Clubs, Children, and the Least of These

“And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me.”

— Matthew 25:40, ASV

A Single Woman with Time to Give

By the time she was thirty, Corrie ten Boom’s life seemed settled. She would work in her father’s shop, keep house with Betsie, and grow old in the Beje. That was the ordinary fate of an unmarried daughter in a Dutch shopkeeping family, and she does not seem to have resented it. But she did not let it make her small. In the twenty years between her mother’s death and the German invasion, Corrie poured herself into a series of quiet works among young people, disabled people, and children in need. None of them made the newspapers. All of them, looking back, were preparation.

The Triangle Girls

The best known of these works was a network of clubs for girls and young women. The Dutch sources call them the Driehoekmeisjes, the “Triangle girls.” The name came from the clubs’ emblem, a triangle whose three sides stood for body, soul, and spirit. The idea was that Christian faith is not only a matter of Sunday religion. It concerns the whole person: physical health and recreation, the mind and the feelings, and the life of the spirit before God. The clubs offered sport, music, crafts, outings, and summer camps, alongside Bible study and prayer.

Corrie was a natural leader of such things. She was energetic, funny, and unselfconscious, and she enjoyed young people. She organised camps, led singing, and gave talks. The clubs grew over the years. Under the German occupation independent youth work was suppressed, but Corrie’s 1945 book records that at least one of her clubs, a group of older girls, went on meeting faithfully while she was in prison.

It is easy to overlook this work, but it gave Corrie two things she would later need badly. It gave her experience of organising: of recruiting helpers, managing money, planning logistics, and keeping many threads in her hands at once. And it gave her a wide network of young people who trusted her. When the underground needed couriers, hosts, and helpers in 1942 and 1943, some of the young people who came to the Beje were the kind of young people Corrie had spent twenty years leading.

Teaching Those Others Overlooked

From around 1921, the Dutch sources record, Corrie also began teaching the Christian faith to people with intellectual disabilities. In the Netherlands of the 1920s such people were largely hidden away, in institutions or back rooms, and few churches thought them capable of understanding the gospel. Corrie thought otherwise. She held special classes for them and prepared them for church membership. She seems to have treated this as some of the most important work she did.

In her later books Corrie told stories of these classes: the patient repetition, the simple words, the joy of a student who grasped that God loved him. Those stories come from her own memory and should be read as such. But the outline is confirmed by the Dutch sources, and it tells us something about her. Long before the war, Corrie had chosen to spend her time on people the world considered unimportant.

There is a darker thread here that she could not have foreseen. Within a few years the German regime that would occupy her country began murdering disabled people in its own hospitals, under a programme it called euthanasia. The people Corrie had been teaching were exactly the kind of people that ideology considered unworthy of life, and when a Gestapo officer later questioned her, he would tell her that her work among them was a waste of time. She would answer him from twenty years of experience.

Children in the Beje

The ten Booms also opened their home to foster children. The museum records that in the 1920s and 1930s several children lived with the family for periods of time. By Corrie’s account, some were the children of missionaries serving overseas. The narrow house, already full of aunts and relatives, took them in. Corrie, Betsie, and their father became a kind of second family to them.

We know few details, and the family seems not to have thought the arrangement remarkable. It was simply another expression of the habit of making room. But it meant that by 1942, when the first Jewish refugees knocked at the Beje’s door, the household had long experience of absorbing strangers into its daily life. It knew how to stretch the food, give up a bed, make someone at home, and keep the peace in crowded rooms. The underground home that Corrie later described, with its classes, concerts, and jokes, did not come from nowhere. It was built on twenty years of practice.

“One of These My Brethren”

The verse at the head of this chapter comes from Jesus’ parable of the sheep and the goats. The Son of man, sitting on his throne, separates the nations and welcomes those who fed the hungry, gave drink to the thirsty, took in the stranger, clothed the naked, and visited the sick and the prisoner. They are surprised: when did they do all this for him? And the King answers, “Inasmuch as ye did it unto one of these my brethren, even these least, ye did it unto me” (Matthew 25:40, ASV).

What is striking about the parable is that the righteous did not know they were serving Christ. They were not performing religious duties. They were simply responding to the needs in front of them, and they did it so naturally that they had forgotten it. That is a good description of the ten Boom household in the years between the wars. They were not planning heroism. They were teaching disabled young people, running girls’ clubs, and taking in foster children, because that is what their faith meant to them.

The parable has another edge that the ten Booms would soon feel. Among “the least” Jesus names the stranger and the prisoner. Within a few years Corrie and her family would take in strangers who were being hunted, and they would themselves become prisoners. They would learn from the inside what it means to depend on the kindness of others, and to find Christ present in a prison cell.

A Quiet Life, Nearly Fifty Years Long

When the Germans invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Corrie ten Boom was forty-eight years old. For nearly half a century she had lived an ordinary life, and by the standards of the world an insignificant one. She had spent it among clocks, children, aunts, and the small works of a devout household. She was a single woman in a provincial town, known to her neighbours as the watchmaker’s daughter.

That is worth pausing over, because the popular story of Corrie ten Boom begins in 1942 or 1943, as though her life only started when she became a rescuer. It did not. The woman who organised an underground network, stood up to interrogators, and survived Ravensbrück had been formed over five decades of small faithfulness. She was nearly fifty when the events began for which the world remembers her. Anyone who suspects that their real life has not yet started might take some comfort from that.

For Reflection

Corrie’s work between the wars had no audience and no glamour. It was clubs for girls, classes for disabled people, and foster children in a crowded house. None of it seemed to be leading anywhere. All of it turned out to be preparing her.

Who are “the least” in our own communities, the people the world overlooks? Serving them rarely feels significant. But Jesus says that what we do for them, we do for him. And sometimes, as the ten Booms found, the habits of love we form in quiet years are exactly what God will use when the storm comes.