Pilgrimage by Lynn Austin Page A

that day when He interrupted the carefully planned ceremony. He said, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him” (John 7:38). That means I’m also a source of living water.
    We have an overflowing abundance of information and tools to help us in our Christian walk, a reservoir of religious freedom to draw from, yet we’re often guilty of hoarding it in cisterns instead of letting it flow freely from us. We attend Bible studies and Sunday school classes year after year, storing up life-giving water but never sharing even a cup of it with others. Water that doesn’t move becomes stagnant and dead, a breeding ground for mosquitoes and disease.
    Living water that purifies the defiled, nourishes like a spring rain shower, and gives blind men their sight can’t be hoarded. It needs to flow in and out. It needs to move through us, always flowing, ever changing. We need to be filled and refilled continually by Christ, the Living Water, not only for our own sakes, but so that streams of living water will flow from within us. So that we can say to a dying world, “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters” (Isaiah 55:1). I am being refilled on this pilgrimage. Now it’s time to let it overflow.
    Yad Vashem
    Our tour bus turns off the frenetic streets of modern Jerusalem and enters a peaceful park. Leaves rustle in the earth-scented breeze, birds twitter and chirp, the sounds of city life fade in the background. But the serenity becomes unsettling when we learn that we’ve entered the grounds of Yad Vashem , Israel’s Holocaust memorial. The tranquility is that of a cemetery.
    We leave the bus and walk along The Avenue of Righteous Gentiles, passing through a grove of trees planted in honor of people from all over Europe who risked their lives to rescue Jews from Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Each tree is marked with a plaque and a name, and I find trees for several of the heroes and heroines I’ve read about: Oskar Schindler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Raoul Wallenberg, and Corrie ten Boom.
    I pause beside Corrie’s tree to whisper a prayer of thanks. I read her book The Hiding Place when I was a young, newly married bride, and her true story made a lasting impression on me. Her life seemed so happy and ordinary in the beginning—much like my life back then with my new husband and my first teaching job—yet everything quickly changed for Corrie and her family after the Nazis occupied their country. Because of the Ten Boom family’s deep faith in God, they made the decision to hide Jews in their home. The Nazis arrested Corrie, her father, and sister Betsie, and imprisoned them in a concentration camp. Corrie was the only survivor.
    I wondered if I would have had the courage to do what she did. What would happen to my faith if I had to suffer because of it? Would I grow stronger as I leaned on God, or would I grow angry and lapse into despair if He failed to rescue me or answer my prayers the way I thought He should? Corrie’stestimony brought me face-to-face with the shallowness of my faith, my lack of a deep relationship with God. Ken and I needed to build our new life together on a rock-solid foundation of prayer and faith and obedience. Corrie’s book became a huge stepping-stone in my walk with God.
    We leave the peaceful avenue and enter the museum. As visitors move from one end of the long, narrow building to the other, the exhibit tells the story of the Holocaust from its very beginning. The first thing we see is a towering wall that serves as a movie screen. Snatches of film from before World War II place us on a street somewhere in Europe. We’re gazing through the windows of an apartment building, glimpsing everyday life in a Jewish community. We see families eating, working, worshiping; gathering for the Sabbath and singing songs that are as ancient as their faith; laughing, rejoicing, celebrating God. I shudder, knowing how it will end.
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