Brian’s Reflection: Tuesday, June 12, 2007


It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals,
because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out.
Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe
that people are really good at heart.

- Annalise (Anne) Frank, born on this day, in Frankfurt, 1929,
exterminated by the Nazis


We all know the sad story of Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl who died in the Holocaust. She is famous for her Diary.

Would most teenagers who went through the horrors that she went through still think that “people are really good at heart”? I don’t know ….. but I doubt it. Let alone an adult. At sixty, I have to confess that I have become somewhat cynical ….. and I’m inching further along that road!

So, just with reference to myself, I can’t say that I’m convinced that “people are really good at heart” by the vicious way so many are behaving these days. But. “Evidence” notwithstanding, I continue to believe that that people are created in the image of God who is Good and who is Love. And that these two things lie at the often deeply hidden heart of humanity.

I guess Anne has caught me. And I guess I had really work hard to live my ideals.

Brian+