Le Chambon-sur-Lignon is on a high plateau in south central France, and it is cold, and it is not on the way to anywhere.
The people there were mostly the descendants of Huguenots: French Protestants who had been a persecuted minority in that country for centuries and who had long memories of what that was like.
Between 1940 and 1944, that village and the farms and hamlets around it sheltered refugees, a great many of them Jewish, and a great many of them children.
How many is contested, and I am going to say so. Figures between three thousand and five thousand are commonly given. Nobody was keeping a list, for obvious reasons. The number is an estimate and it will stay an estimate.
The pastor there was André Trocmé, and his wife was Magda Trocmé, and another pastor, Édouard Theis, worked alongside them. Trocmé and Theis were arrested and held for a period. Trocmé's cousin, Daniel Trocmé, who ran a house for refugee children, was arrested and died at Majdanek.
There is one moment from the beginning of it that has been retold ever since, and it comes from Magda Trocmé's own account, recorded in Philip Hallie's book about the village, published in 1979.
A woman knocked at the door on a winter night. She was cold. She was Jewish. She was asking for help.
And Magda Trocmé said: come in, come in.
Two words and no meeting
I want to stay with those two words, because of everything they are not.
They are not a policy. Nobody had voted on anything. There had been no committee, no vote of the congregation, no strategy for the village.
A woman knocked, and another woman opened the door and said come in, and the whole of what followed grew from that being the answer given at that door on that night.
Trocmé preached, and the congregation acted, and the farms took people, and false papers were made, and children were hidden and moved, and it went on for four years under an occupation, and it is the most ordinary logistics imaginable: beds, food, schooling, and somebody knowing which farm had room.
You are not too small to be a door. Matthew 25:40 says inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason that sentence lands on an actual doorstep.
Here is the verse.
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.Matthew 25:40, King James Version
Read the number in it. One of the least of these. Singular.
The whole passage before it is about food and drink and clothing and visiting, which is to say it is entirely about domestic acts done to particular people, and the sentence that gathers it all up counts in ones.
You have a verse that counts in ones, and every item in the list before it is something done in a house. Matthew 25:35-40 names feeding and giving drink and taking in and clothing and visiting, and the same Spirit who kept that list domestic is the reason a door is not too small a thing.
Now the honest part, and this category requires it and this story especially needs it.
The retelling of Le Chambon has often centered on one pastor and one village, and later historians have pushed back on that firmly. The sheltering was done across a whole plateau, by many communes, by Protestant and Catholic and secular people, by farmers whose names are not recorded anywhere. Some accounts have made it more organized and more heroic and more singular than it was.
Magda Trocmé herself resisted the language of heroism. When people praised what they had done, her recorded response was to say that they were people who were asked for help, and that they helped, and that there was nothing else to be said about it.
I am not going to score it and I am not going to inflate it. What is documented is that a lot of ordinary people on a cold plateau took in a lot of people who needed taking in, over four years, at real risk.
You have a story that is bigger than one name and smaller than a legend, and both of those corrections are honest. The written accounts and the later scholarship disagree about the shape, and it is His Spirit who is the reason the plainness is the encouraging part rather than the heroism.
Because the plainness is the point.
If it had been one extraordinary pastor, there would be nothing in it for you. What is in it for you is that it was farms. It was people with a spare room, on a road, in the cold, saying yes when somebody knocked.
You have a spare room and a road, and that is the entire mechanism in the record. Matthew 25:40 counts in ones and names a domestic list, and the same Spirit who kept it that ordinary is the reason there is nothing here that requires a remarkable person.
So stop waiting to be the kind of person who does something.
You have concluded that what you have is too ordinary to be part of anything, and the record of that plateau is farms and spare rooms and somebody knowing which house had space, kept up for four years by people who afterward refused to be called heroes.
You are the mechanism, and the record does not describe any other one. Matthew 25:40 says one of the least of these and counts in singles, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the reason that reaches a back room rather than staying in France.
You have a door and that is what was actually required. The written accounts describe beds and food and somebody answering a knock, and the same Spirit who kept the details that domestic is the reason nothing exceptional is being asked of you.
And I will not lay one gram on you: you are not being told to be brave in the way those farmers were. Nobody is under an occupation in your street. What God asks of a person is measured to the place they are actually standing in, and He has never once required somebody to be in a famous year before He would use their spare room.
Declare this over yourself
- Ordinary road I live on, you are not too small to be a door. Matthew 25:40 counts in ones and lists feeding and clothing and taking in, and His Spirit keeps that list domestic on purpose. I am not too small to be a door.
- Belief that I am not that kind of person, get out, in the name of Jesus. You have told me it takes an extraordinary person, and the written record is farms and spare rooms and people who refused to be called heroes afterward, which ends you, and the Holy Spirit wrote that down and He is saying it again here. What God asks for, I already have in the house.
- Lord, You are the God who said inasmuch as ye have done it unto one, and You are saying it here. Scripture counts in singles and never in thousands, and Your Spirit kept the number that small so nobody could be excluded by scale. I am saying my own road out loud, and I am keeping the room made up.
Matthew 25:40
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