Indomitable Spirit

“We hold this treasure in earthen vessels...” 

2 Corinthians 4:7

What is this treasure that Saint Paul tells the people of Corinth about? This precious treasure is the light and surpassing power of God’s Spirit within us. We are perishable earthen vessels, from dust we are created, and to dust we will return. Death is at work in us every minute, every second of every day. Cells, tissues are dying, memories wither, ideas change. And yet God chose to put His indomitable Spirit within each of us. We either bring it out and let it shine forth, or we squash and destroy it in selfishness and greed. 

Whenever I think of the indomitable spirit God has put in man I remember the survivors and victims of the Holocaust. I think of people like Gerda Weismann Klein, who wrote about it, and travels the world to tell her story. She and her husband Kurt started a foundation to stop hunger and to teach tolerance. 

In 1942, she and her family were separated. She and her brother were sent to slave labor camps, her mother to Auschwitz, and her father was sentenced to the gas chamber. 

Hours before her father boarded the train to Auschwitz, he looked up from his Bible and told her to wear ski boots when she boarded her train. It was June, how could he have known that 3 years later, those boots would save her life as she trudged on a 1,000-mile death march in the dead of winter through Germany to Czechoslovakia? In her book, “All But My Life”, she recounts how the faith, love and courage of her family, of her grandfather,  kept her from killing herself.

She remembers the last night her parents were together, “"And so they talked on through the night, animated and happy. They faced what the morning would bring with the only weapon they had - their love for each other. Love is great, love is the foundation of nobility, it conquers obstacles and is a deep well of truth and strength. After hearing my parents talk that night I began to understand the greatness of their love. Their courage ignited within me a spark that continued to glow through the years of misery and defeat. The memory of their love - my only legacy - sustained me in happy and unhappy times in Poland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, Switzerland, England. It is still part of me here in America."

Father, thank You for the Spirit You put within us. May we always radiate hope and courage in the midst of darkness.