The Hiding Place

On one of my many childhood trips to Bowie, I found myself alone with the grown ups and scrounging around for something to do.  I must have been at least 12 because it was in the new house.  The new house had several book shelves filled with books at the top of the stairs.  It also had a built in wall cabinet loaded with pictures all across the top.  When I had had enough of staring at old images of my family and myself I decided to hunt for a book.  I pulled down 5 Little Peppers and How they Grew.  No, not in the mood for that plus I had already read it.  The Scarlet Pimpernel, eh, more into the cover than the first 10 pages.  Wait, what was that? Something skinny, The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom.  Oh, it was about World War II.  I had read The Diary of Anne Frank and been riveted in the way every child is riveted by it.

And so it was I sat down with The Hiding Place, first lounging on the uncomfortable office style couch and when my chin started to tremble, I headed for the cave bed, carved into the wall upstairs in the bedroom.  No twelve-year-old wants the family to realize a random book has reduced them to tears.  There are not many books in my life that I have picked up and been unable to put down.  This was one of them.   It completely lifted me out of my selfish prepubescent world and launched me into that scary place of what if.  What if I lived in a country that was persecuting a group of people?  Would I be strong enough like the Ten Boom’s and help them?  Would fear prevent me from doing what was right?  Would I have turned my back on these people who had no where else to go?  I hoped that I would be a strong good person who cared more about others than myself.   I was so inspired by the goodness of these people.  These real people who had hidden Jews and been caught and put in concentration camps.  Corrie would write about the anger in herself and I could relate, but her sister and her father, they always saw and prayed for the SS men and the people who were acting out of fear and hatred.   I contemplated this for a long time.  I had never even considered praying for the enemy.  The enemy was the enemy.  They were the ones ruining everything weren’t they?  But in war things are never black and white.  There were the neighbors who at best were complacent and at worst, told the Germans about the Dutch families that were hiding the Jews.  These neighbors basically delivered a death sentence.  Did that make them the enemy as well?  Was complacency criminal or simply human nature?  After the war these people had the hardest time because not only could their countrymen not forgive them, they could not forgive themselves. 

When faced with the choice of stepping up or caving to fear Corrie’s family choose to step up.  For them it was the only choice.  You do not stand by and watch your fellow man suffer no matter what the consequences.   Corrie Ten Boom said a lot of things in this book that I had to read and reread and I still don’t know if I hear the message as it was intended.  But the older I become, and as the atrocities continue, the more I value her words about love and forgiveness.

“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.”

-       Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

From the deepest depths of my soul, I pray that I am strong enough to seek out another route for that love to travel.  I pray that I never partake in slamming the door and killing that love so that it stops hurting.