Corrie ten Boom’s Quiet Faithfulness Inspires THE HIDING PLACE Actress
By Jessilyn Lancaster, Managing Editor
Nan Gurley was given the role of a lifetime when she stepped into Corrie ten Boom’s shoes for THE HIDING PLACE. THE HIDING PLACE is a filmed stage play in theaters August 3 and 5.
A portion of the Movieguide® review reads:
For the video recording of a play, THE HIDING PLACE has remarkable cinematography and editing. The producers and directors clearly intended from the beginning to make this production simultaneously theatre and cinema. The small cast delivers beautiful performances that make the light of Christ, which indwelt every member of the ten Boom and their clandestine operation, shine through the words of the script itself.
As Gurley portrayed the famed Christian woman who hid Jews in her family’s home, she was drawn to Corrie, Betsie and Casper’s life of faithfulness.
“They were living lives of hidden, quiet obedience day after day,” Gurley tells Movieguide®. “They were hospitable people. They had people in their home above the clock shop regularly. They fostered missionary children. They took care of the children and missionaries when the kids would have to come home from the field in order to go to school. So they were raising other people’s kids. They had people at their table eating with them all the time. So when they got tapped on the shoulder, ‘Will you join the resistance? Will you hide using your home?’ They just kept on doing what they had been doing for years. It’s just the stakes are a whole lot higher. The stakes were now life and death. But they were ready.”
The ten Booms were ultimately captured for hiding Jews and sent to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp.
While the prisoners experienced what could have been the darkest pit of hell, the ten Booms found a way to thrive.
“Corie and Betsie, while imprisoned–here’s what’s remarkable–they didn’t make their imprisonment about them. They were somehow enabled by the Lord. One thing was key to this was their rock solid faith that God is sovereign overall things, that He is in control, that He is not asleep and was not asleep when they were going through this.
“So they trusted that the Lord was in charge and they found a way to be grateful for the flea infestation in their barracks,” Gurley continued. “Because of the fleas, the guards would not come in their barracks. And so they were able to have Bible studies at night in the barracks because the guards would not come in to stop it. So they found a way to be grateful for fleas. They found a way all along to look at the whole horrible experience through redeemed eyes, through eyes that could see eternity through this. And it’s what sustain them. And it’s what enabled them to forgive.”
Forgiveness is the central theme of THE HIDING PLACE, but it’s something that Gurley says Corrie initially struggled with.
While Betsie, who ultimately died before their liberation, was able to forgive with supernatural might, Corrie wrestled with the idea.
When she came face to face with a cruel Nazi from Ravensbruck, who asked for her forgiveness, though, Corrie experienced that same divine intervention.
“He holds out his hand to her, extends his hand and she tells us how her heart was cold as stone,” Gurley said of listening to Corrie recount the story. “The hatred and anger rose up in her heart toward this man. And then she recalled Romans chapter five verse five, went through her mind at this crucial moment, and when she tells it of course, I love to recite the verse in the beautiful way that Corrie spoke English with her Dutch accent.
“And she says, ‘For the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit who has been given to us,'” Gurley recalled. “And she said that verse came into her mind and she felt the power of the Lord goes through her shoulder through her arm and into her hand and she reached out and she took the man’s hand that I forgive you, brother, but she said she could only do it through the power of the Holy Spirit.”
Check back to movieguide.org for our full review.
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