Monday, October 26, 2015

The Helping Hand in the Midst of All Man’s Madness

“For how many a soldier in a concentration camp, weak with hunger and smarting under the whip of the torturers; for how many a person huddling in the last extremity of ghastly dread in a bomb shelter; for how many on the endless gray road of a refugee trek was it not the great experience suddenly to know: I am not in the hands of men, despite everything to the contrary; another hand, a higher hand is governing in the midst of all man’s madness and canceling all the logic of my calculations and all the images of my anxious sick imagination?  I am being led to the undreamed-of shore, the harbor, the Father’s house.  And always when things grow dark, suddenly that marvelous helping hand is there.  If there is anything that is really bombproof, then it is this.”

Helmut Thielicke, The Waiting Father (New York, 1959), page 36.  Italics original.
(Thanks to Ray Ortland for the lead)


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