The House Betsie Saw

In December 1944, Betsie ten Boom lay dying on a filthy mattress in Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her body was skeletal, her skin covered in sores. Yet in those final hours, she gripped her sister Corrie's hand and described something extraordinary — a beautiful house with gardens, wide windows, and polished wood floors, where the broken and brutalized would come to heal. "We will paint the walls with bright colors," Betsie whispered. "There will be flowers everywhere."

Betsie died days later. Her body was placed on a pile with other corpses in the freezing Dutch winter.

But after liberation, a wealthy woman offered Corrie a mansion in Bloemendaal, Netherlands — a grand house with gardens, wide windows, and inlaid wood floors. Corrie walked through it and wept. It was the house Betsie had described from her deathbed.

That home became a place of restoration for concentration camp survivors — a small foretaste of what John saw in his revelation: the dwelling place of God with humanity, where every tear is wiped away and the former things have passed.

Betsie saw past the barbed wire and the crematoria to something the Almighty was already preparing. Revelation 21 tells us that what she glimpsed was not wishful thinking. It was a preview. God is building something more real than our suffering, and the new creation is already on its way down.