Corrie never saw her beloved father again; he died only ten days after the arrest. She and her sister were sent to Ravensbruck, a women’s camp north of Berlin. Every morning, roll call came at 4:30. Mornings were bitterly cold, and the women would often have to stand for hours on end without moving a muscle. As the chill permeated their bones, they stood at attention, hearing only the noises from the punishment barracks: fists upon flesh in rhythm, screams for mercy, the taunting of the torturers.

Corrie and her sister, Betsie, somehow kept a Bible near at hand. It was their rock, their fortress. Whenever they were sure it was safe, they would gather the women, conjure up a modest fire, and read the precious, encouraging words of Romans 8: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Then they would read that list describing everything these women were experiencing: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword. After that, a quotation through which the Old Testament seemed to peer right into the twentieth century, right into Ravensbruck:

For Your sake we are killed all day long;

We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

Then they read those glorious words about being “more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” Even to be conquerors, not to mention more than conquers, seemed incredible in the light of their suffering. Yet power came through those words as surely as heat from the fire reached their cold bones.

As Corrie listened to Betsie read the words, firelight danced upon the haggard features of those huddled around the fire. More than conquerors, she thought, stated not as desperate hope but as ironclad fact. And it was really true—the words gave strength that pulled them through the horrors of one day after another.

“Life in Ravensbruck,” she later wrote, “took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.”10

Earlier in this chapter we met two blind men—men who knew how to move past the limits of human sight. George Matheson knew that God’s love would never let him go. Erik Weihenmayer understood the simple wisdom of trusting the rope, which enabled him to ascend peaks that sighted people could only dream about.

Life on earth will inevitably have its pits and snares, its crevasses and howling winds. It will have lonely times, when we must make the climb in solitude. It will have confusing days, when we simply can’t understand the logic of what is happening.