What
do you see when you see a homeless person sleeping in a cardboard box in a city
park?
What
do you see when you look at a co-worker who has been saying untrue things about
you in office gossip?
What
do you see when your boss at work tells you “no raise this year” because Human
Resources has decided you’ve topped out in your pay grade?
What
do you see when you come face to face with human evil – a child murderer or
molester, someone who has fired a gun into a house and killed a 9-year-old girl
doing her school homework, a man who walks up to two television journalists doing
a story and opens fire, an Islamic State member who swings a sword and beheads
a Westerner, or a Christian, or a gay man, or a woman who works with refugees?
In The Hiding Place, Corrie ten Boom tells what happens when she and her sister
Betsie, as long with numerous other women prisoners, are ordered one day to
gather their belongings and be prepared to evacuate. They are transported,
first by truck and then by train, to a prison work camp called Vught.
It is there that, by
chance, Corrie learns the name of the Dutch man who betrayed their family to
the Nazis.
The man whose action
led to months of imprisonment.
The man responsible for
her father dying only 10 days after his arrest.
The man whose betrayals
led to the arrest and deaths of even more people than the ten Booms knew.
Corrie hears his name,
and she sees anger and hate. “Fires of flame seemed to leap around that name in
my heart,” she writes. “I thought of Father’s final hours, alone in a hospital
corridor. Of the underground work so abruptly halted. And I knew that if Jan
Vogel stood in front of me now, I could kill him.”
In her situation, any
of us would have loved to have our hands around Jan Vogel’s neck.
Corrie lets her anger
stew. It consumes her. She can’t pray. She tastes only bile and bitterness.
Finally, she asks her
sister Betsie why she can handle this information so calmly and quietly, and
doesn’t she feel anything about this man. Betsie, who had suffered everything
Corrie had suffered, says this: “Oh, yes, Corrie! Terribly! I’ve felt for him
ever since I knew—and pray for him whenever his name comes into my mind. How he
must be suffering!”
Corrie
ponders that response in silence. And then realizes what Betsie was telling her
– that she, Corrie, was as guilty as Jan Vogel, “for I had murdered him with my
heart and with my tongue.”
Corrie
had looked at Jan Vogel and seen an evil, murderous villain. And he was. But he
was also a lost soul, a man for whose sins Jesus had also died.
Rather
than judge, perhaps we should follow Betsie ten Boom’s example and pray.
Led
by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading The Hiding Place. To see more posts on this chapter, “Vught,”
please visit Sarah at Living Between theLines.
