The Next Person at the Door

“Deliver them that are carried away unto death, And those that are ready to be slain see that thou hold back.” — Proverbs 24:11 (ASV)

Nobody at the Beje decided, on a particular day, to join the underground. It happened one knock at a time. In 1941 and 1942 Corrie and Betsie began helping Jews by finding them hiding places in other people's homes, and early in 1942 Corrie joined the organised resistance. Jews who had been warned they were about to be picked up heard, by word of mouth, that the watchmaker's family would help. The family took them in for a night or two, fed them, and went looking for somewhere safer.

The hard part was the “somewhere safer.” Sheltering someone for a night was one thing. Finding a family willing to hide a stranger for months, knowing that discovery could mean prison or death for the whole household, was another. Corrie's 1945 book remembers one night when a Jewish couple, warned they had been betrayed, arrived with nothing. Casper sat with them, because he was good at comforting frightened people. A young helper walked the town all evening looking for an address and found nothing. That night the household took one more burden to God in its evening prayers. A place was found two days later.

By 1943 the Beje was a hub. Around eighty resistance workers visited regularly. Corrie's little room became a kind of exchange where one person's need was matched with another's help. The biggest need was food. Everything was rationed, and you needed a ration card to buy bread or butter. A person in hiding officially didn't exist, so had no card. The underground got cards in large numbers, often in raids on the offices where they were kept, and the Beje became one of the places that passed them on. Corrie's 1945 book catches the pace of it: “Twenty more ration cards? Right, you shall have them.” She kept the stock hidden inside the top step of the staircase, which had been made into a secret cupboard.

All of this raised a real question. The work ran on false names, false papers and false answers to the police. Was it right to lie? In 1943 Corrie's sister Nollie was arrested for hiding a Jewish woman; the records confirm the arrest. In The Hiding Place, written much later, Corrie tells how Nollie refused to lie even then: asked if the woman was Jewish, she said yes. The woman was later rescued by the underground, and Nollie was released after some weeks. Corrie respected her sister, but she did not share her conviction. The work demanded deception, and she practised it. The family did not all agree.

Scripture doesn't settle it in one line either. The Hebrew midwives in Exodus disobeyed Pharaoh's order to kill baby boys, gave him an answer the text doesn't comment on, and God “dealt well with the midwives.” Rahab hid Israel's spies and sent their pursuers the wrong way, and the New Testament praises her faith. Some Christians read that as permission to deceive murderers. Others, like Augustine long ago, held that a Christian must never lie. What was clear to all of them is what Peter told the authorities: “We must obey God rather than men.” Nobody is obliged to help carry out an injustice.

Proverbs 24 has a follow-up line for people who say they didn't know. God, who weighs hearts, knows whether we didn't know or didn't want to. The ten Booms knew enough, and they acted on it.

God rarely shows you the whole road at the start. He shows you the next person at the door. The question for you is probably not whether you'd hide someone from the secret police. It's whether you will open the door to the next person God sends, even when you can't see where it leads.

One thing to do this week: think of one person who has quietly asked for help, or obviously needs it: a new student, a struggling friend, a neighbour. Open the door one step: send the message, offer the help, or invite them in.