Tribute to Corrie ten Boom

I am really, really tired. I climb into bed and turn on the TV, to lull myself to sleep. Flipping through the channels, I run across the movie "The Hiding Place". I am a big fan of Corrie ten Boom, and decide to stay up and watch it. Having seen parts of it before, though never the whole thing at once, I knew at the end, the real Corrie talks for a minute or two. This is my favorite part. I love to hear her talk.
I watch most of the movie, although at the worst times I have to close my eyes. I doze off, once or twice, although I am wide awake when the Gestapo storms into the old house and begins beating the women. WHERE ARE THE PRISONERS!!? WHERE ARE YOU HIDING THE JEWS!!? The sound of the beating is the only sound in my room. My eyes are closed, because I can't stand to watch it.
In the darkness, there is a terrible feeling that assaults me. It is the same feeling that I got when I read Pat Conroy's "Beach Music". I was halfway through the book, when I had to put it down. I sat frozen in my chair, with nausea in my stomach. The scene in the book was a description of torture to a Jewish couple, by the Gestapo. Pat Conroy set it up very well, in that you have had half a book to get attached to the characters, before they are horrifically killed by the Nazis. I finished the book, but the feeling that came over me, the one that I felt as I watched this movie, stayed with me for a while. It was almost tangible, this feeling, a Horror, that was three dimensional. It was not a concept, it was a real, touchable live thing, this Evil. Something that I in my safe home, in my safe town, in my safe country, had never felt before. I have always felt protected by my government, like this could never happen here. But what if it did?
What if the government was out to get me, and kill me, because I had the wrong parents or grandparents? Where would I hide? What if the coin was flipped, and I saw all of my friends and acquaintances being rounded up and shipped off to die? Would I have the courage that Corrie and her family did, to stand up and defy the government, and risk separation from my family and home, imprisonment, torture, starvation, sickness, and ultimately death?

I salute the bravery of Corrie ten Boom. The number of people she and her family saved from death staggers me. Not just the original eight hundred or so, but the generations of people that came after, who would never have existed without the help of the Ten Booms, and the Dutch Underground Resistance.
She was in her fifties, when she and all of her family were arrested. She brought light and hope to the darkest place on Earth, and after all of her family died there, she continued to bring light and hope to those around her. After she was released, by a clerical error, (all the women her age were killed, shortly after she left) she spent the next thirty years traveling around the world, telling people that "There is no pit that is so deep, that He is not deeper still." .

At the end of the movie, pictures of each cast member are displayed on the screen, and then they fade out into a photograph of the real person. Everyone except, Corrie, that is. She is the only one left alive, at the time of the movie, so you get the privilege of hearing her speak. She walks down the famous street where it all happened, and into her childhood home, and sits down and begins to tell you in her broken English, about the love of Jesus. I am arrested. I am drawn to her. Something in her eyes holds me to my chair listening to every word.
"I promised my sister I would tell it, and I tell you." with a slight uplift of her voice, on the word, "you". It's as if she is talking personally to you. You want to know more of what she is talking about, you could listen to her soft broken English, forever.

Sitting there in my room, I could feel a Presence emanating from the TV, as she spoke the words. Words that brought peace into the room and washed away the darkness I had been feeling just a while before. And then she was gone, but the peace she spoke remained.
I was just a little girl, while Corrie was still "Tramping for the Lord", and just a teenager when she died. I never met her, never saw her on TV, never even heard her voice, until I saw the movie. Nevertheless, through her books and her ministry, she has had a deep and abiding effect on my relationship with the Lord. Every single time I pick up one of her books, as I am drawn into the pages, I find the Lord speaking to me in some way or another, bringing repentance, forgiveness, and healing.

So that is my tribute to Cornelia Johanna Arnolda ten Boom, very first licensed woman watchmaker in the entire history of Holland.

Coincidentally, I realized while watching the movie, that she was arrested on Feb 28, 1944. I literally jumped out of my skin, when I realized that TODAY was Feb 28, sixty four years to the day. I also realized, while thinking about it, that it wasn't all that long ago. I tend to think of this as having happened in another dimension, because I wasn't born yet, but It came to me, that on the day Corrie was released from prison, Dec 28, 1944, that my dad was three days old. THAT puts things in perspective.