The Hiding Place

by Corrie ten Boom

That was Father’s secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn’t know they were there.

Willem didn’t try to change people, just to serve them.

Childhood scenes rushed back at me out of the night, strangely close and urgent. Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.

“And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”

It was strange that a society which hid the facts of sex from children made no effort to shield them from death.

Happiness isn’t something that depends on our surroundings, Corrie. It’s something we make inside ourselves.”

“Corrie,” he began instead, “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 the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.

“My little hobby. Book collecting. And yet, old friend, books do not age as you and I do. They will speak still when we are gone, to generations we will never see. Yes, the books must survive.”

It would have been unthinkable to squander two activities on the same bit of time!

Corrie, if people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love!

“Don’t try too hard to explain it, Corrie. Just accept it as a surprise from a Father who loves you.”

Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil that one could almost believe one’s own secret sins didn’t matter.

And, sure enough, in their own time and their own way, people worked out the deep pain within them. It most often started, as Betsie had known it would, in the garden.

And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give Your forgiveness.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our 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.

There Corrie learned that her own release had been part of a clerical error; one week later all women her age were taken to the gas chamber.