Saved By A Raincoat And A Trash Can

The question “Why, God?” can hit before your feet even touch the floor. Today I sit with that question instead of rushing past it, using Isaiah 55:8 as the starting point: God’s thoughts are not like ours, and His ways go farther than we can see. If you’ve been asking for a clear explanation or a dramatic rescue, this short morning devotional offers something steadier: a reason to trust even when the story feels unfinished.

I also share the true WWII story of Diet Eman, a young woman in the Dutch resistance in The Hague who helped Jewish friends escape Nazi persecution. What began as quietly passing along forbidden BBC war news became high-risk work with underground routes and forged identity papers. Then comes the moment that still stops me cold: Gestapo agents on a train, questions closing in, and an unexpected distraction a brand new plastic raincoat that gives Diet just enough time to ditch the documents that could have meant certain death.

Diet was still arrested and sent to prison camps, where she later met Corrie and Betsy ten Boom, so this isn’t a tidy story with an easy bow. It’s a story about trusting God’s ways when you don’t get the outcome you wanted, and about believing “My grace is sufficient for you” can be real right where you are. If you need Christian encouragement, faith under pressure, and a fresh way to think about God’s providence, press play, then share this with a friend and leave a review. What part of Diet’s story challenges the way you think about God’s help?

Transcript

Welcome And Daily Morning Reset

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Good morning and welcome to Starting Right. I am Danny Mack, and I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back and relax for the next five minutes as I help you start your day by starting 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? 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 Eamon 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, uh she and her fiance, Hein Sietzma, 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 in 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 Diet 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, Diet 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. Some had 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, and let me live through the prison camps, and let me live through to see the end of the war, and let me live now for almost twenty 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 Diet 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. Diet Amon 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 will trust you that it will work out to be the right thing. Have a great day, my friends. We'll talk again tomorrow. Thank you for listening today. And I invite you to join me Monday to Friday right here on Starting Right with Danny Mack.