The Promise Betsie Whispered in Ravensbrück

In December 1944, Betsie ten Boom lay dying on a thin mattress in Ravensbrück concentration camp, her body wasted by malnutrition and forced labor. Her sister Corrie knelt beside her, surrounded by the stench of death and the groans of suffering women packed into Barracks 28.

But Betsie's eyes held no despair. With her final breaths, she whispered something extraordinary: "We must tell people what we have learned here. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. They will listen to us, Corrie, because we have been here."

Then Betsie described a vision — a beautiful house with gardens and wide windows, where broken people would come to heal. She saw former concentration camps transformed into places of restoration and light. "There is so much to do," she murmured. And then she was gone.

Two days later, Corrie was released through a clerical error. She spent the next thirty years fulfilling her sister's vision, eventually opening a rehabilitation center in a former concentration camp in Darmstadt, Germany — a place of death made new.

This is the promise John saw from Patmos. The Almighty does not merely console us in our suffering — He makes all things new. Every tear wiped away. Every camp dismantled. Every grave emptied. The former things, finally and forever, passed away.