Corrie ten Boom Believed He Was Enough

Often I have heard people say, “How good God is. We prayed that it would not rain for our church picnic, and look at this lovely weather!” Yes, God is good when He sends good weather. But God was also good when he allowed my sister Betsie to starve to death before my eyes in the German concentration camp.**

Corrie ten Boom, watchmaker, writer, and concentration camp survivor, has had a huge impact on my understanding of God’s goodness apart from material provision. Corrie and her family believed it their Christian obligation to care for God’s people, the Jews, during the German occupation of Holland. They were ultimately imprisoned for establishing and running an underground network which moved Jewish people into hiding and, if possible, out of Holland and beyond the reach of the Nazis. If you read her story, “The Hiding Place”, you will be in awe of the powerful ways God protected their underground work. But when you read about her time in prison and later, Ravensbrück concentration camp, you may be more so in awe at the power of God’s provision simply through His presence.

Where Jesus did not give Corrie and Betsie freedom from humiliation, abuse, starvation, and exposure to the rawest form of evil, He unfailingly gave them more of Himself. In the very midst of their suffering, with no promise of its end, Jesus gave them His ability to let go of anger and embrace forgiveness (Luke 23:34). This deeper understanding of God’s promise of provision led Corrie to become a “tramp for the Lord, going wherever I could tell what I had learned: that when the worst happens in the life of a child of God, the best remains and the very best is yet to be.”**

**Corrie ten Boom’s “Clippings from My Notebook”