Corrie ten Boom and the Light No Darkness Could Extinguish

In the winter of 1944, Corrie ten Boom huddled on a thin mattress in Ravensbrück concentration camp, surrounded by lice, disease, and the ever-present stench of death. She had been arrested for hiding Jewish families in her Haarlem watchshop — a secret room behind a false wall that had saved roughly eight hundred lives. Now the walls around her held no safety, only suffering.

Yet Corrie and her sister Betsie did something astonishing. Each evening, by the dim light filtering through grimy windows, they gathered women around a contraband Bible and read aloud. The guards avoided their barracks because of the fleas — which meant the Word of God flowed freely in the one place no one wanted to enter. Corrie later recalled that even there, especially there, she experienced the presence of the Almighty as a shelter more real than any building she had known.

When Betsie died in that camp, her final words to Corrie were, "We must tell people that there is no pit so deep that God's love is not deeper still."

The psalmist David wrote from his own season of pursuit and danger: "The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear?" He did not write those words from comfort but from crisis. Like Corrie, he discovered that when every earthly refuge fails, the Most High Himself becomes the dwelling place. The invitation of Psalm 27 is not to escape trouble but to find, within it, a Presence that no darkness can overcome.