Heart of Darkness: "One of the Dark Places of the Earth"

Five of you – friends, business colleagues, and the boss – are meandering your way down a river. It’s an early evening get-together, and you’re enjoying the company and the beverages. The sun has just set. It’s that early moment of dusk when the world becomes shades of gray. You’re feeling a bit mellow; it’s a bit of an escape from work and life in the city you just left behind.

Suddenly, you hear this: “And this also has been one the dark places of the earth.”

No one responds, except perhaps for a raised eyebrow or a slight roll of the eyes. The one who said it is known for such things. He’s also known for telling long stories, and you suspect you’re in for one. 

You're right; you are.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

The Hiding Place: It is All of Our Stories

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.

Photograph: A scene from the 1975 movie The Hiding Place, with Julie Harris as Betsie (left) and Jeannette Clift as Corrie (right).

For Country and God

I was once on an advisory panel for an elected official. It was an unusual panel – we were all Christians of one sort or another, and we functioned as an accountability group. Our job was to meet, and talk, and pray, and be watchful for signs that the official was being captured by the political environment and forgetting the constituency back home. We met once a quarter, usually for breakfast.

We came from different walks of life. Our group included a few pastors, some professional people, a radio personality, and a few conservative activists. We were generally in agreement, but there were few things before us that offered the possibility of disagreement. I generally consider myself to be a conservative, but my conservatism was on the liberal end of the spectrum represented by that advisory group.

Then came the blow-up. The official had voted – one of those procedural votes – for a measure that included some limited provisions for gun control. At the next group meeting, the official ran late, giving more than ample time for the group to bubble, foment, expostulate and otherwise erupt in a frenzy of anger. When the official arrived, he was met by a rather cool reception.

As we ate our cereal and eggs, group member after group member began a lecture. They were furious. Gun control of all things!

I was sitting between an attorney and a well-known conservative activist and organizer. The attorney, like me, had been very quiet. And then it was his turn to speak. “My family and I go to bed at night, and we sometimes hear the gunshots not far away. Something has to change.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

Then it was my turn.

“A few months ago, “I said, “a shopkeeper was murdered in middle of the day in my suburb. Shot at point-blank range. Three minutes before she was killed, my son and a friend were directly across the street, trying to decide where to ride their bikes. They finally agreed on the nearby park, the same park where the killers ran after the shooting and where they were reprehended. This can’t continue.”

Lest you think our statements won the day and turned the tide, you should know that the conservative activist sitting next to me physically moved her chair away from me.

And yet – we were all Christians.

“Our woes began,” writes A.W. Tozer in The Pursuit of God, “when God was forced out of His central shrine and ‘things’ were allowed to enter.”

That central shrine? The human heart.

“The roots of our hearts,” he says, “have grown down into things, and we dare not pull up one rootlet lest we die. Things have become necessary to us, a development never originally intended.”

Things can include wealth, pride, success, ambition and physical things like furniture, clothes, and things we collect. And even patriotism and the love of one’s country. One of the group members – a pastor – carried a Bible and a copy of the U.S. Constitution wherever he went.  We all have the tendency to push God out of our hearts and replace Him with – things.

Like Tozer says, it was never intended to be that way. And thus our woes began.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re discussing A.W. Tozer’s classic The Pursuit of God. To see what other people are writing about Chapter 2, “The Blessedness of Possessing Nothing,” please visit Jason’s site, Connecting to Impact.