Women’s Day

DAILY BYTE

On this National Woman’s Day we reflect on the story of a woman from a different era, nationality and faith. But hers is a story that still speaks with compelling power to us today.

The story of Anne Frank is fairly well known. She was a Dutch Jewish girl born in 1929 who perished during the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazi’s in 1945 at the age of 16. Yet her great gift was to maintain a candlelight of humanity in a dark age and so guarantee that darkness should not have the final word.

During the Nazi occupation of Holland, Anne’s family and another – the Van Daams – went into hiding in a secret annex in her father’s office in the centre of Amsterdam. With the help and support of Dutch friends, they remained undetected for two years, before being betrayed in 1944 and dispersed to the Nazi death camps.

It was during the time of hiding in Amsterdam that Anne started to keep a diary. For her it was not simply a distraction but a responsibility to record her experiences and feelings as accurately as possible. In the early pages of her diary she wrote, “I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart.” What emerged were remarkable insights on the meaning of life and faith in the face of adversity.

If we remember that this fourteen-year-old girl spent two years in a confined space with seven other people, with a death sentence hanging over their heads, her capacity to see beyond the horror of their immediate circumstances is astonishing indeed. Every evening she would finish her prayers with the words, “I thank you God for all that is good and dear and beautiful. I am filled with joy. I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”

On another occasion she wrote, “I know what I want, I have a goal, an opinion. I have a religion and love. Let me be myself and then I am satisfied. I know that I’m a woman, a woman with inward strength and plenty of courage. If God lets me live...I shall not remain insignificant, I shall work in the world and for mankind! And now I know that first and foremost I shall require courage and cheerfulness.”

It is an excruciating thought that this remarkable young life was cut down so soon by such evil designs. But in the light of her tragic fate there is even more poignancy and power in these words written just days before her arrest: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart... I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right... In the meantime, I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.”

PRAY AS YOU GO

Help me today, dear God, to look beyond the hardships and miseries of my life and our world, to see the beauty of your presence and the wonder of your grace. Amen.

FOCUS READING

2 Corinthians 3:3-6 (The Message & CEV)

Your very lives are a letter that anyone can read by just looking at you. Christ himself wrote it — not with ink, but with God's living Spirit; not chiseled into stone, but carved into human lives — and we publish it.

We are sure about all this. Christ makes us sure in the very presence of God. We don't have the right to claim that we have done anything on our own. God gives us what it takes to do all that we do. His letter authorizes us to help carry out this new plan of action. The plan wasn't written out with ink on paper, with pages and pages of legal footnotes, killing your spirit. It's written with Spirit on spirit, his life on our lives!