Besides collecting stories I've read a lot of books about the same topic. I've recently reread The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom looking for answers to the above questions. The Hiding Place is a true story and journey of a woman who survived the concentration camps who later went around the world speaking to congregations of people about forgiveness and gratitude.
How did Corrie ten Boom survive? Why when she got out of the camps did she speak to people about forgiveness and gratitude when she had so much to be bitter, resentment and hatful about? What made her different? Within the covers of her book, she reveals the answers to these questions.
The follow paragraphs state the answers to my questions
1) Corrie and her sister Betsie found purpose and meaning
They felt their purpose and meaning was to share their Bible with the other prisoners and the hope and peace, Jesus had given them
2) Before the camps they already had an abiding faith in God and Jesus Christ however the camps made their faith more tangible and real to them
Chapter 13 Ravensbruck page 194
... Every day something else failed to make sense something else grew too heavy." Will you carry this too, Lord Jesus?"
But as the rest of the world stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us from morning until light out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever widening circle of help and hope like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warm light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burn the word of God. "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, persecution, or famine, or nakedness or peril, or sword?. Period. Today, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us."
I would look about us is Betsy read, watching the lightning from face-to-face. More than conquerors.... It was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute – poor, heated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not "we shall be". We are! Life in Ravensbruck for took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we live with God, daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.
Sometimes I would slip the Bible from his little sack with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me. It was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry. I had believed the Bible always, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were – of hell and heaven, of how men act and how God acts. I had read 1000 times the story of Jesus arrest – householders that slapped him laughed at Him, flaunt Him. Now such happenings had faces and voices.
... The recurrent humiliation of medical inspection...(they were forced to line up in the hall naked and go past men prison guards in the freezing cold)... but it was one of these mornings while we were waiting, shivering, in the corridor, that yet another page in the Bible leapt into life for me.
He hung naked on the cross.
(Speaking to her sister Betsie) "Betsy, they took his clothes to"
Ahead of me I heard a little gasp. "Oh and I never thanked him..."
3) They found things to be grateful for
Chapter 13 Ravensbruck pages 197 to 199
While at the same concentration camp the two sisters were escorted to the dormitories they would stay in. Besides not having any room or heat the place was crawling with fleas. The older sister Betsie relying on the Bible and the verse that they had read the morning before first Thessalonians where says that we should be thankful for all things she reminded her sister Corrie that they should be thankful for all things in all circumstances even the fleas. The other things they were grateful for; they were together in the same camp as well as in the same dormitory they were able to bring their Bible with them which normally would have been confiscated however no one was able to find it to confiscate it. When looking around themselves they realize they had more to be grateful for than they thought. The fleas turned out to be a true blessing because it kept the prison guards away from their dormitory where they could read the Bible openly and not be harassed by them as they normally would do to the other dormitories.
4) Corrie found forgiveness and faith
Chapter 15 The Three Visions
it was at a church service in Munich that I saw him, the former S.S. man who had stood guard at the shower room door in the processing center at Ravensbruck. He was the first of our actual jailers that I had seen since that time. And suddenly it was all there – the roomful of mocking men, the heaps of clothing, Betsy's pain – blaunched face.
He came up to me as a church was emptying, beaming and bowing. "How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein." he said. "To think that, as you say, he is washed my sins away!"
His hand was thrust out to shake mine. And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.
Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.
I tried to smile, I struggled to raise my hand. I could not. I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity. And so again I breathed a silent prayer. Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.
As I took his hand the most incredible thing happened from my shoulder along my arm and threw my hand a current seem to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for the stranger that almost overwhelming me.
And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.
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http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/relationships/professional/how-to-deal-with-people-who-ask-lots-of-questions
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