Corrie ten Boom and the Yielded Body

In 1944, Corrie ten Boom stood inside the delousing shower at Ravensbrück concentration camp, stripped bare alongside her sister Betsie and hundreds of other women. Guards had seized every possession — clothes, jewelry, the small Bible she had smuggled past four previous inspections. Her body, emaciated and lice-bitten, seemed to belong entirely to her captors.

Yet Corrie later wrote that in that moment of absolute physical vulnerability, she understood something profound: her body had never belonged to her in the first place. It belonged to God. The guards could starve it, beat it, force it into slave labor — but they could not claim what had already been purchased by another.

After liberation, Corrie spent thirty-three years traveling the world, sleeping in over sixty countries, wearing out her aging frame in service. When people marveled at her stamina, she would say simply, "My body is not my own. I was bought at a price."

Paul told the Corinthians that their bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit, bought with the blood of Christ. In a culture that treated the body as either an object of indulgence or something irrelevant to the spiritual life, Paul insisted on a third way: the body matters precisely because it houses the living God. Every choice we make with these hands, these feet, these lips either honors or dishonors the One who dwells within.

What we do with our bodies is worship.