A House of Clocks

“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: They shall prosper that love thee.” — Psalm 122:6 (ASV)

In the old centre of Haarlem, a city in the Netherlands, a few steps from the market square and the huge church of St. Bavo, there is a narrow house at Barteljorisstraat 19. From the street it is only one room wide. Behind the shop it climbs and twists: steep stairs, half-landings, rooms at odd levels. The family who lived there called it the Beje (say it “bay-yay”), from the initials of the street name. Today it is a museum, and visitors from all over the world climb those stairs. For more than a hundred years, though, it was just a watchmaker's shop with a family living upstairs.

Corrie ten Boom's grandfather, Willem, opened the shop in 1837. According to the family's records, he started with one hundred guilders. Three generations of ten Booms repaired and sold clocks and watches from that small front room. It is patient, precise work, and it runs on trust. A customer leaves something precious and has to believe it will come back whole and honestly repaired. The ten Booms kept that trust for a century. It would matter more than they could imagine when their neighbours had to trust them with something far more precious than a watch.

Family tradition says that in 1844 Willem heard a sermon on the verse at the top of this chapter and began gathering a small group once a week to pray for the Jewish people and the peace of Jerusalem. No document from 1844 survives to prove the date, and the idea that the prayer went on for exactly a hundred years is a round number for a celebration. But the prayer became part of who the family were. Corrie's father grew up with it, and so did Corrie.

Her father, Casper, set up his own watch shop in Amsterdam as a young married man, in a neighbourhood with many Jewish families. Family tradition says he had close Jewish friends there and sometimes shared their Sabbath meals. That is where Corrie was born, on 15 April 1892, which was Good Friday that year. A lot of popular books say she was born in Haarlem. She wasn't; the records all say Amsterdam. Family tradition adds that she arrived a month early, so small and weak that nobody expected her to live long. She lived to be ninety-one.

Soon after her birth the family moved back to Haarlem to take over the Beje. She was the youngest of five children: Betsie, Willem, Nollie, and a brother, Hendrik Jan, who died as a baby. Over the years three of her mother's sisters came to live there too. With the children, the aunts, the shop, the workroom and a steady stream of visitors, the narrow house was always full. Corrie remembered it as a place where there was always room for one more at the table.

Casper had a phrase for the Jewish people that Corrie never forgot. They were “God's ancient people.” To him, Jews were not a distant religious category. They were neighbours, friends, customers, and fellow lovers of the Scriptures, and God's promises to them still stood.

We usually think courage appears suddenly, in a crisis. The Beje suggests something else. The courage this family would show in 1943 had been growing for a hundred years, in a weekly prayer, an honest trade, and a crowded table. What you practise when nothing is at stake is what you will have when everything is.

One thing to do this week: pick one group of people who are in danger or pushed aside somewhere in the world, or in your own town. Pray for them by name every day this week, the way the ten Booms prayed for Jerusalem every week. Write their name somewhere you will see it each morning.