l e t t e r f r om o u r p a s t o r
DON PUCIK
2
the challenge | august/september/october 2017
A Privileged Generation
Corrie Ten Boom’s father died in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. After providing care
and shelter for Jewish friends, the entire family was arrested and awaited imprisonment. In this
account shared by his grandson Peter, Corrie’s father is remembered for his last recorded words.
The long hours crept by slowly as we stood there facing the yellow brick wall. My heart
was full of questions. I kept thinking of the Psalm which Grandfather had read the evening
before. After our imprisonment, we had been taken to the police station at Haarlem. In
the gymnasium there, with thirty other prisoners lying and sitting on the floor around him,
Grandfather had taken his Bible and read the Ninety-first Psalm. How peaceful those words
had sounded to our anxious souls: ‘He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High
shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my
fortress: my God; in Him will I trust.”
But now, standing in the corridor of Scheveningen prison, doubt filled my heart. “A thousand
shall fall at thy side,” Grandfather had read, “and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall
not come nigh thee.”
But tragedy had struck. Where was the host of angels we had prayed for so often? Had God
forgotten us? Then I glanced over at Grandfather sitting in the corner. There was such an
expression of peace on his pale face that I could not help marveling. He actually was protected.
God had built a fence around him. Suddenly I knew: The everlasting arms are around all of us.
God does not make mistakes. He is at the controls.
At last they took me to my cell. As I walked past Grandfather, I stopped, bent over him, and kissed
him goodbye. He looked up at me and said, “My boy, are we not a privileged generation?”
Those were his last words to me.*
It is true! We have the privilege of being His Hands and His feet – not in a Nazi prison camp – but
all over northeast Arkansas. His love changes us, then stirs us to tell others about Him. When we
exalt Him through our daily words and actions, people notice us less and less, and Him more and
more… until that day comes when just about everyone we know is talking about Jesus! Then the
world will be asking how Jesus took a sparsely populated and barely noticeable region of the planet,
and used the people there to change the world in one generation. We are a
privileged generation
!
Yours in His Fields,
Don
*Corrie Ten Boom, Father Ten Boom (Fleming H. Revell Company, Old Tappan, New Jersey, 1973), 10-11.
