A very late review of Small Miracles

I have to be completely honest, I've been putting off writing about this book not only because I'm a horrible procrastinator but because I intensely disliked reading it. Small Miracles is a collection of story from the Holocaust. They are all about Jews in Europe that miraculously survived. They are told by the survivors themselves or by family members that have heard them over and over again. (Something I thought was very interesting about this book was the way they talked about God in almost every chapter but never spelled His name out, it was always written G-d. If done out of true honor and respect for Him it would be commendable.) The week before I started reading this book we had a message at church about God's plan for Israel and how He still watching over them. This book was a great illustration of that. Some of these stories are amazing and completely unexplainable. A few of them seem a little unbelievable. People seeing angels and things like that, but most of them are undeniable the hand of God. And that's the whole point of the book, they are stories of modern day miracles. So why didn't I like it??? Well, even though every story was about the survivors, and every story had a "happy ending", for the one or two survivors in each story there were thousands and thousands of friends and family that went to a unimaginably horrible death. I couldn't help thinking and drawing a comparison with the building hatred for anything truly Christian in America today. It's not like the Jews of Europe were loved one day and burned the next. It happened gradually. I am convinced they will be killing Christians in America one day. I have been thinking about it almost daily lately, especially since the elections. It scares me, no it terrifies me! So reading this book was miserable. I keep thinking about being tortured for my faith the way the New Testament Christians were and what it was about that thought that was so very horrible to me, and I realized it's not the actual pain of torture that bothered me to such a great extent. I've been told that child birth is extremely painful too but I never think of it with horror. And many women joyfully choose it. So it's not the pain. It is that fact that one human being could do that to another human being, not only could but have. The fact that "normal" German men shoved Jewish men, women, and children into gas chambers along with all the other atrocities committed then is where the horror really comes from. How could a person inflict that much pain on another person??? And I realized it's so horrible because it is a little picture into the real heart of man. It's sin, raw and not dressed up by western politeness. It's a world without the grace of God. It's what is hidden in every heart, my heart, and it is very scary. And Jesus died for that creature, chose to die! Even if the price for our sin had been a finger prick why would He have chose to submit to it???? He deserves our loyalty even through torture. I know that I do not have it in me to go through what the members of the first church went through, I just could not do it. I have finally admitted it to myself because I realized that they couldn't either. Mr. Coulter was up here a few years ago and he sung some of his song for our church, one of them was about those first Christian martyrs. In the song he asks the question "How did they do it, how did they watch their families being torn up around them and go willingly to the arena for their God?". In the chorus of the song he answers the question. It was grace! It was only God's grace that upheld them through it. They were just like us, they would not have had the ability within them either except for the grace of God.