Believing in Goodness When the World Says Otherwise

On July 15, 1944, thirteen-year-old Anne Frank sat in the cramped Secret Annex at Prinsengracht 263 in Amsterdam and wrote what would become one of the most quoted lines of the twentieth century. For over two years, she and seven others — her parents Otto and Edith, her sister Margot, the van Pels family, and Fritz Pfeffer — had lived behind a bookcase, hidden from Nazi occupation. Allied forces had landed at Normandy just weeks earlier, and the BBC carried rumors of liberation. Yet the Annex remained a prison of silence, blackout curtains, and rationed food.

In that entry, Anne wrote to her diary, which she called Kitty: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart." Less than three weeks later, on August 4, the Gestapo raided the Annex. Anne would die at Bergen-Belsen the following spring. Only her father survived.

What Anne expressed was not naive optimism. It was a stubborn refusal to let darkness define reality — the same defiance the psalmist voiced: "I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart."

Faith does not require proof that everything will turn out well. It requires the courage to affirm goodness even when the evidence seems stacked against it. That is what it means to wait on the Lord — not passively, but with a heart that refuses to surrender hope.