The Cellar on Remembered Street

In September 1940, the German Luftwaffe dropped incendiary bombs across London for fifty-seven consecutive nights. Margaret Braithwaite, a schoolteacher on Albion Road in Lewisham, described in her diary what it meant to hear the air-raid sirens at dusk. Every evening, she gathered her three children and descended into the Anderson shelter her husband had dug into their small garden before shipping out to North Africa. The corrugated steel walls shook with each blast. Shrapnel pinged against the roof like hail on a tin shed. Her youngest, Thomas, pressed his face into her coat and asked the same question every night: "Is it still standing, Mum?" He meant their house. He meant their world.

Each morning, Margaret climbed out to survey the damage. Some nights, homes three doors down were reduced to rubble. But she wrote this: "The shelter is not comfortable. It is cold, it smells of damp earth, and I can hear destruction all around me. But it holds. That is enough."

Nahum prophesied to a people who lived under the shadow of Assyrian terror — the ancient world's most ruthless empire. Yet tucked into his oracle of judgment, he offered this: "The Lord is good, a stronghold in the day of trouble; He knows those who take refuge in Him." God never promised the bombs would stop falling. He promised the shelter would hold. And for those who trust Him, that has always been enough.