A little perspective

We had a great Saturday! We played with the kids, watched a movie, took a nap, and read a book. A big people book! I seriously could not put it down. Have you ever read the story of Corrie ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place? I highly recommend it! She was a Christian lady who, along with her family, protected Jews during WW2. They were arrested and sent to concentration camps for about 10 months. Here are some thoughts from it that I hope I don't soon forget.

• "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."
• The role that the Bible played. Her father read it aloud every morning and every evening for whoever might be in the house. When she and her family were arrested, that was the first night she had not heard the Bible read. She and her sister had a smuggled-in copy of the Bible with them in the concentration camp and it was their life. She said, “Sometimes I would slip the Bible from its little sack with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me. It was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry."
• After Corrie’s release from the concentration camp, she began to speak and tell people what they learned, as her sister had told her. She said, “Through the streets and suburbs of Haarlem I bumped on my bicycle rims, bringing the message that joy runs deeper than despair.”
• "There is no pit so deep that the love of Jesus Christ is not deeper still."
• “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.”
• God's providence, His protection, His purpose--even in fleas, and the grace and wisdom to see that.

What an amazing woman of faith! Just doing what God created her to do--what needed to be done at that time in that place for His purpose.