Corrie Ten Boom and "The Hiding Place"

4/21/2017

This morning I want to tell you about an ordinary woman who demonstrated extraordinary courage in her life: a Dutch woman named Corrie Ten Boom.

Corrie Ten Boom was born in Holland in 1892. Her father, Casper Ten Boom, was a watchmaker. She lived with her father, two sisters, and brother in a house on the corner of a street in the city of Haarlem. Downstairs, her father had his watchmaking shop, and the family lived upstairs.

In 1940, Germany was under the control of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists, who are better known as ‘the Nazis.’ The Nazis had invaded and taken over Holland. Now, as Dutch citizens, in occupied Holland, Corrie and her family could have lived safely along with their elderly watchmaker father. She was unmarried and nearly fifty years old.

But one day in 1942, a woman showed up at their door with a suitcase. She was Jewish. The Jewish people have faced persecution many times throughout history, but under the Nazis it was the most devastating. This woman’s husband had already been captured, and she needed a safe place to stay. Although the Ten Boom household, a Christian household, would risk everything by taking her in, they did. Over the next two years they hid over 600 people. Some people stayed for a few days, some for much longer.

Their house became famous as “The Hiding Place.”

On February 28^th 1944, a neighbor told the Nazi police that the Ten Boom family was hiding Jews. When the police raided the home, they did not find anyone hiding there, because Corrie had a secret double wall in her bedroom. Six people were hiding inside, and they were not found. But even so, the Nazis arrested Corrie, her sister Betsie, and her father, Casper. They were sent far away to a prison camp.

Corrie’s elderly father died ten days later at the prison. Her sister Betsie died later that year. Her last words to Corrie were:

"There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still" and "God will give us the love to be able to forgive our enemies."

Miraculously, by a book-keeping mistake, Corrie was let go from the prison. You might think that she thought her life was over. Her whole family had died, and she had lost everything. But as she wrote, "God does not have problems. Only plans.”

Corrie returned to Holland and set up a house to help people who, like her, had lost everything and been sent to Nazi prisons. She also spoke all around Europe sharing God’s forgiveness with people in places that were destroyed.

Once, in 1947, she herself learned what it means to forgive. When she was 80 years old, she told her story like this:

In 1947, I travelled from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives. “When we confess our sins,” I would say to audiences, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.”

At the end of one meeting, I saw him, working his way forward right towards me in the crowd. This man had been a cruel guard at the prison where we had been sent.

Now he was in front of me, and he thrust out his hand: “A fine message, fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”

“You mentioned this prison in your talk,” he said. “I was a guard there. But since that time,” he went on, “I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein, will you forgive me?” And he reached out his hand.

And I stood there… and could not speak. I had to forgive him – I knew that. Jesus says, “If you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.”

I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. “Jesus, help me!” I prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.”

And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. “I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart!”

For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands; he, the former guard, and I, the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.

I had forgiven, and I was restored to my heavenly Father.

I met Corrie Ten Boom when I was eleven years old. And I read her book, The Hiding Place. She died two years later on her 91^st birthday, in 1983, on April 15^th. Courageous during the war, she devoted herself to helping others heal from the wounds of war by showing God’s love and forgiveness.

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Corrie Ten Boom and "The Hiding Place"

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