Betsie ten Boom's Vision Beyond the Barracks

In the winter of 1944, Betsie ten Boom lay dying on a thin mattress in Ravensbruck concentration camp. Her body was skeletal, ravaged by forced labor and starvation. Her sister Corrie knelt beside her, breathing air thick with suffering and death.

But Betsie was not thinking about Ravensbruck. She was thinking about what comes after.

"Corrie, we must tell people what we have learned here," she whispered. "We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still. They will listen to us, because we have been here."

In her final hours, Betsie described a vision — a beautiful house with gardens where former prisoners and guards alike would come to heal. She spoke of concentration camps transformed into places of restoration, where the damaged and broken would learn to tend flowers again. Days later, Betsie died. But when Corrie was miraculously released through a clerical error, she spent the rest of her life making that vision real.

This is the heartbeat of Revelation 21. John, exiled on Patmos, surrounded by Roman cruelty and the persecution of the early church, saw beyond the present darkness to something Betsie ten Boom glimpsed from her deathbed — a world where the Almighty Himself wipes every tear, where death releases its grip forever, and where the former things finally, mercifully, pass away. The God who makes all things new was already at work, even in Ravensbruck, even on Patmos — and He is at work still.