Father Was Released

“When my father and my mother forsake me, Then Jehovah will take me up.” — Psalm 27:10 (ASV)

The prisoners were taken to the prison at Scheveningen, on the coast near The Hague. The Dutch called it the Orange Hotel, because so many loyal patriots were held there. Casper was so weak the guards had to carry him. Corrie remembered an officer calling him the worst of them all, because he spoke about nothing but Jesus and the Queen. Inside the gate, father and daughter blessed each other, and she looked back at him once. She never saw him again.

Casper ten Boom died on 9 March 1944, nine days after his arrest. The accounts of where he died differ; Corrie was later told his mind had become confused and that he died in a hospital corridor. Fellow prisoners said he stayed brave to the end, saying that if he were freed he would go straight back to helping the Jews. He was buried in a pauper's grave. His children, some of them in the same prison, were not told. He had once said he would count it an honour to give his life for God's ancient people. Now he had.

Corrie was put in a crowded cell, still sick with flu, and a doctor found she had pleurisy. A nurse there quietly slipped her some little booklets of the Gospels. Then she was moved to solitary confinement for weeks. The cell was cold and grey, and she longed for any human face. She was punished for asking about her father and for singing. She went on singing anyway. She made friends with a line of ants on the floor and fed them crumbs. She embroidered her prison clothes with threads pulled from a coloured towel sent from home. Walking alone in the prison garden, a verse steadied her: “And Enoch walked with God.”

At last a letter came from Nollie, who had been released. Gently, it told her their father had lived only ten days after his arrest. Corrie wept for the first time since the raid. The guard she called offered no comfort except to say it was her own fault for breaking the law.

Then came her interrogation. The officer, whom she later named Lieutenant Rahms, surprised her with his courtesy. When he heard about her classes for people with disabilities, he asked whether that wasn't a waste of time. Corrie recognised the voice of the regime in that question. She answered that God's love reaches especially the weak and despised, and that in God's eyes such a person might be worth more than either of them. The next day, she wrote, he told her he hadn't slept for thinking about it, and he confided his own darkness: a family in a bombed German city whose fate he didn't know. Corrie told him there was no darkness Jesus could not drive away. The statement he wrote down, as she remembered it, said she meant to keep helping anyone in need “regardless of their race or creed,” because she was following Christ.

Here is the surprising thing. Corrie's 1945 book says that in that lonely cell she knew a closeness to God she had never known before. God didn't take the loneliness away. He came into it.

Grief and loneliness can be crushing, and they can play tricks on you, telling you that nobody cares and nothing will change. If you are in a dark place like that, please don't sit in it alone. Tell a safe person: a parent, a pastor, a teacher, a doctor, or a crisis line where you live. The psalm's promise is that there is a Father who is never taken away. Often he comes to us through the people we let in.

One thing to do this week: write down the name of one person you could talk to honestly if things got dark, and let them know you're glad they're in your life. If you're struggling right now, talk to them this week.