Corrie ten Boom and the Clerical Error

On December 28, 1944, Corrie ten Boom stood in a line at Ravensbrück concentration camp, clutching a release document she could barely believe was real. For months, she had endured the lice-infested barracks, the back-breaking labor, the slow starvation that had already claimed her beloved sister Betsie just twelve days earlier. Now a German officer was stamping her papers and waving her toward the gate.

Corrie walked through that gate in a daze, much like Peter stumbling past the guards and through the iron gate of Jerusalem's prison, not fully grasping what was happening to him. She later discovered that her release had been the result of a "clerical error." One week after she walked free, every woman her age in the barracks was sent to the gas chambers.

A clerical error. That is what the administrators called it. But back in Haarlem, a small circle of Dutch Christians had been praying for Corrie by name, month after month, refusing to stop even when silence was the only answer they received.

In Acts 12, the church prayed earnestly for Peter while he slept in chains between two soldiers. God sent an angel. Chains fell. Gates opened. Peter walked out alive into the cool night air.