The Secret Place of the Most High (Little Miami, 37 pp., $6, paper) is S. T. Simms’ testimony to the power of the 91st Psalm. The mother of Simms’ best friend called his attention to that New Testament psalm shortly before he deployed to Vietnam in 1967. Soon thereafter, it became his gospel.
With excellent writing, Simms takes the reader deep into the Vietnam War Valley of the Shadow of Death to explain his beliefs. On the second day of the 1968 Tet Offensive, Simms’ ten-man patrol walked into a point-blank-range NVA ambush in the jungle north of Saigon.
With muzzle blasts coming straight at them, not a man was injured, even after counter-attacking, pursuing the enemy, and attacking again. Second in line with a grenade launcher, Simms had fired as fast as he could with enemy RPGs exploding directly in front of him, but nothing touched him—”no blast, no shrapnel, no flying dirt…NOTHING.”
Steven Simms
Simms attributes his platoon’s survival to the power of the 91st Psalm. A month and a half later in another action, Simms took a piece of an RPG shrapnel in his left knee during a fight in which his unit had one man killed and six wounded. He offers his survival as evidence of the Psalm’s continuing power: “I was not invincible but still a candidate for ‘long life.'”
He later attributes a healing event regarding one of his children to the power of the same psalm. To know and trust God places one in The Secret Place of the Most High, Simms believes, and the believer will be delivered from harm.
Simms’ story is factual and unobtrusive–and informative rather than preachy. This makes his message acceptable for believers and non-believers alike.
—Henry Zeybel
Books in Review II 