dual personalities

It grew harder and harder. Even within these four walls there was too much misery, too much seemingly pointless suffering. Every day something else failed to make sense, something else grew too heavy. Will You carry this too, Lord Jesus? But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

I am reading several books, but at the moment I am concentrating on re-reading The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. I read it many years ago, but I kept running across references to it and thought it was time to read it again.

You will recall that Corrie Ten Boom was a watchmaker in Haarlem, the Netherlands, who lived with her family above their father’s shop. A devout Calvinist Christian, she, along her family, never thought twice about sheltering and aiding Jews in need after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940. Ten Boom’s involvement in the Dutch resistance grew beyond gathering stolen ration cards and harboring Jews in her home. She soon became part of the Dutch underground resistance network and oversaw a network of smuggling Jews to safe places. All in all, it is estimated that around 800 Jews were saved by Ten Boom’s efforts. As a result of her and her family’s efforts, they were arrested by the Nazis and sent to a series of concentration camps. Casper Ten Boom and Betsie Ten Boom never returned. The story is a harrowing one, but a truly inspiring one.

I must note that what the Ten Booms did, they did not do for any political reason. They acted by faith alone. As Christians they could not do otherwise.

I used to think that such a thing as the Holocaust could never happen in America, but I don’t think that anymore.

*Code for “all the people hiding in your secret room are safe.”