God's Footprints, Part 2

During the same week that I receive Angie's devotion on looking intentionally for God's footprints in our lives, I was reading The Hiding Place, the story of Corrie Ten Boom. 

Corrie lived with her father and sister in Holland in the 1930s. She was 50-years old and working in her father's watch shop when Germany came in looking to "exterminate" anyone they deemed unworthy, from Jews to the mentally ill. Corrie became one of the queen ringleaders in the fight against the Holocaust, finding hiding places for anyone in need and taking in the "least desirable" into her own home. Eventually she was caught and sent to a concentration camp as punishment. 

Corrie and her sister Betsie were in the camp together. Their parents had raised them in a Christian home, which included nightly Bible readings and belief in the power of prayer. While Corrie was like "the rest of us," not shy to hide her complaints when the smell of the latrines was overpowering, the trains overcrowded, and the beds full of fleas, Betsie had this supernatural ability to find God in any and every situation. In one particularly powerful scene, Betsie thanks God for the fleas in their beds, knowing that he could use even the tiniest bug to fulfill his purposes. 

During a visit to the infirmary, a nurse smuggled a Bible to Corrie. Possessions of any kind were strictly prohibited, and yet, in all her time at the camp, Corrie miraculously never got caught. Each night she and her sister continued their father's tradition of reading the Bible aloud, a practice they were able to keep because for some reason the camp guards never entered their bunk room. It wasn't until weeks later that they discovered that the reason the camp guards never came to their room--a room built for 400 but which housed 1,400 women--was because they didn't want to get fleas. Those fleas are the reason so many women got to hear the Gospel!

Corrie's life, her story, is the epitome of what Angie's devotion was talking about, seeing God in everyday life, in any and every circumstance, trusting that he is guiding and watching over us always. 

My trials are certainly nothing compared to Corrie's, or to those Jesus faced on this Good Friday. And yet still I have to be reminded to look for him in those moments that feel hard, frustrating, or unfair. But hopefully as I continue to focus on living intentionally, it will become easier and easier to recognize him in those moments.