Walking in Forgiveness With Corrie Ten BoomSample

Walking in the Light

In London, I was asked to call on a woman in a mental institution. She was a person who had fallen victim to hatred. She had always lived in Palestine. Her husband had been kind to the Jews and then it was the Jews who had dropped a bomb on her home. When she regained consciousness and saw that her husband was dead, she opened her heart to hatred. Now she was a complete wreck. She spent the whole day reading the newspapers in order to find news about the Jews. If something terrible happened to them, she was happy.

Poor woman! As she entered the room, she looked suspiciously at me. I prayed for wisdom and love.

"I know exactly what you're going to tell me. I must pray," she began the conversation in a defiant manner. "But I cannot pray."

I made no reply, and she continued, "I know exactly what you are going to say next; I must banish the hatred from my heart, because only then can I pray again."

"Who has told you?"

"The chaplain."

"No doubt the chaplain is still a very young man, and he does not yet know how powerful the demon of hatred is. You and I know. Once I was with my sister in a concentration camp. When they treated me cruelly, I could stand it, but when I saw that they intended to beat my sister because she was too weak to shovel sand, then hatred tried to enter my heart. And then I experienced a miracle. Jesus had planted His love in my heart, and there was no room left for hatred.

"The only thing you can do is to open your heart to that love. That love is a reality. If it is dark in a room while the sun is shining outside, do I have to sweep the darkness out? Of course not. I merely have to draw the curtains aside, and as soon as the sunlight floods the room, the darkness vanishes."

We both knelt down, and I prayed, "Lord, here we are, weak, much weaker than the demon of hatred. But You are stronger than the demon of hatred, and now we open our hearts to You, and we give thanks to You that You are willing to enter into our hearts, as the sun is willing to flood a room that is opened to its brightness."

A week later, the woman was discharged from the mental institution. Her heart was full of the love of God.

Corrie ten Boom, Amazing Love p.80–81