Another picture of good overcoming evil is the story of Corrie ten Boom, and the entire ten Boom family. Working with the Dutch resistance, the ten Boom’s built a secret “hiding place” in Corrie’s room. This is where the Jews they were protecting would hide from the Nazi aggressors.

Corrie and her family were eventually arrested and she was ultimately sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany. Because of a clerical error, Corrie was released from the camp on Christmas Eve 1944. The next week, all the women of her age were scheduled to be killed.

This amazing story is chronicled in her autobiography, The Hiding Place. It holds such a wonderful double-meaning for Christians. It was not only the physical hiding place, but also evokes the images of God as our true hiding place and protector from evil.

In today’s Deep Thought, ten Boom shares the secrets of forgiveness she learned through this ordeal:

It was 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 the people in Bloemendaal 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.

Jesus, I pray we would follow this courageous example of forgiveness and the power of your love to unmask and unmake the evil works of this world. Amen.

Corrie ten Boom was a woman of courage and encouragement. Many people in her life made those “courage deposits.” .

Do you see her struggle? “I preach forgiveness and now I am asked to forgive my aggressor face-to-face. And he is an S.S. agent no less.” Her virtue is tested. Yet, she raises her hand to shake his in friendship and forgiveness. She recalls that it is not out of her own love or strength that the world’s healing depends, but on Jesus. This is a radical example of forgiveness in action. It is the Red Letters life!

This embodies C.S. Lewis’ definition that courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point.