![]() Meyer Eusebius Mossel set down his teacup and crossed the room to a massive antique sideboard. But you’d forget your ashtray and I’d come running after you with it. You’d take your pipe with you when you ran in there, Eusie, Corrie reminded him, recalling the practice drills they’d hold against a potential raid by the Gestapo. At the home of Meyer Mossel-christened Eusebius by the ten Booms during the days when a person’s very name could mean death-we sipped tea while he and Corrie reminisced about the secret room concealed behind a wall of her bedroom. When I was working with Corrie on the story of her life, she took me to meet a number of the people for whom Father and Betsie had so willingly given their lives. During the German occupation, all Jews in Holland were required to wear such a star stitched to their clothes. In the frame is a piece of yellow cloth, cut in the shape of a six-pointed star. The second of the gifts Corrie gave me is a rectangular wooden frame, six inches wide by seven inches long, with a carved, gilded border. Wooden frame containing a yellow six-pointed star It shines for me today, telling me, What feeds the soul matters as much as what feeds the body. It shone on respites at home between Corrie’s tireless trips to Russia, Africa, Vietnam. It shone for Corrie when she returned alone from the concentration camp where Father and Betsie had died. Not only for Father and Betsie and Corrie but for the hundreds who during the Nazi terror found shelter in their home. Oh Corrie, this kettle will go on shining long after we’ve forgotten what we had for dinner tonight!Īnd so it did. de Groot at the vegetable stand gave me a special price on potatoes, Betsie added hastily, because Corrie kept the accounts for the family, and the little watch shop never took in much money. Oh Corrie, wait till I get the grime off and polish it awhile! Can’t you just see the morning sun glowing on this spout?"Īnd Mr. "It’s not meant to hold water," said Betsie. What are we going to do with that old thing? It won’t even hold water! Old brass kettle Sister! cried Corrie when Betsie arrived home with her prize. Corrie’s sister Betsie was on her way to the meat market when she caught sight of it, dented and soot encrusted, on a pile of old bicycle tires. The kettle speaks to me about priorities. Through all the displacements, all the moves of my own life, I have carried with me three gifts she gave me because they signify to me this wisdom. Today I live in a retirement community.Īmid all these changes, though, the wisdom Corrie gained in the crucible of a concentration camp remains true. There’ve been moves-we left our house in suburban New York for an apartment in Massachusetts. The death of my beloved husband of seventy years. There’ve been losses: Corrie’s death in 1983 on her ninety-first birthday. In my case, for example, in 1971 we had teenagers at home today I text Oregon, Florida, and Georgia for news of my great-grandchildren. In any individual life, too, fifty years means constant change. ![]() Who, in 1971, could have foreseen a world connected by cell phone, where we googled our questions for answers? Who could have envisaged being socially distanced behind our masks in the grip of a global pandemic? I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this-places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all.These fifty years since the publication of The Hiding Place have seen unimaginable change. I did not know, as I listened to Father's footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. ![]() Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way, Corrie, God can give us his perfect way." "God loves Karel-even more than you do-and if you ask Him, He will give you His love for this man, a love nothing can prevent, nothing destroy. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel. ![]() We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. "There are two things we can do when this happens. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. "Corrie," he began instead, "do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. And of course he did not say the false, idle words. The sweet cigar-smell came into the room with Father. For in some deep part of me I knew already that there would not-soon or ever-be anyone else. Afraid he would say, "There'll be someone else soon," and that forever afterward this untruth would lie between us. ![]() “.suddenly I was afraid of what Father would say. ![]()
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