The Women Who Ran First

On Easter morning 1945, Corrie ten Boom sat in a displaced persons camp near the German border, recently freed from Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her sister Betsie had died there just months before. Everything Corrie loved had been stripped away — her home, her family, her watchmaking shop on the Barteljorisstraat in Haarlem. She had every reason to believe the story was over.

But a letter arrived that morning from a friend in the Netherlands. The war was ending. She could come home. Corrie later wrote that she read the words three times before she believed them. The news was too large for the container of her grief.

This is precisely what happened at the tomb. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary walked to a grave expecting death to have the final word. Instead, an angel rolled back the stone — not to let Jesus out, but to let them see He was already gone. "He is not here," the angel said. "He has risen."

Notice who received the news first. Not the religious authorities. Not the disciples hiding behind locked doors. The Almighty chose grieving women, the ones brave enough to show up at the grave while everyone else stayed home.

Corrie ten Boom spent the next thirty-three years carrying resurrection news across sixty nations. Like those women running from the empty tomb, she had seen the worst the world could do — and discovered it was not enough.