The End Of Me By Kyle IdlemanUzorak

Weak to Be Strong

In Corrie ten Boom’s book Tramp for the Lord, she told of a woman she met in Russia during the Cold War when Christians were being persecuted.

The old woman, Corrie wrote, was reclining on a sofa. Multiple sclerosis had done quite a job on this woman. Her body was twisted in every direction, and she depended on pillows to prop her up. She had no mobility, so her husband’s time was consumed by her care. The index finger of her right hand was all she could control. Nothing else.

But oh, what she got from that finger. It moved across a typewriter keyboard all day and late into the night, tapping out words and sentences and paragraphs as she translated the Bible and other Christian books into her Russian language.

Her husband watched and noticed that it often took the wrinkled old finger quite a long time to hit a key—but on it moved, letter by letter, through books of the Bible.

And then Corrie ten Boom came for a visit. She looked at the twisted, skeletal frame on the sofa, and compassion overcame her. She prayed, “Oh, Lord, why don’t you heal this poor woman?”

The husband saw how deeply moved the visitor was, and he said, “God has a purpose in her sickness. Every other Christian in the city is watched closely by the secret police. But because she has been so sick for so long, no one ever looks in on her. They leave us alone, and she is the only person who can translate, undetected by the police.”

It’s inaccurate to say that God worked despite her weakness. The truth is that he was glorified through her weakness in a powerful way. You’d feel sorry for that woman, just as I would. But the very thing we’d wish and pray away, the very thing apparently destroying her life, the prickly thorn causing so much pain was a holy place that allowed a very weak woman to become a pillar of strength in God’s kingdom.