No Pit So Deep

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD. PSALM 130:1

The sentence most closely associated with the ten Boom sisters was not Corrie’s. It was Betsie’s. As Corrie recounts it in The Hiding Place, her sister, dying in Ravensbrück, told her that they must go out afterwards and tell people what they had learned there: that there is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. Corrie carried that charge for the next forty years. If her whole ministry could be reduced to a single claim, it would be this one. This chapter is about what it means, what it does not mean, and why it can be believed.

Betsie

Elisabeth ten Boom was never strong. She suffered from anaemia most of her life, kept house for her father and sister, and was by every account gentle, orderly and humorous, with a deep and quiet faith. In the camp she was physically the weaker of the two by far. Yet Corrie came to see her as the stronger. The Ochorus biography gathers from Corrie’s accounts the moments when horrors that overwhelmed Corrie seemed not to reach Betsie. On one terrible day, when a woman in their barracks was beaten to death, Corrie turned to her sister in anguish and found her face at peace. Corrie thought of Satan’s complaint about Job, that God had set a hedge about him. There was a hedge about Betsie too.

It was not indifference. Betsie pitied the men who beat her. She once went to invite a brutal barracks supervisor to the Bible readings. She sat through the night with women who could not sleep. Her compassion was intense. But the evil of the camp did not seem to get inside her. She lived, as Paul puts it, looking at things not seen.

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:17–18

The saying and its setting

The careful reader should know the history of the famous words. They are recorded in The Hiding Place, written a quarter of a century after Betsie’s death. Corrie’s first account of the camps, written in 1945, does not contain them in that form. It contains a closely related thought, and in Corrie’s own mouth. Speaking at a memorial in the barracks for women who had died, she told her fellow prisoners, as the Ochorus biography summarises it, that for those who belong to Christ, death is not a pit into which they fall but a tunnel through which they pass into the light.

The two sayings belong together. Betsie may well have said the words the later book gives her, and Corrie may have remembered them exactly. Or the faith the sisters shared may have found its sharpest form in years of retelling. Either way, the faith was tested in Ravensbrück, and it held. The reader who meets the saying online in a dozen slightly different wordings, attached sometimes to Corrie and sometimes to no one, should know that it comes to us as Betsie’s words reported by her sister, and should attribute it that way.

Deeper than the pit

What does the saying claim? It does not claim that God keeps His children out of pits. Betsie was in one, and she died there. It does not claim that God explains the pit, or that the pit is secretly good. It claims that God’s love reaches lower than any depth into which a human being can fall. Scripture says the same thing again and again.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. DEUTERONOMY 33:27

Underneath. However far you fall, the arms are still beneath you. Corrie loved this verse and used it often in her addresses; in The Greatest of These Is Love she tells Russian believers under persecution that she had found by experience that you cannot sink so deep that the everlasting arms are not deeper.

For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. ROMANS 8:38–39

Paul lists depth among the things that cannot separate. He had been in some himself — shipwrecked, beaten, left for dead. He does not say depth cannot reach us. He says it cannot separate us.

The skylark at roll call

Corrie had her own small illustration of this, and she told it in several of the addresses now on Ochorus. Standing at roll call in Ravensbrück while a guard displayed her cruelty in front of the prisoners, she heard a skylark begin to sing overhead, and every woman in the ranks looked up. Looking up at the sky, she remembered the psalm that measures God’s mercy by the height of heaven above the earth. She says the bird returned at roll call for some weeks, and that she took it as God turning their eyes from the cruelty of men to the vastness of His love.

For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. PSALM 103:11

The height of heaven and the depth of the pit are the same measurement taken from different ends. God’s love is higher than the sky over Ravensbrück and deeper than the pit of it.

Betsie’s death

Betsie died in the camp hospital on 16 December 1944. Corrie found her body in a washroom among the dead, and saw, she said, that her sister’s face looked young and at peace. Her first feeling was desolation; then, to her own surprise, peace came, and words from Job with it.

The LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD. JOB 1:21

It would be dishonest to make this sound easy. Corrie grieved Betsie for the rest of her life. But the saying about the pit is not a platitude spoken by a comfortable person to a suffering one. It was spoken by a starving woman to her sister, in the place where she was about to die. That is why it has authority. Those who have been in the pit may say it. The rest of us should mostly listen.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. PSALM 116:15

A charge to tell

Betsie did not only believe the love of God was deeper than the pit. She insisted that the sisters had been brought there in order to be able to say so. In The Greatest of These Is Love Corrie recalls her sister telling her that once they were free they must travel the world and tell people, from their own experience, that the light of Christ is stronger than the deepest darkness. Betsie died a week or so later. Corrie was released soon after, and went.

There is a word here for anyone who has been through a pit and come out. The comfort you received was not only for you.

Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:4

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the page you wrote at the start of this book about the darkest place your life has taken you. Read Deuteronomy 33:27 over it.

2. If you are in a pit now, tell God plainly how deep it is. Then ask Him to show you the arms beneath.

3. When you next quote a famous saying, check its source first. Practise attributing Betsie’s words to Betsie.

4. Look up at the sky once each day this week and remember Psalm 103:11.

5. Think of one person going through something you have already been through. Offer them the comfort you received.

A PRAYER

Lord, out of the depths I cry to You. You know how deep they go, and You are deeper still.

I do not ask You to explain the pit. I ask You to hold me in it, with arms that are always underneath.

Thank You for Betsie’s faith, and for every saint who has said in the dark what I could hardly believe in the light.

Let nothing separate me from Your love, and make me able to comfort others with the comfort You have given me. Amen.