God Does Not Have Problems. Only Plans.

The Bible Museum In Amsterdam

We visited a total of four out of the thirty-six museums while we were in Amsterdam – the Bible Museum , the Zaan Dutch Village Museum, Corrie ten Boom’s house in Haarlem and Anne Frank’s house by the canal in Amsterdam. We spent about two hours in each museum. There is something very sobering about touring museums. It’s like the past is lived out right before your eyes. It’s like for that moment you were transported to a totally different era and the present stands still for you while you walk through an era distant but real, dead but yet alive.

Otto Frank was quoted on one of the walls on Anne Frank’s house which was the family’s hiding place when the Nazi regime ruled Holland in the Second World War. He said to build up a future, you need to know the past. How true.

We are never divorced from the past. It’s the past that gives our future hope and relevance. And museums have a way of connecting us to the past – to generations of people we have never met and never known but upon whose lives and battles and victories, our era has been birthed and built.

What left the deepest impression in my mind was the visit to 19 Barteljorisstraat in Haarlem, the four hundred-year old house where Corrie ten Boom and her family hid Jews fleeing from the Nazis in Holland between 1942 and 1944. Corrie came from a family that loved the Lord and loved the Jews. Her grandfather ran weekly prayer meetings in that very house which became a safe place for Jews a hundred years later , praying for the peace of Jerusalem. Casper ten Boom, Corrie’s father held similar passion for the Jews and Corrie and her sister Betsy develop similar convictions. Willem, Corrie’s grandfather successfully passed on his heartbeat from generation to generation. How inspiring.

Corrie ten Boom was born April 15, 1892, the youngest of four children. Her father was a well-liked watch repairman. Corrie herself was trained as a watchmaker in 1920 and in 1922 became the first female watchmaker licensed in the Netherlands.

In 1940, the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. In 1942, she and her family had become very active in the Dutch underground, hiding refugees. They rescued many Jews from certain death at the hands of the Nazis.

Corrie and her sister began taking in refugees, some of whom were Jews, others members of the resistance movement sought by the Gestapo and its Dutch counterpart. There were several extra rooms in their house, but food was scarce due to wartime shortages. Despite the odds, they gave a home to the destitute. Corrie had a man built a little room behind one wall in her bedroom. That room had just enough space for just six persons and you entered that room on your knees crawling in through the bottom shelf of a cabinet set against the wall.

Every time the Nazi’s came to check, within 70 seconds, these refugees had to run from anywhere in the house up the steep spiral stairways into that ‘hiding place.’ This happened for over two years but the Germans arrested the entire Ten Boom family on February 28, 1944 at around 12:30 pm with the help of a Dutch informant. They were sent first to Scheveningen prison (where her father died ten days after his capture), then to the Vught political concentration camp (both in the Netherlands), and finally to the notorious Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany in September 1944, where Corrie's sister Betsie died. Before she died she told Corrie, "There is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still."

Corrie was released on Christmas Day of December 1944. Ten Boom narrates the section on her release from camp in her book The Hiding Place, saying that she later learned that her release had been a clerical error. The women prisoners her age in the camp were killed the week following her release.

After the war, Corrie ten Boom returned to the Netherlands to set up rehabilitation centres. She returned to Germany in 1946, where in her speaking tours she met soldiers who had mistreated her and her sister in the war. She tells of how the Lord led her to forgive them so that she herself could be set free in her soul.

Corrie died on April 15, 1983 her 91st birthday.

One of the most powerful statements made by this remarkable woman of faith is: "God does not have problems. Only plans." That probably was the story of Corrie Ten Boom’s life.

Thursday afternoon, we were sitting in the Ten Boom living room listening to our guide retell that story while soft snow was falling on Barteljorisstraat, Haarlem. She then took us around the house and to the “hiding place” in Corrie’s little room.

For a moment, amidst the falling snow outside, time stood still for us. And we got transported to the hustle and bustle, the fears and tears, the whispers, the songs and the life of a people who lived so long before us and in conditions so alien to us but whose lives still speak to us today, inspiring us for the future.

God, indeed, does not have problems. Only plans.