By: Courtney Hollingsworth, PLPC
The following excerpt is from one of my favorite books, The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. It is the true account of a Christian woman who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust for hiding Jews. It is a beautifully told story about the light of hope and grace in the midst of terrible darkness, unspeakable horror, and despair.
Often times I would use the trip home to bring up things that were troubling me, since anything I asked at home was promptly answered by the aunts. Once, I must have been 10 or 11, I asked father about a poem we had read at school the winter before. One line had described “a young men whose face was not shadowed by sexsin.” I had been far too shy to ask the teacher what it meant, and mama had blushed scarlet when I consulted her. In those days just after the turn of the century sex was never discussed, even at home. So the line had stuck in my head. “Sex,” I was pretty sure, meant whether you were a boy or a girl, and “sin” made Tante (Aunt) Jans very angry, but what the two together meant I could not imagine. And so, seated next to Father in the train compartment, I suddenly asked, “Father, what is sexsin?”
He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor.
“Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said. I stood up and tugged at it. It was crammed with the watches and spare parts he had purchased that morning.
“It’s too heavy,” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little daughter to carry such a load. It’s the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.”
And I was satisfied. More than satisfied, wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions, for now I was content to leave them in my father’s keeping.
This memory from early in her life was one that she kept with her in the face of witnessing and experiencing horrors beyond imagination during her time in a concentration camp. After seeing something torturous, she had these thoughts: “It was father’s train case once again. Such cruelty was too much to grasp, too much to bear. Heavenly Father Carry it for me!”
We all experience suffering, pain, and trauma in life. Often the weight of the world can feel too heavy a burden to carry. As life unfolds around us and brings loss and suffering, we can become lost in a sea of “why?” questions. We feel alone. Abandoned. Confused. Lost. In these moments of despair, we need to trust what is true of our Heavenly Father over our feelings. He never leaves or forsakes us. He has unending love for us. He is sovereign over all our suffering and joy. He will always carry what is too heavy for us.