Corrie ten Boom
1892-1983 20th century
Forgiveness received before it is given: when loving is beyond our strength, God gives the love along with the command.
Who was Corrie ten Boom?
A watchmaker of Haarlem (the first woman licensed in the trade in the Netherlands), she hid Jews with her father and sister in a secret room of the family house. Betrayed in 1944, deported to Ravensbrück where her sister Betsie died, she was released through a clerical error, days before the women of her age were executed. She then travelled to more than sixty countries to say that God's love is deeper than any pit, until the day she shook hands with one of her former guards.
In their own words
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.
Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.