CSFF Blog Tour Wrap – Beckon by Tom Pawlik

With school ending and summer creeping in, CSFF squeezed in a blog tour for Beckon by award-winning author Tom Pawlik. The modest tour for this adult speculative thriller included thirty-seven posts from twenty-five bloggers.

Those who posted all three days of the tour are eligible for the CSFF Top Tour Blogger Award for May. Below are the links to the articles of each participant up for the award.

√ √ √ Julie Bihn
√ √ √ Bruce Hennigan
√ √ √ Shannon McDermott
√ √ √ Fred Warren

So now the power shifts into the hands of the readers, and it is time to vote (just a little Survivor lingo there, for your entertainment. ) You have until midnight (Pacific time), Sunday June 10 to review the posts and make your decision.

And while you’re voting, why not click over to “Change and the Books You Read” and vote in that opinion poll as well. You’re participation in both these is greatly appreciated.

Who Do We Follow?

I remember the name of the William Morris Chevrolet dealership because the owner does radio spots on the local Christian station. But instead of using his advertisement time to talk about his cars or service or low prices, he gives a devotional, usually something he’s learned from his personal experience.

In the latest one, he said he was writing about following the Word, but accidentally wrote world instead. Then he realized. In reality we do follow one or the other–the Word or the world.

Good insight. More true probably than we even realize.

For instance, the world adopts tolerance as its highest value and suddenly Christians begin to talk about loving homosexuals and those in the inner city and prisoners and unwed mothers.

But doesn’t Scripture admonition God’s children to care for orphans and widows, the poor and the stranger? Didn’t Christ tell us to love our neighbor, our brother, and even our enemy? So why do we rush after the trends of the world when the Bible had it right all along?

If we would faithfully read, preach, obey the Word, we would be showing the world how to live rather than toddling along behind.

There are so many current issues to which Christians are reacting–feminism, homosexuality, welfare, immigration, socialism. For some, “reacting” means resisting and for others, it means imitating–the Christian version of feminism, the Christian version of welfare.

Rather than letting the world pull us here and there, the Church should turn to God’s Word and see what His principles are that we ought to apply.

The same is true for theological issues. Atheists say a god so violent as to command the extermination of a whole race of people is too abhorrent to believe in, so a group of professing Christians band together and re-image God as a kinder, gentler Jesus.

Western culture says Christians are hateful hypocrites, and Christians dutifully follow with Church-bashing books.

The easy answer would seem to be to withdraw from the influence of the world.

The problem is, however, that God gave Christians the task of proclaiming “the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9b). This proclaiming necessitates our involvement with the world. So how do we do it in a way that the world will hear?

Once upon a time there were Rescue Missions and tent meetings and evangelistic crusades and street preachers and door to door evangelism. But somewhere along the line our western culture became too sophisticated for all those. The preaching had to be slick and professional. No one except the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons wanted to go door to door any more. Government welfare and an increase in credit-induced affluence made inner city missions a bit passe.

Essentially the Church followed the world into comfort and ease, rather than taking up our cross daily and following Christ to connect with our culture and proclaim His excellencies.

Not that the old methods needed to be calcified into unbending tradition. But neither should we abandon the principles upon which the old methods were founded.

Jesus told His disciples before sending them off on a short term mission that they were to be wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. And so should we.

We can’t afford to continue making the same mistakes. We need to follow God’s Word, not the world.

And yet it is the world we need to engage.

We mustn’t bury our heads and stay locked away from the world. We tried that because we wanted to keep our children safe, and the world without Godly moral guidelines has become a place where those children, when they are grown, may well face persecution for their faith.

Unless God brings revival.

But will He if we don’t ask Him to? Will He if we continue padding along behind the world, adopting their business models to run our churches, listening to their psychologists to learn how to discipline our children, studying their economists to figure out how to handle our money? As if the Bible doesn’t speak to these issues.

As I think about this, it makes sense that we would follow the world more than we follow the Word, simply because we spend so much more time in the culture than we do with God. And in a sense, we should.

God purposefully left us in the world rather than taking us out, to be with Him. He has a job for us to do here–that proclamation bit He assigned to us.

But what we struggle with, it seems, is allowing our time with God in His Word to inform our actions and attitudes when we are in the world. Instead, the reverse is becoming true–our time in the world is informing our attitudes toward the Word.

William Morris Chevrolet stands out in my mind because their owner decided to do something different. Perhaps that’s the lesson the Church needs to learn. To reach the world, maybe we should be radically, Biblically different rather than walking along behind, adopting the culture’s way of doing things. Maybe in our difference, we can proclaim God’s excellencies and so catch their attention.

CSFF Blog Tour – Beckon by Tom Pawlik, Day 3

An interesting set of posts this month for the CSFF Blog Tour featuring Tom Pawlik’s newest adult speculative suspense, Beckon. There’s been discussion about the characters, Alzheimer disease, immortality, abortion (here on my blog), body count, arachnophobia, reading at night (or not), spelunking, and more. Without a doubt, this book made an impression!

The Story. Jack Kendrick wants to find out what happened to his missing archaeologist father so that he can rehabilitate his legacy. He finds a clue pointing to his dad’s last known destination, an Indian reservation in Wyoming. He talks his best friend Rudy into a road trip and heads west. They learn helpful information from an Indian legend and follow a guide into a cave that leads to a system of tunnels where they encounter horror and death.

Elina Gutierrez is a suspended LAPD cop. When she learns that her cousin is missing, she determines to do whatever it takes to find him. She knows she shouldn’t, but she sets up a one-officer stakeout and follows a van transporting immigrant workers to supposed out-of-state jobs. But rather than going to Nevada as they’d been told, the van leads her into Wyoming.

George Wilcox is at his wit’s end because his beloved wife is dying a horrible death–first losing her memories and her very personality. When he’s contacted by someone in Wyoming promising him a cure, he eagerly–though not without some skepticism–packs Miriam into the car and drives north. To the town of Beckon.

Yes, all three of these story threads weave together in the little backwater town whose nearest neighbors are the N’watu, the people of legend. Something deadly is going on in Beckon. Or is it something miraculous?

Strengths. Author Tom Pawlik is an outstanding writer. His descriptions are vivid, his story concept unique. He’s organized the book into four distinct sections, from three different points of view and in reverse chronological order. It’s not your everyday kind of book!

Mr. Pawlik has also created believable characters, each with a specific need that drives them to act. This in turn creates tension and pushes the story forward. Add in danger and suspense and the story becomes gripping.

As I alluded to in my first-day tour post, the story raises significant questions–ones I believe to be key in our present-day culture. Central is the matter of the value of life. Are there any “throw away” people?

In my mind, this issue of necessity includes life in the womb. Are these little lives less important than the big lives of those outside the womb? Is it moral to sacrifice those little lives for the betterment of big lives?

Mr. Pawlik doesn’t just raise questions–he gives faces, and storylines, to people on both sides. Suddenly the clear-cut answers seem a little murkier.

At this point one of the characters who is a Christian steps up and does something that gives some answers for anyone thinking about the issues. Note, this character does not preach a sermon or even argue the points. She simply does something consistent with the Bible without saying that’s what she’s doing.

Which actually brings me to the next part of the review.

Weaknesses. In many ways, the act of nobility I referred to in the last section would have been perfect as part of the climax. But the story continued for some time after this pivotal event. From my perspective, the big question was answered–whose worldview would win out? The events after that point, then, didn’t carry the same significance, I didn’t think. They were a bit of fluff, if you can call horrific events “fluff.”

The other area of weakness is one I share as a writer–not presenting characters in a way that allows readers to connect with them. Of course Beckon is not a character-driven novel, and readers were pulled along by the tension, the suspense, the conflict between good and evil even if they didn’t feel particularly attached to the characters. It was a thrill ride, an adventure. At times all you could do was hold on tight and see where you ended up.

But …

Part of me thinks the story would be that much stronger if the reader cared more deeply for these people. They seemed believable, surely. They had real wants, serious dilemmas, emotional and spiritual crises to go along with the physical disasters they faced. Readers should have loved them, cheered them on, cared deeply about their choices. If we had, this book would have raced to the top of the Best Book lists, I’m fairly confident.

Recommendation. I’m not inclined to read thriller type books, but after having read Vanish, Mr. Pawlik’s Christy Award winning debut novel, I knew I would read whatever he wrote. Beckon did not dissuade me from that position. Yes, there were horrific events, but there was also hope and help and sacrifice.

I highly recommend Beckon to adults who love the creepy, the bone-chilling, the fear-inspiring, and to readers who want to consider the issues of life and immortality. It’s a good story filled with tension and intrigue and packaged in a unique structure that enhances the reading experience.

Wrap. If you’d like to learn more about Tom Pawlik and his books, visit him at his blog, web site, on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter.

Watch for the tour wrap on Friday right here at A Christian Worldview of Fiction. You’ll have a chance to vote for the May Top Tour Blogger.

And finally, the required disclaimer: in conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, which, I might add, in no way influenced my evaluation of it.

CSFF Blog Tour – Beckon by Tom Pawlik, Day 2

Stephen King lite? Creepy suspense thriller? A story in the tradition of Tuck Everlasting? These and more are the things CSFF Blog Tour participants are saying about Beckon by Tom Pawlik.

But those aren’t quite all the same, are they. So who is right? Is the book too violent or only mildly gruesome?

This book offers a perfect example of how an author and his readers are working in tandem. The author has the responsibility of “speaking” clearly, and the reader then hears what he wants to hear.

Not that the reader intentionally distorts the author’s ideas or vision for his story, but each reader brings his own reading history, his own personal history, and his own set of beliefs to every piece of literature.

As a Christian who believes discernment involves seeing how things in our culture measure against Scripture, I approach what I read with an eye to truth, including spiritual truth. Someone else can pick up the same story with the intent to lose himself for a few hours in the adrenaline pumping thrills of a fast-paced adventure. What each of us “gets out” of the story, then, is bound to be affected by the expectations we brought with us when we turned to page one.

Someone who thinks that Beckon is a mild form of heavy-duty fear-inducing stories most likely has read a good number of Stephen King books, with perhaps a dose of Dean Koontz thrown in for good measure.

On the other hand, another reader more accustom to fairytale style fantasy might find Beckon a dark story filled with tension and suspense that never lets up.

For someone like me who doesn’t enjoy being scared, and thus who rarely reads stories with a high element of fright connected to them, Beckon pushes the envelop of the tolerable.

The point is this. When readers look for recommendations about books, it’s important for them to learn the bent of the individuals passing along their opinions. That’s not to say reviewers can’t be fair. But what frightens one may not frighten another. What touches one may repulse another. What keeps one turning pages as fast as can be might bore another.

It’s the rare book that can bridge the gap of people’s expectations and experiences and find a wide range of readers.

I commented in yesterday’s post that I wouldn’t call Beckon a horror story but that it had horrific moments which I was willing to tolerate. Someone else who loves fast action might tolerate the slower moments that established character. A third someone not interested in faith elements might tolerate the scenes that explore death and the morality of life everlasting.

A book like Beckon seems to be one of those bridge books–one that readers with varied expectations can enjoy. But don’t take my word for it. Read what others on the tour are saying. You can find links to specific articles at the bottom of the Day 1 post.

Before you go, though, take a moment if you would, to participate in a poll about the change in reading habits in the last few years: “Change and the Books You Read.”

Thanks bunches.

CSFF Blog Tour – Beckon by Tom Pawlik, Day 1

I like books that make me think, and this month’s CSFF Blog Tour feature, Tom Pawlik’s recent release, Beckon, did just that. Yes, it was also a good story–especially entertaining for those who like a creepy thrills adventure. I wouldn’t say this book falls into the category of horror, but it has moments that are horrific.

Being as that’s not the type of book I enjoy, I tolerated those parts because there was enough going on that kept me engaged. But more about all that when I do my review later this week. For today I want to discuss an issue. I’m not saying it’s the issue Mr. Pawlik had in mind when he wrote the book, but it’s the issue that jumped out at me.

Unintentionally, to discuss this subject, I may give away plot elements, so consider this a Potential Spoilers Alert.

* * *

When I was growing up, my friends, parents, siblings, and, I’m sure, I as well, parroted an adage that held a lot of truth: two wrongs don’t make a right.

Intentionally or not, Beckon explores this pithy statement. If you can save someone’s life, is it still wrong to do wrong? Might it not be the case that my wrong can cancel out a greater wrong?

In tangent with this topic is the question, is one life more valuable than any other? Is someone who is without family and friends, who is adrift in the world, of less intrinsic value than a leader of a community, than an educated, productive, loved member of a family?

It’s so easy to say, of course, all life is equally valuable. But what if a homeless person had to die to save your wife? Your child? Is it so different from organ transplants if someone else’s “life energy” could provide healing and health to a dying loved one?

One step further, in my mind. Is it really true that all life is equally valuable if we use abortive tissue to develop cures for killer diseases?

Someone may argue that those babies were going to die anyway, so why shouldn’t their tissue be used for good, to save those who would die horrible deaths unless a cure is soon discovered for the disease from which they suffer. In fact, the use of those aborted babies’ tissue gives meaning to their deaths.

But using that same logic, why, then, don’t we “give meaning” to the homeless drifter and carve up his body, doling out his organs to keep “productive members of society” alive?

Society still gets irate at such a thought. Here in SoCal not long ago, a mentally ill homeless man was killed during a confrontation with law enforcement officers. What an uproar! And rightly so, if all life is equally valuable.

That man’s good should not be sacrificed for the sake of someone who happens to live in a house, drive a car, hold a job, and vote. A person is not better because he is better off. Rather, in God’s eyes, life is valuable. He created it. He formed each person in the womb.

It’s not OK for anyone to decide that the life in the womb is less valuable than the life outside the womb–that being too vulnerable to stand up for yourself, to live on your own, makes you less important.

Again, Western society seems to understand that. We go to great links to provide wheelchair access to public places and to give preferential parking to handicapped individuals. We celebrate remarkable feats such as a double limb amputee finishing a marathon or climbing a mountain or disabled individuals participating in the Paralympics. Their lives are valuable, our laws and outpouring of support seem to shout.

Why, then, do we tolerate taking a life to make someone else less burdened or embarrassed? Why do we fertilize eggs and then use the product–the person who results from that union–as nothing more than tissue to do with as we please?

Why aren’t those lives valuable, if, in fact, all life is of equal value?

And yes, Beckon made me think of this subject. What did others reading the story think about? You’ll need to take a look at the articles from the other tour participants (a check mark links to a tour article):

√ Noah Arsenault
√ √ √ Julie Bihn
√ Beckie Burnham
√ √ Brenda Castro
√ Theresa Dunlap
√ Nikole Hahn
√ Ryan Heart
√ √ √ Bruce Hennigan
√ Janeen Ippolito
√ √ Jason Joyner
√ Carol Keen
√ Rebekah Loper
√ Katie McCurdy
√ √ √ Shannon McDermott
√ Karen McSpadden
Eve Nielsen
√ Nissa
√ Joan Nienhuis
√ Faye Oygard
√ Kathleen Smith
√ Jessica Thomas
√ √ Steve Trower
√ √ √ Fred Warren
√ Dona Watson
√ Shane Werlinger

People of Faith: Corrie ten Boom, Part 4

After leaving the Nazi concentration camp, Corrie spent over thirty years speaking and writing about God’s love and forgiveness.

The conclusion.

What an extraordinary woman, we’re tempted to say. What made her faith so strong that she could endure such cruelty, grief, illness and isolation and still trust God as well as forgive her enemies?

Corrie said clearly that her faith accomplished nothing. It was too weak, too unstable, and sometimes she had a hard time believing when all around people were suffering hateful treatment and dying. She recognized instead that Jesus who promised to be with her always, carried her through those horrific circumstances.

From the age of five when Corrie prayed with her mother and yielded her life to Christ, she looked to Jesus. Her godly parents taught her by example and instruction to trust Him. Their love for God’s Word and commitment to prayer became infectious.

Besides the influence of Corrie’s parents, her sister Betsie proved to be a spiritual mentor, living her life in obedience to God and His Word and challenging Corrie to do the same. Before their arrest, Betsie prayed for the invading German pilots whenever she saw their planes. During her imprisonment she prayed for the German guards who mistreated them. In the months before she died, as she and Corrie prayed, God spoke to her about life after the war. She told Corrie of her vision to tell the German people of God’s love and forgiveness and to open homes for the hurting. Betsie understood that everything in life up to that point had been preparation for the ministry to come.

As God led in miraculous ways, Corrie embraced Betsie’s vision. But she also knew the truth about forgiveness first hand. Life in a concentration camp bred selfishness and a lack of love. Taking the warmest spot for roll call meant someone else would be cold, hoarding vitamins meant someone else would go without. Then there was the temptation to think that the power to help and to heal others’ hearts came from within her rather than from God. When the joy went out of her worship, Corrie faced her sin, confessed it and received God’s forgiveness and renewed fellowship. Later God would teach her to rely on the power of His love in order to forgive, even as she had been forgiven.

In the Beje Corrie had developed the life-time habit of beginning and ending each day with Bible reading and prayer. In prison she inhaled Scripture like one starving. During her concentration camp experiences the Bible was her light and hope. “The blacker the night around us grew,” she wrote in The Hiding Place, “the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God” (p. 177).

Was Corrie’s “secret,” then? Her upbringing? The godly influences in her life? Her prayer life? Her willingness to listen to and obey God’s Word? Corrie insisted the “secret” was not hers.

To illustrate the point, she wrote in Not I, But Christ about a trip in New Zealand she and a few others took by car. Along the way, they came to a primitive bridge. A man in their group got out to inspect the structure to see if it was strong enough for them to cross.

This man did not inspect our faith in the bridge, he inspected the bridge. So often we are inclined to look at our faith … but we must inspect the Bridge. We must not look at ourselves, but at Jesus. And when we look at Him we know He is strong. (p.53)

When people would approach Corrie and remark about the strength of her faith she similarly answered that Jesus sustained her:

It was His everlasting arms underneath me that carried me through. He was my security.

If I say it was my faith, then you, whenever you have to pass through hardships, can say, ‘I have not Corrie’s faith.’ But when I tell you it was Jesus, then you can trust the same One who has carried me through, will do the same for you (Corrie: The Lives She Touched, p. 153).

Corrie’s world turned especially dark during the Nazi era because the depravity of Man seemed to win out, but the truth is, we all live in a fallen world with sinful people who inevitably sin against us. Some of us may think we haven’t suffered to the same degree as Corrie and thus dismiss the idea that we too need to look to God to give us the ability to forgive. We think, perhaps, we should be capable of handling the “small stuff” or, worse, that we only have to forgive the “big stuff.”

Others of us may have suffered greater trauma than Corrie. Instead of the loving foundation and support of a godly family, we were hurt by those very people God designed to care for us. Perhaps the sin against us was violent or re-occurring over a long period of time.

Do the differing circumstances relegate Corrie’s life message as inapplicable for people in the twenty-first century? Hardly. Corrie did not direct her audiences to look at her or to learn x-number of steps in order to achieve forgiveness—such information might become outdated or irrelevant. Rather, Corrie ten Boom, before the traumatic events of World War II, during its blackness and the ensuing ministry to tell others what she knew to be true about God, and after as she experienced the approach of death, did what any person in any circumstance can do—she looked to Jesus, the Author and Finisher of her faith. She trusted in the One she knew to be the Victor and obeyed.

# # #

Bibliography

Brown, Joan Winmill. Corrie: The Lives She’s Touched. Minneapolis: Special Edition, World Wide Pictures, Fleming H. Revell, 1979.

Rosewell, Pamela. The Five Silent Years of Corrie ten Boom. Zondervan, 1986.

Ten Boom, Corrie, and John and Elizabeth Sherrill. The Hiding Place. Chosen Books, 1984.

Ten Boom, Corrie, and Jamie Burkingham. Tramp for the Lord. Christian Literature Crusade, Fleming H. Revell, 1974.

Ten Boom, Corrie. Not I, But Christ. Thomas Nelson, 1983.

Ten Boom, Corrie. Prison Letters. Fleming H. Revell, 1975.

To read the entire article see Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

People of Faith: Corrie ten Boom, Part 3

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2. Corrie and her sister Betsie have been sent to the German concentration camp, Ravensbruck.

- – - – -

Miraculously Corrie was able to take her Bible (Betsie had given hers away, a book at a time) into Ravensbruck, though the prisoners were stripped and required to leave all their belongings behind in the processing center. In the darkness of that sin-sick place, God’s light—His Word, His miraculous answers to prayer, the worship offered Him by those living on the edge of death—shone brightest. Whenever possible, Corrie told her fellow prisoners that Jesus died on the cross for them, and by way of encouragement she reminded them that Jesus was Victor.

The sisters were assigned to the knitting crew and this group soon became the praying heart of the camp, making petition for their guards, the healing of Germany, Europe, the world—just as their mother had once prayed from the prison of her crippled body, just as Corrie would one day pray from her own personal confinement.

They held their services in the evening, and the highlight of their worship was reading Scripture. Because the prisoners in Ravensbruck came from all over Europe, only a few could understand the Dutch rendition Corrie read, but a translation chain developed and the life-giving words were passed from one language to another.

Even as their spirits grew stronger, however, their bodies grew weaker. In late November Betsie became gravely ill, and in December she died. Three days later Corrie received word that she was to be released—a miracle since all the women her age and older were scheduled for execution soon after. However, she failed the required physical and spent two weeks in the medical facility. Finally her clearance came through, and by New Year’s Day she was on her way back to Holland.

After a period of recovery, Corrie tried to return to her previous activities, working in the watch shop and re-establishing her ministry to the mentally disabled, but she was restless. At last she realized she needed to fulfill the work that Betsie had envisioned for them during those months in Ravensbruck: telling people what they had learned—that even in a concentration camp, Jesus was Victor because no pit was so deep that God wasn’t deeper still. That very week, Corrie began her speaking career.

After the war, by God’s providential provision, she was able to open a home for concentration-camp survivors in a fifty-six-room mansion in Haarlem. Because God had taught Corrie forgiveness through His Word and Christ’s example on the cross, she also turned the Beje into a home where the hated Dutch collaborators could find restoration.

A year later, she saw the fulfillment of another of Betsie’s visions—an old concentration camp in Germany converted into a facility to minister to those displaced by the war.

Meanwhile Corrie continued to speak, in part to raise money for these rehabilitation efforts but also because those who survived the war had a hunger for the message of forgiveness.

Over the years her evangelistic speaking ministry expanded until she became a “tramp for the Lord” (the title of one of her later books), traveling during the next thirty-three years to more than sixty countries. She spoke in prisons and churches, to large groups and small, always telling about God’s love and forgiveness, most clearly lived out by Betsie in Ravensbruck as she expressed compassion for her enemies and prayed for those who mistreated her.

Eventually Corrie added writing to her speaking engagements. Her autobiography, The Hiding Place, co-authored by John and Elizabeth Sherrill, was published in 1971. Four years later eighty-three-year-old Corrie saw her story become a movie distributed by World Wide Pictures.

The next year she shifted her focus from personal speaking engagements to writing and film production. To facilitate the latter she decided to settle in Southern California. She found a home she called Shalom House and much like her father before her, opened her doors to those in need of prayer and counseling. Including those she talked to on the telephone, Corrie ministered in this way to hundreds of people. Correspondence flooded her from across the globe.

Eighteen months after Corrie moved into Shalom House, her longest imprisonment and most remarkable ministry began. In August 1978 she suffered the first of a series of strokes that left her progressively disabled. First she experienced temporary paralysis and loss of speech. While she regained some mobility, she lost the ability to communicate in sentences. Though Corrie worked hard at therapy, a subsequent stroke robbed her of all speech, and she lost much of her independent functions.

Despite her limitations, God continued to use her. Nurses, visitors, the gardener, a cleaning lady—any number of people saw the love and joy of the Lord shining through her eyes. Some came to Christ as a result. Many commented on the peace of God that pervaded her home. And Corrie continued to pray. Eventually she became bed-ridden. Five years after her first stroke, on her ninety-first birthday, she passed into God’s presence. But even in death the message of her life continued—inscribed on her grave marker were the words “Jesus is Victor.”

“She had served Jesus Christ in her strength; she served Him in weakness,” wrote her companion and care-giver Pamela Rosewell Moore in the forward to Corrie’s devotional Not I, But Christ. “She served Him in her life; she served Him in death. How precious her life and testimony were to Him, even when she was removed from the public eye. She followed and obeyed Him then as constantly as she ever had” (p. 12).

To be continued.

See “People of Faith: Corrie ten Boom, Part 4.”

People of Faith: Corrie ten Boom, Part 2

At the end of Part 1: Corrie, her sister Betsie, and their father are living in Holland in an oddly constructed house called the Beje, during World War II. As the persecution of Jews intensifies, they look for opportunities to help those in need.

- – - – -

A year and a half after the occupation began, a need presented itself to them. The police raided the furrier shop across the street from the Beje, evicting the Jewish owner. Mr. Weil, whose wife was away visiting friends, stood alone in the street, unable to return to his home over his shop. The Ten Booms befriended him and slipped him out of town to Willem.

Six months later a Jewish woman was similarly evicted from her clothing store. Afraid to return to her apartment, she went to the Ten Booms, saying she heard they had helped someone like her before.

Two nights later an elderly couple in similar circumstances arrived. Corrie traveled to Hilversum, again seeking Willem’s help. He told her she would have to develop her own network—operatives and resources for things like food ration cards and identification papers.

As Jews in need continued to turn up at the Beje, Corrie found the connections she needed by God’s direction. Eventually Willem’s son Kik introduced her to the “professional” underground, and her number of contacts grew. One such person, a Mr. Smit (the name used by all those in their organization to protect their identity), volunteered to build a secret room in the Beje. In the event of a raid, any people passing through their station would have a place to hide.

He chose a room at the top of the three-tiered oddly constructed building—Corrie’s room—and there he and his workers surreptitiously built a two-and-a-half-foot-wide room accessed by a crawl space near her bed.

The underground activity continued throughout the next year and spread from helping Jews to hiding military-age boys to keep them from conscription. The network of workers grew to eighty elderly women and middle-aged men, with the Beje at the center of the web. Eventually, however, finding safe homes outside the city for the numbers of people moving through their underground station became harder and harder, particularly for those with distinct Semitic features. Thus four men and soon after, three women became borders in the Beje.

On February 28, 1944, because of information provided by a collaborator posing as someone in need, the dreaded raid occurred. While the guests boarding at the Beje were able to hide in the secret room, the family members and a number of others present for a Bible study were arrested. In addition, some underground workers came to the watch shop to warn of the impending raid, and they too were taken into custody.

In all, thirty-five of Corrie’s family and friends were transported and imprisoned in the federal penitentiary in Scheveningen outside The Hague. Within ten days, Corrie’s eighty-four-year-old father Casper ten Boom died, though she wouldn’t learn of his passing until April.

Two weeks into her imprisonment, Corrie was taken to solitary confinement. While the ensuing four months of isolation felt like punishment because she was not allowed to speak to anyone, including the prisoners who delivered her meals, she later learned she was separated from the other inmates because of her illness. Two days before the raid, she had started running a fever, and in prison her condition worsened to “severe pleurisy.”

Two months into her prison stay, she began receiving periodic letters and packages, in particular from her sister Nollie who, along with the other family members except Betsie and her father, had been released.

When Corrie recovered from her illness, she was summoned to appear before a German officer to determine her sentence. Led by God she seized the opportunity to ask this lieutenant if there was darkness in his life. When he admitted there was no light at all, she told him about Jesus, the Light of the world. This man, who years later Corrie led to Christ, arranged for the Ten Boom family to gather in his office for the reading of their father’s will. Nollie used the occasion to give both Corrie and Betsie small Bibles placed in pouches they could wear around their necks.

Early in June the inmates were moved to Vught, a concentration camp for political prisoners located in southern Holland. At last, Corrie’s isolation was over. By God’s providence she located Betsie as the guards herded the prisoners onto a train. The sisters stayed together for the next six months.

While in Vught, they continued to receive occasional encouragement and supplies from home, though these “privileges” were often revoked by the guards as punishment wielded against an entire barracks. Corrie and Betsie spent long days on work details and regularly battled hunger and illness.

Sundays altered the camp routine. Without assignment demands, the Ten Boom sisters took walks and sat outside in the sun, but most important, they began conducting worship services with other prisoners. By August they had a group of sixty in attendance.

In September, however, the Nazis committed mass executions on the men’s side of the camp and once again loaded the women on a train—this time packing them in freight cars for the journey to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp in Germany.

Life there, in such close proximity to a crematorium, was bleak and the conditions inhumane. Besides the humiliation of having to parade naked in front of the male guards for health inspections, the women were packed into lice and flea infested barracks.

Prompted by the Scripture the two sisters read that morning, Betsie insisted they thank God for their new environment. They thanked Him they were together, that they had His Word. They thanked Him for the overcrowding because many more people could hear God’s life-giving message of salvation. And Betsie said they should thank Him for the fleas.

Though Corrie could see no reason to thank God for an infestation that added to their misery, she joined Betsie out of obedience and trust in what God said in His Word. Later when the two conducted daily services in their barracks without interference from the Germans, they learned they enjoyed this freedom because the guards did not want to go where there were fleas.

To be continued.

See “People of Faith: Corrie ten Boom, Part 3.”

People of Faith: Corrie ten Boom, Part 1

One of my non-fiction ideas is a book profiling twenty Christian women of faith. I’ve decided to post, in four parts, the chapter about Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch woman known for hiding Jews during World War II. Following a year of incarceration, during which her father and sister died, she began a speaking and writing ministry to proclaim God’s forgiveness and love. Late in life she moved to Southern California where she lived until her death at age 91.

Corrie ten Boom

Corrie ten Boom sat gazing out the window, alone with her thoughts, unable to verbalize her needs or even her love for those most dear. Solitary confinement was not a new experience for this eighty-seven-year-old woman, but this imprisonment during the last years of her life was far different from the one she endured thirty-five years earlier in a Dutch prison cell. In both instances, however, and during horrifying experiences in two Nazi concentration camps, Corrie put her faith in Jesus who she knew to be the Victor. In the face of inhuman conditions, mistreatment, sickness and death, she lived that faith day by day.

Corrie spent her first fifty-two years caring for her family and working in their watch shop in the Beje—the patch-work Dutch home of her birth, where the words “Jesus is Victor” were transcribed on the kitchen hearthstones.

Although she never married, her life was anything but solitary. She was one of four children in a close family, headed by godly parents. When she was a child, her mother’s three sisters moved in with the Ten Booms, adding to the activity swirling about the house.

As each of Corrie’s aunts declined over the years, she took on the necessary caregiving responsibilities until one by one they passed away. Eventually she nursed her own mother when a stroke partially paralyzed her and robbed her of the ability to speak more than three words—yes, no, and Corrie. Three years later, Mrs. Ten Boom died, leaving Corrie and her oldest sister Betsie to manage the house for their father and to work with him in the watch repair business.

Corrie’s next two decades in the family home were fulfilling. Through a providential sequence of events, she and Betsie switched roles which put Corrie next to her father in their watch shop keeping the accounts and waiting on customers, rather than in the kitchen tending to domestic duties. When Corrie was ready to move to more challenging responsibilities, her father patiently taught her the particulars of watch repair. Eventually she went to school to specialize in work with wristwatches and became Holland’s first licensed woman watchmaker.

Besides her involvement in the shop and with her family—including a happy assortment of nieces and nephews—Corrie developed a ministry with the mentally disabled and founded a Christian girls scout movement known as the Triangle Club. She and her family also welcomed into their home a succession of foster children over a period of ten years. Still they found time for a steam of visitors, whether policemen or derelicts coming for a bowl of Betsie’s soup or a cup of her coffee, or laborers and business professionals asking their father for counsel and prayer.

As far as Corrie knew, her life would continue as peacefully to its end as it had progressed to this point, but God had something considerably bigger in store for her.

When she was forty-eight, Adolf Hitler and an ever-broadening war disrupted Europe. Eventually German troops marched into Holland and after a five-day campaign, the Nazi war machine added another conquered nation to the list succumbing to its blitzkrieg.

During the first year of Nazi occupation, persecution targeting Jews began to creep into Holland, and Corrie’s town of Haarlem was no exception. Minor sporadic attacks occurred—a broken window in a business owned by Jews, offensive words graffitied on a synagogue wall. Gradually the symptoms worsened. Signs appeared in shop windows denying Jews service. Others forbade admittance to public parks, restaurants, theaters, the concert hall. A synagogue was burned down, but the fire trucks that answered the alarm worked only to keep the flames from spreading to other buildings.

Then an edict came singling Jews out by requiring them to wear bright yellow Stars of David sewn onto their coats and jackets with the word Jood (Dutch for “Jew”) prominently placed in the center. Disappearances began. No one knew for sure if the missing people had gone into hiding or were secretly arrested by the Gestapo. At any rate, public arrests became more frequent.

Eventually the Ten Booms discussed what they should do to help these persecuted people. Willem, the only boy of the family, had already successfully found hiding places for a number of Dutch Jews living in the nursing home he ran in nearby Hilversum. Should an opportunity arise, Corrie, Betsie and their father wanted to be ready to help as well.

To be continued.

See “People of Faith: Corrie ten Boom, Part 2.”

The Lord Is In His Holy Temple

Habakkuk had it right when he wrote, “The Lord is in His holy temple.” That statement stood in contrast to the idols of wood, overlaid with silver and gold that the people of Israel were guilty of worshiping.

What profit is the idol when its maker has carved it,
Or an image, a teacher of falsehood?
For its maker trusts in his own handiwork
When he fashions speechless idols. (Hab. 2:18)

I find it interesting that the idol is without profit, yet it is the teacher of falsehood. In other words, it cannot answer prayer; it cannot save, but it is fully capable of deceiving. The idol, a product of a craftsman’s talent and skill, induces him to believe in himself.

“Believe in yourself” is the current mantra of Western civilization. It’s an acceptable theme in children’s literature, one that is sure to garner little opposition. Who would tell someone else to doubt himself?

Well, essentially God does.

The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it? (Jer. 17:9)

If the heart is more deceitful than all else, why would a person want to look within for his source of strength, why would he trust in himself rather than in God? He wouldn’t. So trusting himself over God is tantamount to calling God a liar.

To get to that point, of course, a person also must put himself up as God’s judge. This person, in his vast wisdom and knowledge, can make the determination whether or not God is right to say the heart is more deceitful than all else. How ironic! A deceitful heart, deciding whether or not hearts are deceitful.

Sadly, our culture is training us to abandon reason, abandon authoritative truth and moral absolutes in order to believe whatever we wish to believe.

Enter God’s word.

But the LORD is in His holy temple.
Let all the earth be silent before Him. (Hab. 2:20)

A person who believes in himself will still one day meet his Maker face to face, and what is he going to say? I did it my way? I followed my dream?

Yes, God will say, you believed in the wooden idol you carved out for yourself, your own speechless handiwork. And how is that working out for you?