Someone once said, “[a]nd whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery!”
Some of you may have heard of Anne Frank, a Jewish girl born in Germany in 1929. Her family moved to the Netherlands when she was 4, after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power.
For her 13th birthday, Anne received an autograph book, which she began to use as a diary. But only a month later, the Frank family had to go into hiding because the Nazis had begun systematically rounding up and deporting Jews from the Netherlands.
For over two years, Anne lived with her family and four others hiding in a secret annex, behind a bookcase in her father’s office building, which they could not ever leave for fear of being captured. Anne wrote in her diary regularly: she recounted day-to-day life in the annex, and also wrote about wanting to become a writer, and about her longings to someday return to school.
But in 1944, Nazi officers stormed the building, discovered the families and sent them off to concentration camps where all but Anne’s father would perish. After the camps were liberated, Anne’s father retrieved her diary, and published it with the title, The Diary of a Young Girl.
Anne Frank knew a bit about facing difficulty. But do you know one of the things she wrote in her diary? You guessed it—“And whoever is happy will make others happy too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery!”
Anne learned firsthand that joy in the face of difficulty is contagious. So is misery. None of us, God willing, will ever face difficulty like Anne Frank did. But our response to it, like her own, is not entirely about us. We infect those around us. In the face of hardship, will your contagion be joy…or misery?