Chaplains Chat

This term in Chapel we are looking at Christian people – how they have contributed to the world around them and influenced the people that they have encountered. One such lady was the remarkable Corrie ten Boom. Corrie and her family grew up in the Netherlands and they were Christians. In 1942 when the Germans invaded the Netherlands, the family decided to use their dad’s watchmaking business to help rescue Jewish people from arrest, imprisonment and concentration camps. After making a hiding place in their dad’s shop, they helped upwards of 800 Jewish people as they fled the Netherlands. After the family was betrayed, Corrie and her sister Betsie were sent to a number of concentration camps. Betsie would die in one of these before a clerical error saw Corrie released. After the war, she met one of the German guards who had become a Christian and he asked her for forgiveness. Remarkably she forgave him, despite his previous actions.

Corrie ten Boom forgave this man because she realised the extent to which God had forgiven her. She understood Jesus’ words, that forgiveness that comes from God should result in forgiveness of others around us. As Jesus himself says in Matthew 18:35: “forgive your brother or sister from your heart.” Forgiveness is a wonderful thing that brings relationships together and doesn’t hold things against someone else even when they wrong us. It is truly wonderful that Jesus doesn’t hold things against us when we trust in his death on the Cross for our forgiveness.

Rev. A Benn
Chaplain