My mom would pick a good book out and read it aloud to our family when we were growing up.
One of the books she read to us was
The Hiding Place. The true story of Corrie Ten Boom.
A few days ago i found this little book tucked away in Granny's bookcase. I'm rereading it now and i'm finding there's so much wisdom packed into this little book.
I just read the part where Corrie is in her early twenties and just found out that the love of her life is engaged to some one else. She was crushed! She runs up to her room at the top of the odd little house and cries.
Her father comes up the stairs to talk to her. She hears him coming and is afraid he'll say "There'll be someone else soon." In her heart she knows that's not true.
But that's not what he tell her.
Instead he says
"Corrie, 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 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.God loves Karel, even more than you do, and if you ask Him, He will give you His love for this man, a love nothing an prevent, nothing destroy. Whenever we cannot love in the old human way, Corrie, god can give us the perfect way."I hope i have this kind of wisdom to share with my kids when they go through hard things!
If you know the rest of the story you know it's a hard one. And Corrie would remember this lesson later on. She says,
"I did not know, as I listened to Father's footsteps winding back down the stairs, that he had given me more than the key to this hard moment. I did not know that he had put into my hands the secret that would open far darker rooms than this, places where there was not, on a human level, anything to love at all."