Pilgrimage (11 page)

I take another swig from my water bottle as I stare into the remains of the Pool of Siloam, and I can almost hear His invitation: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). But Jesus said something else that day when He interrupted the carefully planned ceremony. He said, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him” (John 7:38). That means I’m also a source of living water.

We have an overflowing abundance of information and tools to help us in our Christian walk, a reservoir of religious freedom to draw from, yet we’re often guilty of hoarding it in cisterns instead of letting it flow freely from us. We attend Bible studies and Sunday school classes year after year, storing up life-giving water but never sharing even a cup of it with others. Water that doesn’t move becomes stagnant and dead, a breeding ground for mosquitoes and disease.

Living water that purifies the defiled, nourishes like a spring rain shower, and gives blind men their sight can’t be hoarded. It needs to flow in and out. It needs to move through us, always flowing, ever changing. We need to be filled and refilled continually by Christ, the Living Water, not only for our own sakes, but so that streams of living water will flow from within us. So that we can say to a dying world, “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1). I am being refilled on this pilgrimage. Now it’s time to let it overflow.

Yad Vashem

Our tour bus turns off the frenetic streets of modern Jerusalem and enters a peaceful park. Leaves rustle in the earth-scented breeze, birds twitter and chirp, the sounds of city life fade in the background. But the serenity becomes unsettling when we learn that we’ve entered the grounds of
Yad
Vashem
, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. The tranquility is that of a cemetery.

We leave the bus and walk along The Avenue of Righteous Gentiles, passing through a grove of trees planted in honor of people from all over Europe who risked their lives to rescue Jews from Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Each tree is marked with a plaque and a name, and I find trees for several of the heroes and heroines I’ve read about: Oskar Schindler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, and Corrie ten Boom.

I pause beside Corrie’s tree to whisper a prayer of thanks. I read her book
The Hiding Place
when I was a young, newly married bride, and her true story made a lasting impression on me. Her life seemed so happy and ordinary in the beginning—much like my life back then with my new husband and my first teaching job—yet everything quickly changed for Corrie and her family after the Nazis occupied their country. Because of the Ten Boom family’s deep faith in God, they made the decision to hide Jews in their home. The Nazis arrested Corrie, her father, and sister Betsie, and imprisoned them in a concentration camp. Corrie was the only survivor.

I wondered if I would have had the courage to do what she did. What would happen to my faith if I had to suffer because of it? Would I grow stronger as I leaned on God, or would I grow angry and lapse into despair if He failed to rescue me or answer my prayers the way I thought He should? Corrie’s
testimony brought me face-to-face with the shallowness of my faith, my lack of a deep relationship with God. Ken and I needed to build our new life together on a rock-solid foundation of prayer and faith and obedience. Corrie’s book became a huge stepping-stone in my walk with God.

We leave the peaceful avenue and enter the museum. As visitors move from one end of the long, narrow building to the other, the exhibit tells the story of the Holocaust from its very beginning. The first thing we see is a towering wall that serves as a movie screen. Snatches of film from before World War II place us on a street somewhere in Europe. We’re gazing through the windows of an apartment building, glimpsing everyday life in a Jewish community. We see families eating, working, worshiping; gathering for the Sabbath and singing songs that are as ancient as their faith; laughing, rejoicing, celebrating God. I shudder, knowing how it will end.

I turn and continue to walk, reading and studying the displays as I go. The museum floor slopes subtly down as I witness the gradual, ominous progression of hatred. It spews from public billboards and magazine pages and newspapers. The Nazis enact laws against Jews. They are fired from their jobs. Their homes and businesses are confiscated, looted. Jews are required to sew yellow stars on their clothing. They are ridiculed and harassed in the streets. As the persecution intensifies, desperate families gather their belongings and try to emigrate, only to find that few nations will take them.

Then comes
Kristallnacht
, “the night of broken glass,” when 267 synagogues are burned, countless holy books destroyed, and hundreds of Jews beaten and killed in anti-Jewish riots. I’m struck by how “harmlessly” and gradually it all began before spiraling into genocide so violent that
few people could have conceived of it, let alone believed it would happen. But the proof is in front of me, documented in photographs and on film and in stories told by survivors.

As I walk and listen and read, the doorways to the exhibits become narrower, the rooms smaller and more confining until I find myself in the middle of a jumbled maze. I’m surrounded by images of Jews being rounded up at gunpoint and forced into ghettos and concentration camps. I’ve become separated from my husband and stuffed into a very tight space with strangers. Confused and disoriented, I search for the way out or the way that I came in, but I can’t find either one. The lights are dim, the ceiling low. There are no windows.

I’m lost.

With nowhere to turn, I shuffle forward with the others and find that I’m being crammed into a railroad car like the ones that transported millions of Jews to their deaths. Claustrophobia sucks my breath away. I need to get out! Now!

As my panic builds, I realize that this fear and disorientation are exactly what the architect intended. I’m being forced to experience the same emotions that Jews felt as their joyful, song-filled world descended into a nightmare. I take deep breaths to control my panic and persevere through the maze, studying the horrific pictures. Death camps. Crematoria. Mass executions. Piles of discarded shoes and shorn hair and tattered suitcases, left behind by people whose lives ended in unimaginable horror. I look into the haunting faces of the men, women, and children who are slowly being driven to their deaths and my tears flow unchecked. For a few searing hours, I am experiencing a tiny taste of the Holocaust, and I can barely endure it. I want to run, but I can’t escape. Neither could millions of Jews.

Slowly, the rooms become larger, the displays more orderly as the photos show Allied help arriving, bringing hope. The floor gradually slopes up again as I near the end. Hitler’s forces retreat and surrender. The war ends. Salvation comes at last to survivors in the concentration camps and work camps. I see a photo of young Anne Frank, who longed to grow up and become an author like me, but who died of disease in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, six weeks before she would have been liberated.

The memorial of Yad Vashem ends with another towering wall on the opposite end of the building from the movie screen that depicted Jewish life before the Holocaust. This second wall is made of glass, and on the other side of it is a stunning view of modern Jerusalem. I look out at homes and apartment buildings with laundry fluttering from balconies. Mothers push baby carriages down sidewalks, young students hurry to catch a bus, old men sit around café tables. It’s a view of treetops and hills and blue skies and streets pulsing with life. The prophet Zechariah might have envisioned this when he wrote these words about Israel’s future: “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘Once again men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each with a cane in hand because of his age. The city streets will be filled with boys and girls playing there . . . I will save my people from the countries of the east and the west. I will bring them back to live in Jerusalem; they will be my people, and I will be faithful and righteous to them as their God’” (Zechariah 8:4–5, 7–8).

I’m still weeping as we board the bus and drive away from the Holocaust memorial. I’m not alone in my tears. No one speaks as we each try to process what we’ve seen
and experienced. Not only does the brutality of millions of deaths stun me, but also the realization that it occurred a mere decade before I was born. I think back ten years—and count forward ten years—and I shudder. This wasn’t an event from the ancient past, enacted by primitive, superstitious people who didn’t know any better. This happened in our modern era, among civilized nations. How quickly everything can change.

Yad Vashem raises terrible questions in my mind about why God would allow such atrocities, why He was silent in the face of so many Jewish pleas and prayers. We ask similar questions about His silence in the aftermath of hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis that take thousands of lives. Where is He? How can a loving God allow innocent people to suffer and die?

Grief-stricken by what I’ve experienced, I have no answers.

And yet God has offered an answer, if only we could comprehend it. He came down to this violent, hate-scarred planet in an act of unimaginable love to live among us and suffer what we suffer. The horror of Yad Vashem is only a taste of what Christ faced on the cross as He carried the weight of our most heinous sins. He not only endured torture and brutality, but He did it in love, so that even a Nazi officer could be forgiven if he bowed before Christ in repentance. God promises to be with us in our suffering even, as Corrie ten Boom and others have testified, if our suffering takes us to a lice-infested death camp.

The apostle Peter talks about the suffering we might face as followers of Christ and writes, “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice that
you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed” (1 Peter 4:12–13). I have never been persecuted for my faith or been forced to take a stand at the risk of my life. It’s easy to be a Christian in America compared to Iran or China or Nazi Germany. It’s easy to accept God’s will for my life when it’s one of abundance instead of persecution. So I ask myself the same question I asked after reading
The Hiding
Place
: Would I fear the Nazis more than I feared God? Would I have chosen to follow Christ’s example and love others at the cost of my own life, as Corrie and her family did?

As I am pondering all of these things, the bus travels across the city and arrives at the Jewish
shouk
. The colorful hubbub of this sprawling open-air market rouses me from my introspection. It’s the eve of the Sabbath and the aisles and stalls are jammed with people haggling with shopkeepers, hurrying to finish their shopping before the day of rest begins. The sheer abundance of goods, the vibrancy of the colors and smells and sounds make it seem as though God is shouting, “Oh, taste and see that I am good!”

I wander through the market aisles past mounds of oranges, pistachios, avocados, and more varieties of olives than I’ve ever seen. I sample rich pastries still warm from the oven, gobbling several of my favorite chocolate-filled ones, licking melted chocolate from my fingers. Men in suits and ties purchase flowers and strawberries for their wives and special Sabbath treats for their children. Housewives greet each other with “Shabbat shalom,” and leave carrying freshly baked
challah
bread and kosher wine. The bread and wine are Sabbath traditions and reminders, for me, of Christ’s body and blood.

In another hour or two at sundown, all of this bustling activity is going to come to an abrupt halt. Businesses and workplaces will close, the market stalls will be shuttered, public buses will stop running. The day of Sabbath rest will begin, and God’s people will pause to celebrate His goodness. Our suffering often causes us to turn away from God in anger. Here, His people still cling to Him—and He to them.

As unfathomable as the Holocaust still is to me, it’s clear as I absorb the beauty and joy in this open-air marketplace that God has kept His promise to the children of Abraham. “This is what the Lord says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night . . . ‘Only if these decrees vanish from my sight,’ declares the Lord, ‘will the descendants of Israel ever cease to be a nation before me’” (Jeremiah 31:35–36). Alongside Yad Vashem’s portrait of mankind at our worst, I see a stunning portrait of our loving, promise-keeping God.

Jesus said that earthquakes, wars, and rumors of wars all will continue until He returns. In the meantime, life can change so quickly, as it did for Corrie ten Boom and for millions of Jews in Europe. For us, it might be the loss of a job, the unexpected death of a loved one, a life-shattering medical diagnosis, or a devastating tornado. Where am I placing my faith? Why do I cling to stuff that doesn’t matter?

Whatever suffering we may endure, whatever the reason for the disasters we may witness, one thing is certain: our loving God remains sovereign over all of it. A few miles from Yad Vashem and this teeming, life-filled
shouk
is a hill called Calvary, where the battle against death has already been fought and won. “On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will
swallow up death forever” (Isaiah 25:7–8). Christ’s victory gives meaning to our present lives and hope for our future.

Therefore, my dear brothers, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

1 Corinthians 15:58

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