Light of the World Today
On the morning of 28 February 1944, a Dutch watchmaker named Corrie ten Boom heard the buzzer in her family home in Haarlem, Netherlands. It was the signal they had been dreading. The Gestapo had arrived.
Corrie was fifty-one years old. She and her family had spent the previous two years hiding Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution in a secret room built behind the false wall of her bedroom. They had sheltered hundreds of people, coordinating with the Dutch underground, risking everything each day. On that February morning, the life they had built came apart within minutes. Informants had betrayed them. The Nazi security service flooded the house. Six people concealed in the hiding place remained undiscovered, but Corrie, her sister Betsie, and their eighty-four-year-old father Casper were arrested and taken away.
Casper ten Boom died in a Dutch prison ten days later.
Corrie and Betsie were transferred through several prisons and eventually arrived at Ravensbruck, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women in northern Germany. The conditions there were beyond description: forced labour, starvation rations, disease, violent guards, and the constant presence of death. Around them, women died every day.
What Corrie did at Ravensbruck is one of the most documented acts of faith under pressure in the twentieth century. She and Betsie had managed to smuggle a Bible into the camp. In the evenings, after twelve-hour shifts of hard labour, they gathered women in the flea-ridden barracks and read the Scriptures aloud, translating into multiple languages as they went. Women came to faith. Guards were prayed for by name. The fleas themselves, which Corrie had initially resented bitterly, turned out to be the reason the guards rarely entered their particular barracks, giving them unusual freedom to hold those gatherings.
Betsie, who had always been physically fragile, deteriorated steadily. Before she died in December 1944, she told Corrie something that would shape the rest of her long life. She said: we must tell people, Corrie. We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.
Corrie was released from Ravensbruck shortly after Betsie's death, the result of a clerical error. She later discovered that all women her age were executed in the days immediately following her release.
She was fifty-two years old when she walked out of that camp. For the next thirty-three years, she travelled to more than sixty countries, carrying the same message her sister had given her in those last whispered days. She spoke in the ruins of postwar Germany. She stood on platforms in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. She met former camp guards and chose, with God's help, to extend forgiveness to them. She died peacefully on her ninety-first birthday, 15 April 1983, in California.
Her story is documented in her memoir The Hiding Place, published in 1971. It is corroborated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, by Yad Vashem the Holocaust Remembrance Authority in Israel, which named her among the Righteous Among the Nations in 1967, and by the Corrie ten Boom House museum still standing today in Haarlem. Every detail of her life is verifiable.
What makes Corrie ten Boom's story so important for today's devotion is not only what she endured. It is what she said about how she endured it. She was clear, in her writing and in her speaking, that the walk through the darkest places of her life was not made possible by the strength of her own faith. In her own newsletter she wrote: I came through alive and victorious, not through my faith, which was weak and wavering, but carried by Jesus Himself.
That is the heart of today's devotion. The walk with God through the darkness is not carried by the strength of your belief. It is carried by the faithfulness of the God you are walking with.
Scripture Foundation
The Psalms contain some of the most honest prayers ever written. They were not composed in comfort. Many of them were written by people who were desperate, afraid, betrayed, or in genuine physical danger. God preserved every one of them in Scripture, which tells us something important: He is not threatened by honest cries. He collects them.
"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest." Ps. 22:1 to 2 (NIV)
These are the opening words of Psalm 22. They are also the words Jesus quoted from the cross (Matt. 27:46). They begin in felt abandonment. They do not pretend the darkness is not dark. But notice what the writer does not do: he does not stop addressing God. Even in the anguish of verse one, he is still saying my God. The walk continues, even when it feels like walking in a blindfold.
By verse twenty-four, something has shifted. Not the circumstances. But the orientation of the heart.
"For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help." Ps. 22:24 (NIV)
What changed between verse one and verse twenty-four? The writer chose to speak truth to himself. He chose to rehearse what he knew about God rather than only what he felt about his situation. This is not denial. It is one of the most spiritually courageous acts a person can perform: to say, in the dark, what you know to be true in the light.
Jeremiah did the same thing in one of the most desolate books in the Bible. Lamentations was written after the Babylonian army had destroyed Jerusalem and taken its people into exile. Jeremiah was not writing from a place of spiritual comfort. He was sitting in the rubble of everything.
"I have been deprived of peace; I have forgotten what prosperity is. So I say, 'My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped from the LORD.'" Lam. 3:17 to 18 (NIV)
That is the honest low point. He names it without softening it. And then, three verses later, something extraordinary happens.
"Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, 'The LORD is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.'" Lam. 3:21 to 24 (NIV)
The phrase I call to mind is a deliberate act of the will. And then the phrase I say to myself is even more deliberate. Jeremiah was not reporting a feeling. He was making a choice. He was talking his own soul back from the edge of despair with what he knew was true, even when nothing around him confirmed it. This is the walk of faith in the dark: not a manufactured smile, but a deliberate anchoring to truth when every emotion is pulling the other way.
Paul knew this territory well. By the time he wrote his second letter to the Corinthians, he had been beaten, imprisoned, shipwrecked, and rejected by people he had loved and served. He was not writing from a comfortable desk. He was writing from within the difficulty.
"We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed." 2 Cor. 4:8 to 9 (NIV)
The word but in each of those phrases is carrying enormous spiritual weight. It is the hinge between what is happening and what is still true. Hard pressed, but not crushed. Perplexed, but not in despair. Each contrast is an act of faith, a refusal to let the immediate experience have the final word.
"Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal." 2 Cor. 4:16 to 18 (NIV)
Paul is not trivialising the difficulty. He calls it troubles. He acknowledges that outwardly they are wasting away. But he sets that against a longer frame, an eternal one, and he makes the choice to fix his eyes not on what is visible but on what is durable. This is the discipline of the dark walk.
And underneath all of it is a promise that never changes regardless of how any season feels.
"God has said, 'Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.'" Heb. 13:5 (NIV)
The promise is not that you will always feel God near. The promise is that He will never leave. Those two things are not the same. In the dark seasons, the gap between them can feel enormous. But it is the promise, not the feeling, that is anchored in God's character. And God's character does not change with the season.
The Walk That Does Not Feel Like Walking
There are seasons in the life of every believer when the walk with God does not feel like walking at all. It feels like standing in a room where the lights have gone out and you are not sure anymore which direction the door is. Prayer feels like speaking into a ceiling. Scripture that used to feel alive now feels flat. The worship that once moved you leaves you unmoved. You go through the motions because you do not know what else to do, and you wonder if that is enough.
It is enough. Because in those seasons the motions themselves are an act of faith. Showing up when you do not feel God is one of the most honest expressions of trust a person can offer. Corrie ten Boom held worship services in a lice-ridden barracks at Ravensbruck because she chose to keep walking even when the ground under her feet was the most brutal ground imaginable.
The dark season of the spiritual life is not a sign that something has gone catastrophically wrong. Some of the most spiritually mature people in history have described it in detail. Historically documented accounts tell us that Martin Luther struggled with prolonged periods of deep spiritual despair, what he called Anfechtung, attacks of the soul, during which he felt cut off from God entirely. He would cling to one simple phrase: I have been baptised. Not because he felt close to God. Because he knew a truth that was independent of his feelings.
The point is not to compare your darkness with anyone else's. The point is that the darkness is known territory in the walk with God. It has been mapped before by people who kept walking through it and came out the other side changed, deepened, and carrying something they could only have received there.
"God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea." Ps. 46:1 to 2 (NIV)
An ever-present help. Not an occasionally-present help. Not a help that arrives when you have prayed correctly or lived faithfully enough. An ever-present help. Even now. Even in this.
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Applying This Today
The application for Day 4 is gentler than the previous three days. If you are in a dark season right now, the last thing you need is another ambitious list. Here are four simple, honest things you can do today.
• Read Ps. 22 in full from beginning to end. The honest prayer:
Read it slowly. Notice how it moves from raw desolation to renewed trust across the same poem. Then write your own honest prayer, beginning from wherever you actually are rather than wherever you think you should be. It does not have to be elegant. It does not have to resolve neatly. God kept Ps. 22 in His Word precisely because He knew you would need it.
• Choose one truth about God that you know in your mind, even if you cannot feel it right now. Speak truth to yourself:
Write it down on a piece of paper. Say it out loud once. This is what Jeremiah did in Lam. 3:21 to 24. This is what Paul did in 2 Cor. 4. It is one of the most ancient and proven disciplines in the spiritual life. You are not generating a feeling. You are anchoring your soul to something more durable than a feeling. Do this once today, and again tomorrow morning before anything else.
• Tell one trusted person where you actually are. Do not walk alone in the dark:
The dark seasons of faith are most dangerous when they are kept entirely private. The body of Christ was never designed to be a place where everyone performs spiritual health for one another. It was designed to be a place where people carry each other. Corrie ten Boom, even in Ravensbruck, did not walk alone. She had Betsie. You need someone too. A text, a phone call, or a conversation: let one person in today.
• Sit in stillness for ten minutes with Lam. 3:22 to 23 open in front of you. Practise stillness:
Do not fill the silence with activity or noise. Do not pray elaborately. Simply sit. Read the verse once. Set it down. Be still. This is sometimes the most difficult and the most powerful thing a person can do. God speaks in silence more often than we expect. And even if He does not speak today, staying is itself an act of trust that He is there.
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Key Takeaways for Day 4
• The walk with God does not end when your feelings about it change. It continues because His faithfulness does not change. Corrie ten Boom did not survive Ravensbruck by the strength of her faith. She survived, as she said herself, carried by Jesus.
• Honest prayer, including desperate prayer, is still prayer. God preserved the raw psalms in Scripture because He knows we would need them. He is not threatened by where you are.
• Speaking truth to your own soul in the middle of darkness is one of the most spiritually courageous and powerful acts available to a person. It is what Jeremiah did. It is what Paul did. It is what faith looks like when feelings have given out.
• His compassions are new every morning. Not some mornings. Not the mornings when you have earned them. Every morning. Including this one.
• There is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still. This is not a slogan. It was proven by a Dutch woman in a Nazi concentration camp, and it is available to you today.
Memory Verse
"Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness."
Lam. 3:22 to 23 (NIV)