Tramp for the Lord
Read Tramp for the Lord Online
Authors: Corrie Ten Boom
Published by CLC Publications
U.S.A.
P.O. Box 1449, Fort Washington, PA 19034
GREAT BRITAIN
51 The Dean, Alresford, Hants. SO24 9BJ
AUSTRALIA
P.O. Box 469, Kippa-Ring QLD 4021
NEW ZEALAND
118 King Street, Palmerston North 4410
© 1974 by Corrie ten Boom and Jamie Buckingham
All rights reserved. Published 2010
This edition 2011
ISBN-13: 978-0-87508-986-7
ISBN-13 (e-book): 978-1-936143-58-0
Unless otherwise identified, Scripture references in this book are from the Holy Bible, King James Version.
Scripture quotations marked P
HILLIPS
are from The New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips. © J.B. Phillips 1958. Used by permission of the Macmillan Company.
Scripture quotations marked N
EB
are from The New English Bible. © The Delegates of the Oxford University Press and the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press 1961 and 1970. Reprinted by permission.
Scripture quotations marked
LB
are from The Living Bible, Paraphrased by Kenneth N. Taylor, © 1971 by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The poem “Royal Scars” is from
Mountain Breezes
by Amy Carmichael, published by CLC Publications.
Excerpt from
War on the Saints
by Jessie Penn-Lewis, published by CLC Publications.
Introduction:
T
HE
W
ORLD
I
S
M
Y
C
LASSROOM
11. Lights from Darkest Africa
20. God’s Word, the Sword—God’s Perfect Weapon
22. When You Are Tempted to Quit
23. I’ll Go Where You Want Me to Go, Dear Lord …
but Not Up Ten Flights of Stairs
24. To All the World—Beginning with One
28. I Have Much People in This City
33. The Blacks and Whites of Forgiveness
M
y wife, Jackie, and I met
Tante
(Aunt) Corrie and her pretty, blond secretary, Ellen de Kroon, at the airport in Melbourne, Florida. Ellen had called the night before saying they were flying in, but that Corrie had been having some severe heart pains. At eighty years of age, that’s serious business.
We met the plane and whisked them to our house which is just minutes from the airport. “I’m very tired,” Tante Corrie said. “I like to rest a while.”
Moments later she was stretched out on our daughter’s lavender bedspread. I opened the window so the soft, tropical breeze could blow in from the lake behind the house. Gently closing the door, I cautioned the children to speak in whispers, and tiptoed into the kitchen to join Jackie and Ellen.
Ellen had brought us some Gouda cheese and we sliced it, reminiscing over my first meal in Corrie’s house in Holland. Ellen couldn’t wait to tell Jackie about the expression on my face when Corrie informed me I had a choice of two dishes for lunch: raw mullet dipped in onion, or smoked eel.
Talking softly and munching on cheese and crackers, I glanced up to see Tante Corrie coming down the hall, her eyes sparkling.
“Aren’t you going to rest?” I asked.
“Oh, I have already a good sleep,” she answered in her thick, Dutch accent. “Ten minutes is all you need when God gives the sleep.”
It is this remarkable power of recuperation which has allowed Tante Corrie, at more than eighty years of age, to tramp the world for the Lord. I saw that same power at work in her life a year later in Pittsburgh. We were both on the program for a Bible conference at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She had spoken three times that day to a congregation made up of everybody from bearded Jesus People to university professors. I was out late that night, and when I returned to the dormitory, I saw Ellen running down the hall. “Tante Corrie is having a heart attack,” she said.
I raced to Corrie’s room. She was stretched out on her bed, her face gray from the pain. “God has told me my time is not yet up,” she whispered. “I have sent for a minister to pray that I may be healed.”
Moments later, as the young minister arrived and laid his hands on her, I saw her features relax and the color return to her cheeks. “Thank You, Lord,” she said softly, “for taking away the pain.” Then, signifying she was ready for us to leave, she said, “I go to sleep now.”
The next morning at eight o’clock she was behind the pulpit speaking to a thousand persons in the great auditorium—as though nothing extraordinary had happened.
I am convinced that the secret of Tante Corrie’s great recuperative power, as well as the secret of her popularity as a speaker, lies in her childlikeness. As a little girl believes her Daddy can do anything, so Corrie ten Boom trusts in God—even more. She is living proof of what happens when a woman—when any person—is filled with the Holy Spirit.
J
AMIE
B
UCKINGHAM
I will teach you, and guide you in the way you should go
.
I will keep you under my eye
.
Psalm 32:8,
NEB
T
he school of life offers some difficult courses, but it is in the difficult class that one learns the most—especially when your teacher is the Lord Jesus Himself.
The hardest lessons for me were in a cell with four walls. The cell in the prison at Scheveningen, Holland was six paces in length, two paces in breadth, with a door that could be opened only from the outside. Later there were four barbed-wire fences, charged with electricity, enclosing a concentration camp in Germany. The gates were manned by guards with loaded machine guns. It was there in Ravensbruck that more than ninety-six thousand women died.
After that time in prison, the entire world became my classroom. Since World War II, I have traveled around it twice, speaking in more than sixty countries on all continents. During these three decades I have become familiar with airports, bus stations and passport offices. Under me have been wheels of every description: wheels of automobiles, trains, jinrikshas, horse-drawn wagons and the landing gear of airplanes. Wheels, wheels, wheels! Even the wheels of wheelchairs.
I have enjoyed the hospitality in a great number of homes and have slept in many times more than a thousand beds. Sometimes I have slept in comfortable beds with foam rubber mattresses in the United States, and sometimes on straw mats on dirt floors in India. There have been clean rooms and dirty rooms.
One bathroom in Hollywood had a view of exotic plants and flowers from the sunken Roman bathtub; while a bathroom in Borneo was simply a mud hut equipped with nothing but a barrel of cold water. Once, while staying with a group of young Jewish girls in Israel, I had to climb over a mountain of building materials and walk through a junk-filled field to make my way to a tiny outhouse, which was nothing more than a hole in the ground. Such a place would have been impossible to find at night.
Always in my travels, even now that I am in my ninth decade of life, I have carried in my hand and in my heart the Bible—the very Word of Life which is almost bursting with Good News. And there has been plenty for everyone. I often feel as the disciples must have felt as they fed more than five thousand with five loaves and two fishes. The secret was that they had received it from the blessed hand of the Master. There was abundance for all and twelve basketfuls of fragments left over.