In 1944, Corrie Ten Boom was suffering with pain and edema, likely due to starvation, as she languished in the Ravensbruck Concentration Camp. With Christmas approaching, she was desperate to find any source of goodness or light. As she reminisced about Christmas’s past, with her family’s massive Christmas tree, candles, mouth-watering food, and festively wrapped gifts, her heart yearned for just one glimmer of those nostalgic, warm feelings to surface.

Instead, as she shuffled between barracks of the concentration camp, her stiff legs aching, she saw ‘the saddest Christmas trees’ she’d ever witnessed. Jutting up in the middle of camp was a strand of thin, sickly trees with a pile of dead bodies underneath them. In her book Christmas Memories, she wrote “Dark it was in my heart, and darkness was all around me.”

That night, she tried to resurrect any light remaining in her soul and attempted to share Jesus, and the joy of Christmas, with her fellow prisoners, but she was mocked, ridiculed, and scorned. Broken in spirit, she fell silent.

Sometime before midnight, the officers must have noticed the severity of her edema and moved her to the infirmary. Christmas Eve in the sick ward of a death camp. Things couldn’t get much worse.

During the middle of the night, Corrie heard a child crying out for her mother. Rising from the lumpy cot, Corrie scoured the dark, silent infirmary for the source of the wailing and discovered an emaciated little girl quietly sobbing in her bed. Her named was Oelie. The child had recently undergone a surgery, and the Nazis had placed a meager strip of toilet paper along the incision on Oelie’s thin back.

Corrie comforted Oelie as best she could, tugging her gently into her arms, and the child’s cries eventually succumbed to curious questions. Corrie told Oelie all about Jesus, how much he loved her and how he had promised to prepare a place in heaven for all those who believe in Him.

Oelie blinked up at Corrie in wonder. “What is heaven like?”

Corrie smiled, “It’s a beautiful place with no more pain or evil.”

“And Jesus is preparing a room for me? Will it be a big house or a little one?”

Corrie laughed. “What do you think?”

Oelie smiled, her expression dreamy. “I don’t want a big house. Just a little one.” As the child drifted to sleep, she murmured. “I’m so happy to know I’ll see Jesus there.”

At that moment, Corrie understood why she had been chosen to spend this Christmas in Ravensbruck. Christmas wasn’t about her at all, nor was it about warm, nostalgic memories, music, or food. Christmas is about giving love, hope, and light to those who have none.

Hope and light can be found in even the bleakest of places. As Corrie’s sister Betsy once said, “There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.”

This Christmas, may we not look for opportunities to receive love, but to give it away.