Quotes from Corrie Ten Boom

Show us. Show us how. It was said so mater of factly it took me a second to realize she was praying. More and more the distinction between prayer and the rest of life seemed to be vanishing for Betsie.

You have had to travel a long way to get here, to tell us about the Lord Jesus. Please thank your tribe that they have allowed you to come here.

We are the children of a king and have in our possession the key to our Father's storehouse. All its treasures are ours to use at any moment. —Eva von Tiele-Winckler

We knew that in spite of daily mounting risks we had no choice but to move forward. This was evil's hour: we could not run away from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God's power alone be free to work.

Only heaven will reveal the top side of God's tapestry.

There are no "ifs" in God's kingdom. I could hear her soft voice saying it. His timing is perfect. Hi8s will is our hiding place. Lord Jesus, keep me in Your will! Don't let me go mad by poking about outside it.

We sat by deathbeds that became doorways of heaven. W

Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you." And I was satisfied. More than satisfied—wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions—for now I was content to leave them in my father's keeping. E

But," she said, "this is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for a future that only He can see.

AND SO THE shadow fell across us that winter afternoon in 1937, but it rested lightly. Nobody dreamed that this tiny cloud would grow until it blocked out the sky. And nobody dreamed that in this darkness each of us would be called to play a role: Father and Betsie and Mr. Kan and Willem—even the funny old Beje with its unmatching floor levels and ancient angles.

How rich is anyone who can simply see human faces!

Mama's love had always been the kind that acted itself out with soup pot and sewing basket. But now that these things were taken away, the love seemed as whole as before. She sat in her chair at the window and loved us. She loved the people she saw in the street—and beyond: her love took in the city, the land of Holland, the world. And so I learned that love is larger than the walls that shut it in.

He stamped on his cigar stub in the ashtray beside the radio and with it, it seemed, the anger too, for his voice grew gentle again. "Oh, my dears, I am sorry for all Dutchmen now who do not know the power of God. For we will be beaten. But He will not.

That man, the watchmaker! He's a Gestapo plant

Every day of my life had ended like this: that deep steady voice, that sure and eager confiding of us all to the care of God.

Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil that one could almost believe one's own secret sins didn't matter.

Some knowledge is too heavy . . . you cannot bear it . . . your Father will carry it until you are able.

Three times, he said, he had begged God to take away his weakness, whatever it was. And each time God had said, Rely on Me.

Conditions are always changing; therefore, I must not be dependent upon conditions. What matters supremely is my soul and my relationship to God.

I don't know," she said softly. "But if God has shown us bad times ahead, it's enough for me that He knows about them. That's why He sometimes shows us things, you know—to tell us that this too is in His hands.

That's the S.D.'s favorite trick—feeling for a warm spot on a bed." © Hans Poley/Nederlands fotomuseum, Rotterdam Two Jewish women during an actual drill of the hiding place in 1943.

We didn't know, of course, the political views of all these people. But—and here I felt a strange leaping of my heart—God did! My job was simply to follow His leading one step at a time, holding every decision up to Him in prayer. I knew I was not clever or subtle or sophisticated; if the Beje was becoming a meeting place for need and supply, it was through some strategy far higher than mine. A

Happiness is not dependent on happenings, but on relationships in the happenings.

Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain. "There are two things we can do when this happens. We can kill the love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel...