God Enables Us To Forgive
Corrie ten Boom’s Testimony of Forgiveness
Corrie ten Boom and her
family, working with the Dutch resistance, sheltered Jews during World War II in
their home in Holland to save them from the Holocaust. The Nazis arrested her
and her entire family and sent them off to concentration camps. Corrie and her
sister, Betsie, were imprisoned together at Ravensbruck inside Germany. There
they witnessed and endured unspeakable violence and despair, very nearly
starving to death. Betsie was beaten by a Nazi guard, weakening her already
sickly frame so that in the course of time she grew weaker and finally
died.
Corrie grew sick at
heart.
Yet Betsie had always prayed
for God to bring good out of horrible evil. She prayed for her guards and that
the atrocities of the camp could be used by God as a platform for something
beautiful for God. Her words to her sister, Corrie, carried her through the
remaining years of her life. Betsie had a vision from God; she "saw" the prison
barracks painted green with growing plants and flowers to heal the soul. Then
she turned to her sister and told her to tell the world a message from the Lord:
"We must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is
no pit so deep that [God] is not the deeper still. They will listen to us
Corrie, because we have been here."
Betsie died shortly
thereafter. Corrie was released through a "clerical error." She returned to
Holland, was liberated by the Allied Forces, and grew strong again. After the
war, someone donated some concentration camp barracks and she painted them
green, put gardens in them to heal the soul and so began a ministry of love and
healing to her former enemies. She went often to speak in the shattered remains
of Germany, carrying the message that her sister Betsie told her just before she
died.
There was one moment that was
definitive for Corrie. She had gone to Germany to preach the gospel of
forgiveness. Listen to her words:
"It was at a church service in
Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower
room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our
actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there –
the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsie’s pain-blanched
face.
"He came up to me as the
church was emptying, beaming and bowing. ‘How grateful I am for your message,
Fraulein,’ he said. ‘To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins
away!’
"His hand was thrust out to
shake mine. And I who had preached so often to people ...of the need to forgive,
kept my hand at my side.
"Even as the angry, vengeful
thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for
this man; was I going to ask for more? ‘Lord Jesus,’ I prayed, ‘forgive me and
help me to forgive him.’
"I tried to smile. I struggled
to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth
or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. ‘Jesus, I cannot forgive
him. Give me Your forgiveness.’
"As I took his hand, the most
incredible thing happened. From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a
current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for
this stranger that almost overwhelmed me.
"And so I discovered that it
is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing
hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with
the command, the love itself." *
When we think we cannot
forgive, God can do it through us. What it takes is a decision to choose His
highest and to invite our Lord into our weaknesses. Then He can forgive through
us. He can also use our former despair as the starting place of care for untold
people who are in desperate need of the mercy of our God.
Corrie learned to bless those
who cursed her, to pray for those who despitefully used her, and through this
process, learned that forgiveness is not only required but enabled. She learned
that there was "no pit so deep that God was not the deeper still."
Adapted from the book Power
Praying by David Chotka. Copyright © 2009, Prayer Shop Publishing. [www.prayershop.org.]
*The direct quote from Corrie is from the book The Hiding
Place by Corrie ten Boom with John and Elizabeth Sherrill. Copyright © 1971. Published by Chosen Books, a
division of Baker Publishing.
PEACE
