Driven Into the Wilderness to Find Her Mission

In 1944, Corrie ten Boom was arrested for hiding Jewish families in her Haarlem home. Within weeks, she was transported to Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi concentration camp. She had answered God's call — sheltering the vulnerable, saying yes to a dangerous commission — and almost immediately, she was thrust into a wilderness more brutal than she could have imagined.

The parallels to Mark's Gospel are striking. Jesus had barely risen from the baptismal waters, the Father's voice still echoing over the Jordan, when the Spirit drove Him into the desert. No celebration. No preparation time. Forty days of deprivation and temptation followed the highest moment of divine affirmation.

Corrie endured lice-infested barracks, starvation rations, and the death of her beloved sister Betsie. Yet something remarkable happened in that wilderness. Betsie whispered to her, "We must tell people what we have learned here — that there is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still." The wilderness did not destroy the calling. It forged it.

When Corrie emerged from Ravensbrück in 1945, she spent the next thirty-three years traveling the world with a single message that echoed Christ's own proclamation: the Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe.

The wilderness between your calling and your ministry is not a detour. It is where the Almighty shapes the message He has given you to carry.