The Tramp for the Lord

Corrie ten Boom was fifty-three years old when the Nazis arrested her family for hiding Jews in their Haarlem watchshop. She lost her father. She lost her sister Betsie. She nearly lost her own life in Ravensbrück concentration camp. After liberation in 1945, Corrie could have retreated into quiet anonymity. No one would have blamed her.

Instead, she spent the next thirty-three years traveling to more than sixty countries, telling anyone who would listen what God had done. She called herself "a tramp for the Lord." In churches, prisons, and crowded lecture halls from Uganda to Vietnam, she proclaimed the faithfulness of the Almighty in the darkest place she had ever known. She simply could not keep silent.

When asked why she kept traveling well into her eighties, frail and far from home, Corrie's answer was always the same: she had experienced His faithfulness, and she could not hide it.

This is the heartbeat of Psalm 40. The psalmist does not offer God mere ritual or reluctant duty. "I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart." And from that delight flows proclamation — "I have not hidden your deliverance within my heart; I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation."