The Hiding Place
This year, my Facebook group, The Posse, took on a reading challenge. Each month, we have a different challenge to guide our reading. It’s been great push to get me out of my usual routine. This month, we were challenged to read a book published in the year we were born. Being born in 1971, I was worried that I would find nothing that interested me, but after a brief Google search, I discovered this gem: The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom.
I had heard about this book from sermons and recalled faithful women talking about the impact the book had on them, but until this month, I had never taken the time to read it. What a blessing this book turned out to be!
The Ten Booms were a Dutch family of incredible faith who lived during WWII and hid Jews from the Germans during the occupation. Their dedication to Christ inspired and humbled me. They each had different gifts, but all were used for God’s glory. And when the sisters were transported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, their faith changed every life they touched.
God did not spare them the horrors of the concentration camp. They endured torture, isolation, indignity, abuse, malnutrition, and flirted with death every day. Yet God did provide miraculous ways to sustain them. From an eyedropper bottle of vitamin liquid that never ran dry, to a smuggled Bible never discovered by their guards, to visions of future ministries that gave them hope, to counted blessings that made them realize they were not alone. God still saw them, and He still cared. Not all of the Ten Booms survived, but they all made an astounding impact for Christ.
There are two scenes in particular that amaze me with their power. The first is one of the times that the female prisoners were stripped naked by their guards for their physicals. Stripped of all defenses, the humiliation was horrible. Then Corrie was blessed with a realization: They had stripped Jesus, too. Artists might depict the crucifixion scene with a piece of cloth to protect Christ’s modesty, but that was out of reverence, not accuracy. Christ was bared before his tormentors as well. The women of Ravensbruck were not alone in their indignity.
The other scene involved an infestation of fleas. When they first arrived at Ravensbruck, they were thrust into a room built to hold 400 prisoners that now held 1400. Women lay wall-to-wall on wooden pallets of various heights. The conditions were deplorable. Worst of all, every blanket and beam was covered in flesh-biting fleas. Betsie, Corrie’s sister, had the patience of a saint and the faith of child. When they came into their new home, she reminded her sister that they were to give thanks in all circumstances. Even this one.
So they counted their blessings. They had each other. They had their smuggled Bible. They had hundreds of women that they could minister to. And then Betsie gave thanks for the fleas. Corrie struggled to go so far. How could there be anything good about those horrible pests? Yet as time passed and the Ten Boom sisters began conducting worship services in their barracks, they wondered why the guards never came in to stop them. It wasn’t until much later they learned that the guards refused to go in because of the fleas. God had provided, perhaps not in the way the prisoners would have preferred, but he provided nonetheless.
The COVID-19 pandemic is such a small inconvenience compared to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, but as we navigate these waters of isolation and social distancing, of health worries and event cancellations, I wonder what doors God might be opening for ministry during this time of hardship that would not have been opened otherwise.
How have you seen God at work during this pandemic?
Have you read The Hiding Place?
