"Opportunity Knocks," part two

I’m gonna have to blog about our last life group study. It was pretty cool. We’ve been doing this series at church called HOSTAGE that deals with stuff like bitterness, anger, worry, shame and addiction. It’s funny how stuff I’m blogging about often lines up with what’s going on at church. I don’t plan it, really. But you’ll see how that relates later.

Today I wanted to add something about the opportunity for redemption.

I was talking to a lady about how God can make something good out of a bad experience (that he has the power to redeem anything) and she said, what about the Holocaust?

So I had to say, “Corrie ten Boom.” Have you heard this story? It’s the true story of a Holocaust survivor who wrote a book called “The Hiding Place” about her family’s WWII experience.

In a nutshell, they hid Jews in their home until they were caught and thrown into a concentration camp. Corrie’s sister, father, brother and nephew died there. Corrie managed to survive the horrors. She wrote her book and became a famous speaker. She talked about love and forgiveness.

Then one day, at the age of 55, she was put to one of the hardest tests of her life. A man came up to her after a speaking engagement and began to talk to her. He confessed that he was a former Nazi guard at the famous Ravensbruck camp where she and her sister were tortured. He asked for her forgiveness, and held out his hand to her.

Corrie wrote later that although she had been preaching “God will give us the love to be able to forgive our enemies,” she felt no forgiveness toward the man standing in front of her. She was reluctant to even try. But she recognized the opportunity that God was giving her, so she prayed, and stretched out her hand. At that moment, she later wrote, a flood of forgiveness washed over her, and in reaching out to forgive, she found the grace and ability to do so.

“I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then,” she wrote. “There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still.”

Hundreds of thousands of people’s lives have been changed by The Hiding Place and Corrie’s story, not to mention the scores of Jews and resistance fighters whose lives they saved before their capture. The Holocaust was one of the darkest times in human history, an ultimate example of how evil people can be. And yet, out the ashes of hatred and genocide comes a story of personal transformation, love, forgiveness and grace. A story of amazing redemption. No one would blame Corrie for bitterness, vengeance or hatred. Yet she took the opportunity to have love, joy and peace formed in her life through her violent circumstances.