Whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him (drop the issue, let it go), so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions and wrongdoings (against Him and others).
Mark 11:25 AMP
I still remember the first time I saw the movie, The Hiding Place. I was fourteen and attending a Brazilian boarding high school. I was deeply moved by the story of Cornelia (Corrie) ten Boom, a Durch Christian who, along with her family, helped many Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust during the Second World War before her family was imprisoned in 1944.
While incarcerated, Corrie experienced mistreatment and the loss of her beloved sister, Betsie, who died after whispering the inspiring words, „There is no pit so deep that He (God) is not deeper still.“ As a teenager viewing this movie for the first time, I was impressed by Corrie’s faith and how God miraculously freed her ten months later. What I did not quite grasp then, however, was how forgiveness played a key role in her life at the camp and afterwards.
Sixteen years later, as a thirty-year-old in the United States, I was experiencing the pain of injustice and rejection. It was then that God reminded me of the story of Corrie ten Boom. I listened to her own testimonial, as she told of her struggle to forgive. It was when she realized that she also had wronged God and needed His forgiveness that she was able to “let go“of the bitterness in her heart.
In her book Tramp for the Lord (1974), she wrote of an encounter she had with one of the cruelest guards at the Nazi camp where she’d been imprisoned. She was teaching at a church in Germany three years after she was released. The guard did not recognize her as he stood in line to greet her at the end of the service. She had not forgotten his face and prayed that God would help her forgive him. She wrote, “For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love as intensely as I did then.“
Corrie opened a rehabilitation center for concentration camp survivors while in the Netherlands, before sharing, around the world, about the healing power of forgiveness and God’s love. What an inspiration for us to practice forgiveness.
Katia Garcia Reinert
Notes of Joy © by Pacific Press Publishing Association