Tramp for the Lord

This book by Corrie ten Boom is an unexpected delight. I grew up on occasional stories about Corrie ten Boom; how she and her Christian Dutch family sheltered Jewish families throughout the Holocaust for years, right up until the end where they were captured and she and her sister Betsy were taken to a concentration camp, where Betsy died, but Corrie survived just long enough to see the camp's liberation at the end of the war. They were inspiring stories, and form the backbone of her more famous work The Hiding Place - but I'd never read that myself. But somehow I found myself drawn to what she found herself doing with her life after so much trauma. And man, is it remarkable.

   The autobiographical chapters in this book span decades, recounting historical events as she grows up through and past them, all with an unshakeable faith in Christ that carries her through everything as she persists in a singular quest to share the joy and hope she has in Jesus with as many people in as many place as she can. It's truly inspiring. And not just the task of it - the bulk of these chapters is comprised of a variety of hindrances, from lost airline tickets to localised epidemics to terrorist attacks to you-name-it - but Corrie's immediate instinct is always to retreat and to pray, and to continue doing so, while blessing those around her however she can, until something rights itself. And in these chapters, it always seems to. A cynic may easily say these are the miraculous wishings of a senile woman with nothing in her head but the dregs of a meaningless faith. But I do not think a woman of her calibre could have been what she had without developing a hard shell of robustness and fortitude in telling what is mere coincidence or genuine miracle or both; and more often than not, both IS both - that's the point. Her faith and her prayer and her patience sees her through so many strange and stressful situations in this book that she not only makes her global tour appointments as a speaker to congregations more or less on time, but she touches and brightens the lives of many random folks around the world as she does so. I found this a genuinely inspiring book - if not necessarily for how I think my life could ever go, then insofar as I may have faith, patience and prayerfulness. Lord give me the strength to be the kind of tramp Corrie was.