Time & Perspective Quote by Corrie Ten Boom

Ten Boom’s line isn’t trying to shame anxiety; it’s trying to disarm it with a piece of moral physics. She frames worry as a logistical error, not a personality flaw: you’re hauling tomorrow’s weight with today’s muscles. The metaphor is domestic and bodily, the opposite of abstract self-help language. It lands because it makes worry feel inefficient rather than inevitable, a bad form of time travel that costs you twice.

The subtext is hard-earned authority. Corrie ten Boom wasn’t a lifestyle guru; she was a Dutch Christian who helped hide Jews during the Nazi occupation and survived Ravensbruck. That history changes the temperature of the advice. When someone who has lived through industrial-scale cruelty tells you worry doesn’t “empty tomorrow of its sorrow,” she isn’t offering optimism. She’s saying: sorrow may be scheduled, but you still have agency over your present reserves.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to the modern cult of preemption - the idea that if you forecast every catastrophe, you’ll be safer. Ten Boom argues the opposite: rehearsing pain doesn’t immunize you; it weakens your capacity to respond when the moment actually arrives. The rhetorical trick is the swap from emotional language (“worry”) to economic language (“load,” “strength,” “empties”), turning anxiety into a bad investment with a predictable return: depletion.

It works because it respects reality’s darkness while defending today as a finite resource worth protecting.