October 18, 2005

[Rev. Doc]

Afraid Of The Unknown

"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!"
2 Corinthians 5:17

Tim Woodroof in his book "Walk This Way: An Interactive Guide to Following Jesus" writes:

In the closing days of World War II, Allied bombings of the munitions factories around Essen, Germany, became more and more frequent and fierce. When the air raid sirens sounded, armed guards would rush to bomb shelters, leaving the slave laborers (often Jewish and female) to huddle in the rubble and take their own chances.
On March 11, 1945, at the height of an endless bombardment, Elizabeth Roth and five companions decided to make their escape. They crept to the barbed wire surrounding the factory where they worked, crawled through a gap, and made their way across an empty field to a hill overlooking the town where they hoped to find a hiding place.
There, on the verge of freedom, one of the girls lost her nerve. Quietly, she turned back, recrossed the field, crawled back through the wire, and returned to the wreckage of the factory. The next day, along with five hundred other female workers, she was loaded onto a train and sent to Buchenwald and the gas chambers.

In recounting this story, William Manchester remarks, “It is a common phenomenon among escapees; the known, however ghastly, seems preferable to the unknown.â€