The Doorway She Could Not Un-Enter

In 1943, Corrie ten Boom stood in the hallway of her family's narrow house on the Barteljorisstraat in Haarlem, Netherlands. Her father Casper had just agreed to hide Jewish refugees in a secret room behind a false wall. Corrie understood what this meant. The Gestapo had already arrested neighbors for far less. She could smell the smoke from burning synagogues carried on the North Sea wind.

There was no halfway measure available. You either built the hiding place or you didn't. You either opened the door when a terrified Jewish mother knocked at midnight or you pretended not to hear. Corrie chose to open the door, knowing that every knock could be the last — either a refugee seeking shelter or a soldier seeking arrests.

She later wrote that the decision wasn't made in a single heroic moment but in the quiet accumulation of smaller surrenders — each one a death to self-preservation.

Esther faced that same narrow doorway. When she told Mordecai, "If I perish, I perish," she wasn't being fatalistic. She was being resolute. She had counted the cost with open eyes and an empty stomach, three days of fasting stripping away every comfortable illusion. Sometimes faithfulness doesn't feel like courage. It feels like walking forward when every instinct screams retreat — trusting that the God who positioned you in this place did not do so by accident.