The Most Beautiful....Bleakness!............(The Hiding Place)

                I like block windows....particularly with a pastel light in them....and I also like the neon lighting up and down and all-around a jukebox....or the outside of a diner. An aqua or turquoise Thunderbird always catches my eye. I like to look inside a GTO or a 57 Fairlane. MGBs are always what I particularly search for....this because I had one back in 1972....mine was forest green with bright orange and yellow seat covers. I'm always up for 50s music blasting from no closer than say....twenty yards. Put them together....the neon diner with the 50s cars....music....and maybe add in carhops on roller skates....and I can go from reality back to Happy Days. A car cruise does the same thing.
               So on Saturday....the car cruise was the first stop....beautiful day....and all the cars parked in and around the quaint town that has a candy store....ice cream and yogurt....and even a house plant store....but the movie showing was 2:00 and I knew that there would be no previews for this independent Christian film....and the theater was forty minutes away!
               Forty minutes of highway....not a lot to look at....and conveniently the sermon we listened to on the drive was only about twenty-five minutes....a John Piper sermon....Jesus Overcomes Our Darkness!  So we were running from the parking lot to the theater....to pick up the reserved tickets. (I don't run anymore....it probably looked more like a walrus trying to get to water) Wouldn't you know it....Barbie was playing...so the whole Happy Days car cruise scene was replayed....with pink everywhere!
               After taking time to add the butter to the popcorn....the film had just started as I sat down....and for the next two hours and thirty minutes was the most beautiful stark and bleak darkness you could ever imagine. There was no color to speak of....except for the red swastika on some of the armbands. Let's get this straight...I go from almost the rainbow of Disneyland to the black & white of film noir....and it was...."beautiful?"
               If I were only alluding to colors....no it would not be beautiful....and the film was about the Nazi takeover of Holland...so that was not beautiful....quite the opposite....horror actually....but the beauty was there. As Corrie Ten Boom pulled the tiny Bible out from her blouse....around her neck on a chain....smuggled into the concentration camp....and everyone crowding around to hear her read it.....yes that was beautiful!
               The father....Casper Ten Boom....standing up to say grace over a modest meal....with Jewish people that he was hiding from the Nazis around the table....yes that was a grand vista. The faith amidst the persecution....and the prayers....and the pleadings....and the cries....and the tears....were raindrops....the sun [Son] causing them to almost twinkle. The deaths were as lightning white chariots led by magnificent steads....as they carried the souls to the city of streets paved with gold. And the ending....a miracle where Corrie is 'mistakenly' freed....as Joseph was released from the prison....or Jeremiah pulled from the pit....or Peter walking out of the jail with everyone asleep....freed to wander the whole world and tell of her family's faith in Jesus Christ and the Word of God!...freed to move me....forty years ago....with simple devotional books....the last thing one would expect me to be reading!
               Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder....but sometimes one has to dig deep for it....through the ashes and the dung. This post is a follow-up to the post preceding this. I am so upbeat on this film! May God....if it be His will.....and to His glory alone.....disseminate it worldwide....that many might see the true treasure in even a small Bible....and the real beauty of God's Word in a world that values more only colors and gilded objects!