The Watchmaker Who Said Yes

In February 1944, an eighty-four-year-old watchmaker in Haarlem, Holland, faced a choice that would cost him everything. Caspar ten Boom had been hiding Jewish families in a secret room behind his bedroom wall. When the Gestapo finally raided his home, an officer offered Caspar a deal — promise to stop sheltering Jews, and he could return to his quiet life. The old man answered without hesitation: "If I go home today, tomorrow I will open my door again to anyone who knocks."

He died ten days later in Scheveningen Prison. He never wavered.

What strikes me about Caspar ten Boom is not merely his courage but his immediacy. There was no bargaining with God, no weighing of options. He knew what faithfulness required, and he walked straight into it.

Joseph of Nazareth understood that kind of obedience. Everything in his culture told him to walk away from Mary quietly. A righteous man had every legal right to do so. But when the angel of the Lord spoke in a dream, Matthew tells us that Joseph woke up and simply "did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him." No argument. No delay. He took Mary as his wife, accepted a child not his own, and stepped into a story far bigger than anything he had planned for himself.

God still calls ordinary people to extraordinary obedience — not with full explanations, but with the quiet whisper that says, "Trust Me."