Words Written in the Dark

On June 12, 1942, a thirteen-year-old girl in Amsterdam received a red-and-white checkered autograph book for her birthday. Within weeks, Anne Frank and her family were hiding in a concealed annex above her father Otto's office at Prinsengracht 263, fleeing Nazi persecution. For twenty-five months, eight people lived behind a bookcase, surviving on rationed food, whispering during daylight hours, never once stepping outside.

Anne wrote. In cramped quarters shared with her parents, her sister Margot, and four others, she poured her fears, her humor, her stubborn hope into that little book. On July 15, 1944, just three weeks before the Gestapo discovered their hiding place, she wrote words that still arrest the human heart: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart."

Anne died at Bergen-Belsen in February 1945. She was fifteen. But her father Otto, the annex's sole survivor, found her diary and published it in 1947. Today it has been translated into more than seventy languages and read by tens of millions.

Romans 8:28 does not promise that all things are good. The Holocaust was not good. A child's death in a concentration camp was not good. But the verse tells us that God works within even the darkest chapters to bring forth something redemptive. Anne wrote for herself. The Almighty ensured the whole world would read it.

When you suffer in obscurity, take heart. You cannot see who your faithfulness will reach. But He can.