The Clerical Error That Saved a Life

In December 1944, Corrie ten Boom lay on a thin mattress in Ravensbrück concentration camp, weakened by fleas, hunger, and grief. Her sister Betsie had just died in that same barracks. Corrie was fifty-two years old, imprisoned for the crime of hiding Jewish families in a secret room behind her bedroom wall in Haarlem, Holland. Everything had been stripped away — her home, her family, her watchmaking shop, her freedom.

Then, without explanation, her name appeared on a release list. A clerical error. She walked through the camp gates on New Year's Day, 1945. One week later, every woman her age in that barracks was sent to the gas chambers.

Corrie ten Boom should have been a footnote — one more victim swallowed by the machinery of evil. Instead, the woman the world discarded spent the next thirty-three years traveling to sixty-four countries, telling anyone who would listen that no pit is so deep that the love of God is not deeper still.

The psalmist knew this rhythm of deliverance. Pushed hard, falling, surrounded — and then the right hand of the Most High lifting up what hatred had thrown down. "The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone." Corrie's life, like this psalm, is not a story of human endurance. It is a testimony that the steadfast love of the Lord endures forever, even through the darkest valley, even out of the shadow of death itself.