I'll Never Forget You...Corrie ten Boom

This April 15 would have been Corrie ten Boom's 100th birthday, and thinking of that reminds me of the excitement Corrie would feel about birthdays—her own and everyone else's! To her a birthday wasn't the completion of a past year, but the beginning of a wonderful new one.

"How do you know the coming year will be wonderful?" I asked her once. My own birthday, coming up the next year, with our oldest child leaving for college, wasn't one I looked forward to.

I put this question to Corrie one rainy afternoon in Holland, where I'd gone to research her role in the Dutch Resistance during World War II. That morning we'd visited the grim brick-walled federal penitentiary at Scheveningen, where Corrie had been imprisoned by the Nazis. The memory of the birthday she'd spent there had led to talk of birthdays in general, and to my question.

She was confident about each new year, Corrie said, because of a phrase her father repeated whenever the family gathered for a birthday celebration: The best is yet to be!

It was more than an expression of optimism, Corrie said—it was the summation of her father's faith. "Whatever the current hardship, whatever the outward appearance, Father knew God was in charge, bringing his kingdom to pass. 'The best is yet to be!' was the promise Father made us every birthday."

Today, with the papers full of social and economic forebodings, I find myself thinking often of that promise. The best is yet to be! Was that true in Corrie's life? Could Corrie's own birthdays illustrate the point? Three of them come to mind at once.

First, her birthday itself, April 15, 1892. Corrie was born above the watch shop in the narrow old house in Haarlem where her father had been born. It was his father who had placed the sign "Ten Boom: Watches" in a ground-floor window.

On that windy April day 100 years ago, it must have been hard for Corrie's father to cling to his own credo: The best is still ahead. His wife, long a semi-invalid, had barely survived the delivery of this fifth child, and the doctor had confided to him that she could have no more.

As for the tiny, sickly infant, the doctor only shook his head. Doubtless she would soon be another tiny headstone in the St. Bavo cemetery, alongside the grave of the couple's third child.

The rest of the family tried to console the sorrowing parents. Death for this baby would come as a blessing; the newborn girl was obviously too frail to lead a normal life here on earth. One of the uncles picked the scrawny creature up in his arms. "Father," Oom Hendrick prayed, "we ask you to take this little one swiftly to yourself."

But Uncle Hendrick, of course, was judging by appearance. The best indeed was yet to be. For Corrie lived to be 91, a guide and inspiration to millions all over the world.

The second birthday I think of was spent in Scheveningen prison.