The Other Side is a Crown

“Do you believe that I can do this?” Matthew 9:28

Corrie Ten Boom, who was imprisoned because she and other family members helped Jews escape during the Holocaust, spent the rest of her life spreading God’s Word. One time she was in Argentina and she visited patients in a hospital after a horrible polio epidemic. A nurse asked her to speak to a man who was lying in a bed that went up and down so he could breathe. Corrie cried despairingly to the Lord that she could not do it because she felt like crying in a corner. 

She received God’s answer to her: “I have known that for a long time, but it is good you know it too, for now you can let Me do it.” After that, she took strength from the Lord and spoke to the poor man. She showed him an embroidery where the back was a messy tangle of threads, and the other side was a crown. 

She said, “When I see you lying on this bed, I think of this embroidery. There has been a time in my life when it seemed like the tangled side of the crown. I saw no pattern, no beauty, no harmony. I was in prison, where my sister died before my eyes. But all the time I knew that God has no problems, only plans. There is never panic in heaven. 

“Later on I saw God’s side of the pattern. Because I had to go through deep suffering in that prison, I was able to comfort people afterward because I could tell them, ‘Jesus is stronger than the deepest darkness. When you have experienced the darkness of a concentration camp, you know how deep that darkness can be!’”

After some time of listening to Corrie’s message about Jesus, the man wrote, “I see already the beautiful side of the embroidery of my life”. Corrie went back the next day to speak with the Jewish man again, but the nurse said he passed away. She showed Corrie the note he left before he closed his eyes. “For the first time in my life I have prayed in Jesus’ name.” 

God used Corrie Ten Boom when she was not able to do it. We just need to do what He wants us to do because He can do it, He can supply what we need. Let us just believe in all His promises and try to see God’s side of the pattern.