The Hiding Place

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.

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

Today I know that such memories are the key not to the past, but to the future. I know that the experiences of our lives, when we let God use them, become the mysterious and perfect preparation for the work He will give us to do.

And our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things too. Don't run out ahead of Him.When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need--just in time.

All through the short afternoon they kept coming, the people who counted themselves Father's friends. Young and old, poor and rich, scholarly gentlemen and illiterate servant girls—only to Father did it seem that they were all alike. That was Father's secret: not that he overlooked the differences in people; that he didn't know they were there.

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 which shut it in.

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

How brief is anyone’s life of service. 

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. God can give us the perfect way. Do you know what hurts so very much? It's love.

 Love is larger than the walls that shut it in. 

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

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.

Walls ringing with laughter. 

Father, so skilled in find the good in every situation... If father saw war and defeat than there was no other possibility at all. 

There are no “ifs” in gods world. Only in the center of his will is our only safety. 

Lord Jesus, I offer myself for your people. 

My job was simply to follow His leading one step at a time, holding every decision up to Him in prayer.

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.

Whatever in our life is hardest to bear, love can transform it into beauty. 

Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.

What feeds the soul matters as much as what feeds the body. 

For I, too, had a hiding place when things were bad. Jesus was this place, the Rock cleft for me. I pressed a finger to the tiny crevice.

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

Thou art my hiding place and my shield: I hope in thy word. . . . Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe.

"If I go home today," he said evenly and clearly, "tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.

How rich is anyone who can simply see human faces. 

It is not possible to be rich alone. 

If I was washing out clothes in the basin or sharpening my knife, when the answer pier,I stopped at once to give them my full attention. It would be unthinkable to squander my activities on the same bit of time.

If people can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love.

Betsy seemed to carry no burden of rage. 

“ I pray for him every time his name comes into my mind.”

“Give thanks is ALL circumstances.”

Don’t try too hard to explain it. Just accept it as surprise from a father who loves you.

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.

And for all these people alike, the key to healing turned out to be the same. Each had a hurt he had to forgive.

Of course it was not my wholeness, but Christ’s that made the difference.