A Father's Hand on Her Face

Every night in the ten Boom home in Haarlem, Holland, the same ritual unfolded. After prayers were said and the blankets pulled tight, old Casper ten Boom would reach down and lay his weathered hand gently against his daughter's face. Corrie ten Boom later wrote in The Hiding Place that nothing in the world made her feel as safe as that moment — her father's broad hand against her cheek, his steady presence beside her bed. She could sleep through anything knowing he was near.

Decades later, crammed into the suffocating darkness of Ravensbruck concentration camp, Corrie discovered something astonishing. In the lowest pit of human cruelty, surrounded by death and despair, she felt it again — not her earthly father's hand, but the unmistakable nearness of her Heavenly Father. The same quieting. The same steady love pressing close.

This is what the prophet Zephaniah proclaimed to a broken and frightened Israel: "The LORD your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness; He will quiet you by His love; He will exult over you with loud singing."

The God of the universe does not watch us from a distance. He draws near. He places His hand, as it were, against our face. He sings over us — not because we have earned it, but because we are His. And in that nearness, even Ravensbruck cannot steal our peace.