GIFT FROM THE FATHER
Corrie Ten Boom tells of a time in the German death camp Ravensbruk during WWII. She had smuggled her Bible and a small bottle of liquid vitamins into her barracks. Her sister Betsy was sick and growing sicker, but she demanded that Corrie first give a dose of vitamins to all the other sick in their barracks before she would accept any.
Corrie tells that a strange thing was happening. The vitamin bottle was continuing to produce drops. It scarcely seemed possible, so small a bottle, so many doses a day. Now in addition to Betsy, a dozen others on our pier were taking it. My instinct was always to hoard it -- Betsy was growing so very weak! But the others were ill as well. It was hard to say no to eyes that burned with fever, hands that shook with chill. I tried to save it for the very weakest -- but even these soon numbered fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five.... And still, every time I tilted the little bottle, a drop appeared at the tip of the glass stopper. It just couldn’t be! I held it up to the light, trying to see how much was left, but the dark brown glass was too thick to see through.
"There was a woman in the Bible," Betsy said, "whose oil jar was never empty." She turned to it in the Book of Kings, the story of the poor widow of Zarephath who gave Elijah a room in her home: "The jar of meal wasted not, neither did the cruse of oil fail, according to the works of Jehovah which he spoke by Elijah." Well -- but -- wonderful things happen all through the Bible. It was one thing to believe that such things were possible thousands of years ago, another to have it happen now, to us, this very day. And yet it happened this day, and the next, and the next, until an awed little group of spectators stood around watching the drops fall onto
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