Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mac . I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day , so grab your cup of coffee , sit back , relax and let me help you start your day .
Right In the book of Isaiah and the 55th chapter , in verse 8 , it says my thoughts are nothing like your thoughts , says the Lord , and my ways are far beyond anything that you could ever imagine . That verse is particularly significant when people are going through very difficult times , because the question always is why God , why ?
The question always is why God , why ? And we need to trust what that word says that God's ways are different than our ways and that he does see the beginning from the end from a completely different perspective than we do . There was a young woman by the name of Diet Eman who was brought up in a Christian family .
During the Second World War she lived in the Hague , a city in the Netherlands right on the North Sea , and when the German forces invaded in 1940 , she and her fiancé , hein Sietsema , together with a bunch of their friends , formed a group of the Dutch resistance to fight against the Germans .
Initially their work was very simple they would listen to the forbidden BBC radio and war news and then tell their friends and everyone they could about what was happening outside of the German-controlled news . But then the Nazi regime started to enforce these anti-Semitic laws and suddenly some of their friends were starting to disappear .
So Diet and her group decided that they were going to do something to help those Jewish friends of theirs and help to get them out of the country . So they connected with other resistance groups and worked out an underground railroad that was able to get a number of Jewish people safely out of the clutches of the Germans .
One of the pieces that was so important to getting them out was providing some false documents to those Jewish friends of theirs . Most of these documents would pass a very cursory inspection but they would never pass a very intensive look .
But still many of their Jewish friends were able to escape because of what they were able to do and what they were able to get them . They were able to keep what they were doing hidden for a while , but eventually the Gestapo identified her and figured out her connection with the resistance . She decided she needed to get away .
She needed to try and escape herself . So she left her home and went to live with a family out on a dairy farm where she found some refuge for a while and she was able to get herself some new identity papers . She continued to work with the resistance and she even helped to track Nazi troop movements and quantities of German equipment .
One day she was traveling by train after picking up some new false documents for some of the Jews they were helping to try and escape , when on the train there came three Gestapo agents . She recognized that they were looking for her and she knew that if they caught her with these false documents it would probably mean death .
They took her off the train and were questioning her looking at her documents .
When another Gestapo agent came walking up wearing a brand new plastic raincoat , the other agents were so distracted looking at this coat and talking to him about it that Deet was able to get rid of the large package of false documents into the garbage can without the Gestapo agents realizing it .
Still , she was arrested and thrown into a prison camp , eventually winding up in the same prison camp where she met Corey and Betsy Tinboom . After the war was over , deet often told this story about the man with the raincoat at the train station .
She said that God worked in a very unusual and mysterious way to keep her from being caught with all those other forged documents . Someone asked her well , if God could have stopped her from being caught from that , why did he let her get caught at all ? The answer , you know . I've never worried about that .
I just know that God was there when I needed him , because if I was found with those documents it would have meant certain death . And yet God had let me live through that .
Let me live through the prison camps , let me live through to see the end of the war and let me live now for almost 20 years after the war , to be able to declare God's goodness and truth to people around me and around the world , thanking God for what he did in my life and for the opportunity that I had to help so many other people's lives .
There are times for all of us that we need to remember that God's ways are not our ways . We would want a very specific and dynamic answer to many of our problems and to many of our situations , yet God says no , I'm going to do what I did for Paul . My grace is sufficient for you , even where you are and with the problems that you're dealing with .
And that was how Deet lived , grateful to God for everything that he had done to help her and to give her opportunities and to protect her the way that he did , and never angry with him for the things that she felt he didn't do . Deetaman was a remarkable woman who lived a remarkable life .
I hope and pray that you and I can live with that same attitude that she had , one that said God , I will do whatever you want me to do and you can do whatever you need to do in your way , and I invite you to join me Monday to Friday , right here on Starting Right with Danny Mac .