“You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:7).
I’m writing on the 15th April 2023. I note that because I discovered that today marks 40 years since the death of the Dutch Christian Corrie Ten Boom. It was her 91st birthday as she was born on Good Friday 1892 on the same date. Corrie and her family hid and protected Jewish people during the horrors of the persecution in the Second World War. Her family were eventually taken themselves and died in the concentration camps except for Corrie who survived Ravensbruck. Corrie went on to write the book ‘The Hiding Place’ which tells the story and spent many years touring and speaking in more than 50 countries. It has been decades since I read the book but I still recall how moved I was by it. It has also been made into a film.
Here is are three quotes which I’ve come across:
“Do you know what hurts so very much? It’s love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.”
“And so I discovered that it is not on our own forgiveness any more than on our own goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His. When he tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.”
“In darkness God’s truth shines most clear”.
I’m pretty sure that each is from ‘The Hiding Place’ – her life was certainly a testimony to the proclamation of ‘repentance and forgiveness of sins…to all nations’ (Luke 24:47).