The Shelter That Held When Its Builders Could Not

In February 1944, Dutch police raided the Béjé, the ten Boom family's narrow house on Barteljorisstraat in Haarlem, Netherlands. Corrie ten Boom, her father Casper, and her sister Betsie were arrested for harboring Jews. But behind a false wall in Corrie's bedroom sat a secret room — barely thirty inches deep — where six people crouched in silence. The Gestapo searched for hours. They never found the room. All six survived.

The ten Booms did not escape so easily. Casper, eighty-four years old, died ten days after his arrest. Betsie perished at Ravensbrück concentration camp in December 1944. Corrie survived, released through what she later called a clerical error — one week before women her age were sent to the gas chambers.

Twenty-seven years later, Corrie published The Hiding Place with John and Elizabeth Sherrill, and the title itself became her theology. The physical room had saved six lives. But the deeper hiding place — the one Corrie clung to through Ravensbrück's horrors — was the shelter the psalmist described: "Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty."

Psalm 91 does not promise that God's people will escape suffering. It promises that in suffering, we are not abandoned. The Most High does not always remove the storm, but He remains our refuge within it. Corrie's life proves that the shelter of God holds even when every earthly hiding place is torn away.