"There is no pit so deep, that God's love is not deeper still"
About this Quote
Ten Boom’s line doesn’t romanticize suffering; it refuses to let suffering have the last word. “Pit” is doing heavy work here: it’s not an abstract “hard time” but a trapdoor image of descent, confinement, and shame. You don’t fall into a pit in a dignified way. You end up there dirty, disoriented, and often alone. By choosing that word, she speaks to people who feel not just hurt but discarded.
Then she flips the geometry. “So deep” invites a bleak contest of depth, as if despair is measurable, as if trauma can win by going lower. The counterpunch is quiet and absolute: “God’s love is…deeper still.” Not higher, not broader, not even stronger - deeper. The subtext is practical, almost stubborn: if you’re at the bottom, love can meet you there without asking you to climb first. It’s a rebuke to the moralizing version of faith that treats closeness to God as a reward for being tidy.
Context matters because Ten Boom wasn’t selling inspiration from a safe distance. As a Dutch Christian who helped Jews during the Holocaust and survived Ravensbruck, she knew what “pit” meant in the literal sense: camps, starvation, cruelty, the kind of evil that makes uplifting language feel obscene. The sentence works because it’s calibrated to that scale. It doesn’t explain suffering; it undercuts its claim to totality. Despair says, “This is the deepest point.” Ten Boom answers: you haven’t found the edge of love yet.
Then she flips the geometry. “So deep” invites a bleak contest of depth, as if despair is measurable, as if trauma can win by going lower. The counterpunch is quiet and absolute: “God’s love is…deeper still.” Not higher, not broader, not even stronger - deeper. The subtext is practical, almost stubborn: if you’re at the bottom, love can meet you there without asking you to climb first. It’s a rebuke to the moralizing version of faith that treats closeness to God as a reward for being tidy.
Context matters because Ten Boom wasn’t selling inspiration from a safe distance. As a Dutch Christian who helped Jews during the Holocaust and survived Ravensbruck, she knew what “pit” meant in the literal sense: camps, starvation, cruelty, the kind of evil that makes uplifting language feel obscene. The sentence works because it’s calibrated to that scale. It doesn’t explain suffering; it undercuts its claim to totality. Despair says, “This is the deepest point.” Ten Boom answers: you haven’t found the edge of love yet.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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