I’d like to tell you about the time I met the famous holocaust survivor, Corrie ten Boom. In November of 1974, I was working as a “gofer” for the Billy Graham team during a crusade in Norfolk, Virginia, and I was taking the hotel elevator. When I stepped in, there she was. Her gray halo-arranged hair and character-lined face were unmistakable.
I wondered whether to call her Miss Boom or Miss ten Boom. Whatever I said, she squinted at me and asked with Dutch accent: “Young man, have you ever seen an angel?”
“No,” I replied, startled, “Not that I know of.”
“Well, I have,” she declared. And in the time our elevator took to reach the bottom floor she told me of a time when she was smuggling Bibles into Communist Eastern Europe. The border guard was checking everyone’s luggage, and she knew her load of Bibles would surely be discovered. In alarm she prayed, “Lord, you have said that you would watch over your Word. Now, please watch over your Word that I am smuggling.”
Suddenly as she looked at her suitcase it seemed to glow with light. No one else saw it; but to her it was clearly visible. There was an aura of light wrapped around that suitcase.
Her turn came at customs, and the guard, who had so vigilantly opened and inspected every piece of everyone’s luggage, glanced at her bags, shrugged, and waved her through. It was an angel, she told me, who had helped her deliver God’s Word behind the Iron Curtain.
I’ve never forgotten that story, or the experience of meeting a woman who wasted no opportunity to say a word for the Lord. Even a few fleeting moments with a kid on an elevator became, for her, an occasion for ministry.