The Safest Place 

Over the years, our family has read many books together. One of them that we read recently was Corrie ten Boom's The Hiding Place. Most of us had read it at least once before, but every one of us cherished it just as much or even more this time. Each chapter challenged us in our faith, warmed our hearts to the things of the Lord, and inspired us to be more faithful in our walk with Him. One passage touched me deeply as we read it and I have come back to it time and time again in the ensuing weeks. I thought I would share it with you...

     "One night I tossed for an hour while dogfights raged overhead, streaking my patch of sky with fire. At last I heard Betsie stirring in the kitchen and ran down to join her.
     She was making tea. She brought it into the dining room where we had covered the windows with heavy black paper and set out the best cups. Somewhere in the night there was an explosion; the dishes in the cupboard rattled. For an hour we sipped our tea and talked, until the sound of planes died away and the sky was silent. I said goodnight to Betsie at the door to Tante Jan's rooms and groped my way up the dark stairs to my own. The fiery light was gone from the sky. I felt for my bed: there was the pillow. Then in the darkness, my hand closed over something hard. Sharp too! I felt blood trickle along a finger.
     It was a jagged piece of metal, ten inches long.
     "Betsie!"
     I raced down the stairs with the shrapnel shard in my hand. We went back to the dining room and stared at it in the light while Betsie bandaged my hand. "On your pillow," she kept saying.
     "Betsie, if I hadn't heard you in the kitchen----"
     But Betsie put a finger on my mouth. "Don't say it Corrie! There are no 'if's' in God's world. And no places that are safer than other places. The center of His will is our only safety---O Corrie, let us pray that we may always know it!" 

Corrie and Betsie had no idea what lie ahead of them and many other family members and friends as they conversed that evening...concentration camps, beatings, malnourishment, death, sickness, the witnessing of unimaginable cruelty... But God knew. And He would be with them every step of the way. All that they needed to know was that the center of God's will is our only safety. The center of God's will is our only safety. I pray that for myself, for my husband, for my children, for all of my dear friends and loved ones. May we always seek to be in the center of God's will.

We See the Pieces; God Sees the Whole

I was going through some papers recently and came across this quote. I'm not sure who wrote it, but it may have been Jeremiah Burroughs. Possibly from his book, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment.
"We, indeed, look at things by pieces, we look at one detail and do not consider the relation that one thing has to another, but God looks at all things at once, and sees the relation that one thing has to another. When a child looks at a clock, it looks first at one wheel, and then at another wheel: he does not look at them all together or the dependence that one has upon another; but the workman has his eyes on them all together and sees the dependence of all, one upon another: so it is in God's providnce. Now notice how this works to contentment: when a certain passage of providence befalls me, that is one wheel, and it may be that if this wheel were stopped, a thousand other things might come to be stopped by this. In a clock, stop but one wheel and you stop every wheel, because they are dependent on one another. So when God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing? God may have some work to do twenty years hence that depends on this passage of providence that falls out this day or this week...Let me therefore be quiet and content, for though I am crossed in some particular thing God attains His end; at least, His end may be furthered in a thousand things by this thing that I am crossed in."