"When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away the ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer"
About this Quote
Ten Boom’s metaphor lands because it refuses the luxury of vague optimism. It’s not “keep your chin up.” It’s: stay in your seat when your senses start lying to you. A tunnel is engineered darkness, a temporary condition that feels like failure only because it cancels the evidence you’re used to relying on. The ticket matters here: it’s proof you belong on the journey, a receipt for meaning purchased earlier, before panic rewrites the story. Throwing it away is self-sabotage dressed up as decisiveness.
The subtext is disciplined trust, not passive cheerfulness. “Sit still” isn’t cozy; it’s restraint. It names the very human impulse to make a dramatic move when clarity disappears, to convert anxiety into action even if that action is destructive. Ten Boom frames despair as a misread signal: the darkness isn’t a verdict, it’s a passage.
Context does the heavy lifting. Corrie ten Boom wasn’t a lifestyle guru; she was a Dutch Christian who helped shelter Jews during WWII, was imprisoned, and survived Ravensbruck. So her appeal to “trust the engineer” isn’t naive faith in institutions. It’s the kind of hard-won spiritual pragmatism forged in systems that failed and a world that went black for years. The engineer, in her worldview, is God: unseen, not explainable on demand, but presumed competent in the design even when the rider can’t see the track.
Culturally, the line endures because it gives a script for modern uncertainty: don’t confuse the absence of light with the absence of direction.
The subtext is disciplined trust, not passive cheerfulness. “Sit still” isn’t cozy; it’s restraint. It names the very human impulse to make a dramatic move when clarity disappears, to convert anxiety into action even if that action is destructive. Ten Boom frames despair as a misread signal: the darkness isn’t a verdict, it’s a passage.
Context does the heavy lifting. Corrie ten Boom wasn’t a lifestyle guru; she was a Dutch Christian who helped shelter Jews during WWII, was imprisoned, and survived Ravensbruck. So her appeal to “trust the engineer” isn’t naive faith in institutions. It’s the kind of hard-won spiritual pragmatism forged in systems that failed and a world that went black for years. The engineer, in her worldview, is God: unseen, not explainable on demand, but presumed competent in the design even when the rider can’t see the track.
Culturally, the line endures because it gives a script for modern uncertainty: don’t confuse the absence of light with the absence of direction.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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