Thriving in Anxious Times

Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychologist who was being worked to death as an inmate in three concentration camps run by the Nazis during the Second World War. It was in those camps, he wrote later, that he developed the insight for which he is famous, that between what happens to us, and how we respond to what happens, there is a gap, a space, and it is that space that gives us the power to choose. “The last and the greatest of human freedoms,” he wrote, “is the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

That is not much different than what Paul wrote so long before, from his prison cell: ‘think about these things: whatever is true, whatever is beautiful, whatever is admirable, whatever is excellent, whatever is worthy of praise. Think about these things.”