Closets and Corners.

Corrie ten Boom remains one of my heroines of the faith because of the way she answered one question...

I grew up under the influence of many Christian leaders from the Second World War and Cold War eras, and Corrie ten Boom was held in particularly high esteem in my childhood home. 

The Dutch watchmaker’s family worked together to aid over 800 Jews and resisters during the Holocaust by hiding them behind a hidden wall in Corrie’s bedroom. They helped many survive and escape Holland, until Corrie, her sister Betsie, their brother, nephew, and their aged father Casper ten Boom were all captured in 1944 and sent to prison camps. Corrie was the only one to survive much past the war, passing away at age 91. 

I first read Corrie’s family biography, The Hiding Place, when I was about ten or twelve years old. I read The Diary of Anne Frank around the same time. Later, I would discover Brother Andrew, Richard Wurmbrand, and Maria Anne Hirschmann, and absorb their stories of surviving totalitarianism.

I watched Reagan, Gorbachev, and the fall of the Berlin Wall as a child, and came of age in the confluence of Y2K and evangelical end-times fervor, both of which were taken very, very seriously in my circles. I lived with the expectation of the bottom falling out for American Christians at any time. 

The small walk-in closet of my childhood bedroom was in a corner of the house where several planes of wall and roofline came together. I have clear memories of discussing how, because the inset corner would make it hard to tell from the outside where the interior walls lined up, it was an ideal spot to build an extra wall to create—if ever needed— our own “hiding place.” 

For my 20th birthday gift, I specifically requested (and I still have) a pocket Bible with minuscule print, taking my cue from the tiny Scriptures that Betsie ten Boom hid on her emaciated body while imprisoned in Ravensbrück. 

The “Liberal Elites” hated both Christians and America, I was told, and people who followed Jesus would eventually be persecuted for their faith. "They” had a “New Age Agenda” that would “indoctrinate” us with a false and atheist history, a la Orwell’s 1984. Meanwhile, radical “feminazis” wanted to "tear apart the family" and "destroy traditional marriage" by weakening "real" womanhood and tearing down good men. Liberals and feminists had already successfully "watered down" the Gospel through "mistranslations" of the Bible, particularly the NIV and the Living Bible. Along with "the gays," they had also "infiltrated" every level of the Academy, using public schools and colleges to gain access to young people to systematically destroy their faith (and recruit them to homosexuality). This evil paradigm was being set up to support the “New World Order” that would take away our King James Version Bibles, force us to turn in other Christians so they could put us all in camps, and partner with the “Godless Communists” to usher in the “End Times.” 

The preceding paragraph may seem extreme to some readers, but I do not speak here in hyperbole. I did not simply misunderstand, or come to wild, childish conclusions, nor hear something once and take it to extremes. I use quotation marks because those were the exact words used in my world.

All of these disastrous events were so imminently anticipated that I had zero expectations that I would have a long life. There was simply no questioning whether these things were just around the corner. I assumed I would probably not have time to get married or grow middle-aged, much less old. Growing up as I did on a steady diet of the stories coming out of Eastern Europe after the Iron Curtain was drawn back, perhaps my fatalism is unsurprising.

It took me many years after Y2K to even begin to release my fatalism and fears, reform destructive (not to mention wildly incorrect) eschatology, and begin to relax and enjoy my life without feeling an ever-present sense of doom, a constant wondering if I’d be called to be imprisoned for Jesus like Corrie was, or to die for Him, like Betsie did.

I only recently became aware that every day since 2000 has felt in some subconscious way like a bonus, something I never expected to have, and in the days since I had this insight, I’ve realized that I want to wring every drop of life out of all the days I’m given, no matter how many or few they are.

But now I find myself revisiting so many of the old fears, only this time the adversaries—much as it pains me to call them that—are largely from the same camp that planted the fears in the first place. 

The spiritual and cultural heirs of the ones who looked at Germany and Russia and said "We can't let that happen here!" are now the ones setting up the framework for exactly that to happen here.

It’s not a member of the Liberal Elite who has referred to me as “the enemy within" and threatened to use the military against me.

It’s not a crystal-wearing New Ager asking me to inform on my neighbor who suddenly doesn’t look pregnant anymore. 

It’s not the leaders of the New World Order who have cozied up to a dictator whose stated goal is to reconstruct the Russian Empire through force.

It’s not the left-wingers who want to choose which books I can and cannot read. 

It’s not the Academy who’s skewing textbooks to sugarcoat atrocities committed in the name of America and/or Christianity. 

It’s not a Godless Communist who wants to enforce mass roundups and build camps. 

It wasn't the gays who ended my marriage.

It wasn't college that brought on my dark night of the soul.

So far, there's no one trying to take away my Bible. Rather, it's been added to, having America’s founding documents exalted to the same place as holy Scripture, hawked for sale as a fundraiser to pay legal fees. Most of Jesus’ words have been entirely ignored, while selected passages from the Old Testament have been mandated as a public spectacle in tax-payer funded spaces.

Instead of the world persecuting believers for a faith that looks like Christ, people who claim to be following Him are laying the groundwork for the persecution of others.

Maybe it wasn't the atheists who indoctrinated me.

We’ve spent the last year or so in my home having increasingly frequent conversations that ask questions of the type I thought—hoped— I had left behind forever. Corrie ten Boom remains one of my heroines of the faith, and for the first time in over two decades, I feel it’s a real possibility that I may be called upon to answer the same question Corrie asked:

Who would I hide in my closet?