Before the Session
- Review today’s scripture text and the session activities to help better facilitate the discussion.
- Have the Bible Background Video ready to view.
- Print the four quotations (and accompany background in italics) from Corrie Ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place on separate pieces of paper.
- Encourage your group to listen to the Faithelement podcast ahead of the next session (Share the link via email or social media)
Context
Read aloud 2 Timothy 1:1-14 then play the Bible Background Video.
In today’s session, the group will share an experiential exercise where they may hear the scripture’s words in new strengthening ways.
Reflection
Tell the group:
The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom recounts the author’s experiences during World War II. She and her family were devout Christian Dutch watchmakers, living in Poland, who hid Jews in their house for many months. The family was eventually arrested, and Corrie is the only one who survived the imprisonment at Ravensbruck, one of the most brutal concentration camps.
Invite volunteers to read the provided quotations from The Hiding Place:
- In this scene, Corrie’s father is being interrogated by the Gestapo because he is suspected of helping Jews:
“The Gestapo chief leaned forward. I’d like to send you home, old fellow,” he said. “I’ll take your word that you won’t cause any more trouble.”
I could not see father’s face, only the erect carriage of his shoulders and the halo of white hair above them. But I heard his answer.
- “If I go home today,” he said evenly and clearly, “tomorrow I will open my door again to any man in need who knocks.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place -
This quotation is from the part of the story where Corrie recounts her experiences in the barracks at the concentration camp where she had managed to smuggle in a Bible:
“At last either Betsie or I would open the Bible. Because only the Hollanders could understand the Dutch text, we would translate aloud in German. And then we would hear the life-giving words passed back along the aisles in French, Polish, Russian, Czech, back into Dutch. They were little previews of heaven, these evenings beneath the lightbulb.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place -
This quotation is a comment Corrie makes after reading the Bible in the concentration camp where many atrocities took place:
“I had believed the Bible always, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were–of hell and heaven, of how men act and how God acts.”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place -
The following is Corrie’s response to a Gestapo Lieutenant’s inquiry about the Bible’s contents:
“It says,” I began slowly, “that a Light has come into this world, so that we need no longer walk in the dark. Is there darkness in your life, Lieutenant?”
― Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place
Darken the meeting area and have everyone who is able sit on the floor together in the middle, then read the following scenario for people to imagine as if it were happening to them: (taken from ABC News article by James Gordon Meek, Megan Christie, Brian Epstein and Brian Ross “Kayla Mueller in Captivity: Courage, Selflessness as She Defended Christian Faith to ISIS Executioner ‘Jihadi John’” – August 25, 2016)
As Mueller’s fellow female hostages described it for “20/20,” ISIS held the four women in a 12-foot-by-12-foot room of brick whitewashed walls, in what the FBI later called the “pipeline desert prison,” with a blacked-out window, a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling and mattresses and blankets on the floor. They could only tell day from night through a ventilation fan near the ceiling.
“There was a little bit of light coming by this small vent, but that was it,” Chavez said.
“It was cold, dirty. We didn’t have that much to eat,” Saide recalled. “They gave us black dresses and hijab, so to cover our heads and faces.”
The women passed their time swapping stories of their families, their boyfriends and describing their respective homelands. They also whiled away the hours drawing, reading the Quran, writing and planning escapes that were all but impossible. Mueller sometimes cracked them up doing impressions of guards, including one brute they called “Edges.”
And always in the background were ISIS nasheeds — chanting songs of martyrdom and death — blaring on speakers.
“They played on and on and on,” Chavez said.
The relentless nasheeds underscored the real violence of the hostage takers, which the world would see later on Aug. 19, 2014, with the first beheading on video by ISIS of an American captive, journalist James Foley.
After a one-minute silent pause, invite the group to listen to the [scripture text](2 Timothy 1:1-14) as it is twice read slowly.
Invite volunteers to share their insights on the things that come to their minds when they hear these words.
Close with prayer
Writer: Joy Yee