We
were living in Houston in the mid-1970s when I first heard of Corrie ten Boom
and the story she had to tell in The
Hiding Place. The book had been
recently published, and a movie
of the same title was released in 1975. It starred Jeannette Clift as
Corrie, Julie Harris as her sister Betsie, and Arthur O’Connell as their
father. I read the book but didn’t see the movie.
Forty years later, the story has stood the test of time. It
is still a good story. It is still a heartbreaking story. And it is a story
that keeps begging the question, what
would I do in their situation? What question the story does not beg is could this happen here?
The answer to the second question is obvious – yes, it or something
like it could happen here. Never underestimate the darkness of the human heart.
We saw the same human lunge toward evil on Sept. 11, 2001. We see it in Syria
and Iraq and Libya. We saw it in the killing fields of Cambodia, and with the
tribal warfare in Rwanda, and in Bosnia. But this isn’t a problem limited to
radical Islam or people in faraway countries. The same desire for authoritarian
power and control can be seen all too close to home, and it isn’t an impulse
limited only to governments.
In the Epilogue to the book, we read that Corrie and her
family learn that her teenaged nephew Kik died at the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp. He was caught helping an American parachutist escape to the
Dutch coast. In 1959, Corrie herself returned to the Ravensbruck camp, where
she was imprisoned and where Betsie died. And she learned something both
familiar and profound. A Nazi guard or commandant or functionary had mistakenly
released her late in 1944. She was supposed to have been killed with all of the
other women her age the following week, but someone had made a clerical error.
A bureaucratic mistake.
Or the hand of God.
Perhaps both.
We often hear people ask, if there is a God, how could he
allow so much evil in the world? The real, and perhaps surprising, question
should be, why isn’t there more evil than what we see? My answer to that
age-old question is simple: if there was no God, if there is no God, then our
world at best would look much like what Corrie ten Boom experienced during
World War II. That impulse to evil exists within each of us.
What also exists within each of us is the impulse to reach
for God.
The Hiding Place
is the two of two sisters in a small city in Holland, caught up in a gigantic
turn of history. Because of their faith in God, they embark upon a course of helping
Jews hide and escape from the Nazis. That course eventually leads to their
arrest. Betsie comes through the story as something of a saint, the believer
giving thanks in all things, in all circumstances. Corrie questions and kicks
against what happens. She is the most recognizable of the two, the most
familiar, at least to me. She gets angry at God, she shakes her fist at him,
she refuses to believe that she should give thanks for fleas, of all things.
Corrie survives the horror of imprisonment and the
concentration camp. She survived with a purpose. She knew what God would have
her do. And her path started with forgiveness, as difficult as it was.
In so many ways, the story of Corrie ten Boom is all of our
stories. Perhaps not as extreme, bit it is – and can be – our stories.
Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we've been reading The Hiding Place. This concludes the discussion. To see more posts, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.
Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we've been reading The Hiding Place. This concludes the discussion. To see more posts, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.
