Sunday Faith Blog...Corrie ten Boom

I thought the above quote was important and true and wanted to share it with you today.  When I Googled and found the quotes below, also by Corrie ten Boom, I wanted to pick a few and share them but I knew that at least one of them I might have deleted would be the quote that might most touch one of you today, when you need it most.  I hope you will be blessed by some of these amazing thoughts by Corrie ten Boom:

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

 “Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.”

“This is what the past is for! Every experience God gives us, every person He puts in our lives is the perfect preparation for the future that only He can see.”

“Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.”

“Worrying is carrying tomorrow's load with today's strength- carrying two days at once. It is moving into tomorrow ahead of time. Worrying doesn't empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

“If you look at the world, you'll be distressed. If you look within, you'll be depressed. If you look at God you'll be at rest.”

“Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.”

“Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love. 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 that love so that it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.”

“You can never learn that Christ is all you need, until Christ is all you have.”

“What wings are to a bird, and sails to a ship, so is prayer to the soul.”

“Any concern too small to be turned into a prayer is too small to be made into a burden.”

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

“Trying to do the Lord's work in your own strength is the most confusing, exhausting, and tedious of all work. But when you are filled with the Holy Spirit, then the ministry of Jesus just flows out of you.”

“There is no pit so deep, that God's love is not deeper still.”

“Don't bother to give God instructions; just report for duty.”

“Happiness isn't something that depends on our surroundings...It's something we make inside ourselves.”

 “Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him....Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness....And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.”

“It is not my ability, but my response to God’s ability, that counts.”

 “In darkness God's truth shines most clear.”

“Dear Jesus...how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are here.”

“when we are powerless to do a thing, it is a great joy that we can come and step inside the ability of Jesus”

“There is no panic in Heaven! God has no problems, only plans.”

“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 - let us pray that we may always know it!”

“Worry is a cycle of inefficient thoughts whirling around a center of fear.”

“Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?”

“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.”

“God's viewpoint is sometimes different from ours - so different that we could not even guess at it unless He had given us a Book which tells us such things....In the Bible I learn that God values us not for our strenght or our brains but simply because He has made us.”

“Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way . . . God can give us the perfect way.”

“Memories are the key not to the past, but to the future."

Her teaching focused on the Christian Gospel, with emphasis on forgiveness. In her book Tramp for the Lord (1974), she tells the story of an encounter while she was teaching in Germany, years later, in 1947. She was approached by a former Ravensbrück camp guard, who had been known as one of the most cruel. She was reluctant to forgive him, but prayed that she would be able to. Ten Boom wrote

"For a long moment we grasped each other's hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God's love so intensely as I did then."

Z:  Though her sister Betsie ten Boom died at Ravensbruck concentration camp after having worked so hard and suffered beyond our imaginations, the story of Corrie meeting the guard and feeling that love is well known and has touched many people in its theme of amazing forgiveness that only God can do.  What's also amazing is that her sister, before she died in the camp, told Corrie that they would both be freed before the new year.  She died and Corrie was released on December 28, 1944.  Both were, indeed, free.

Have a great Sunday.  I highly recommend the book The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom.
z