The mother rushed to scoop up her toddler who fell on the playground. “You’re OK, I got you!” She brushed off his knees. “Everything will be OK; I promise.”
A child wants protection from harmful things beyond his control. He wants a restoration of tranquility and order. In his crisis, here comes Mom with her assurance of just that. But she cannot guarantee everything will be OK beyond that moment. The child will continue to face danger and stress. Life happens. Yet there remains something true about her words. In God’s time and in His way, everything WILL be OK. All of God’s children yearn for that.
In his book, Signals of Transcendence, Os Guinness writes about being born in China to missionary parents during WWII. It was a time when millions died in the Japanese invasion and the following communist revolution. His older and younger brothers died from hunger and disease. “My first ten years, to put it gently,” he writes, “were years of chaos, disorder, terror, fear, death, suffering, war, revolution, and loss. Everything was not alright.”
Yet in the midst of those trials, his parents’ faith in God remained. The same parents who lost two sons offered their remaining son a calm assurance. “Their faith gave them rock-solid grounds for trusting in the ultimate goodness of life and existence, despite the horror and sorrow of the immediate situation,” he writes. “The final reality behind the universe is God, who is love, and who has a great heart for humans who He has created in His own image.”
A mother’s intuition gives her reason to comfort her child saying, “Everything will be OK.” A mother’s faith offers her child the hope that tranquility and protection await those who believe, though we remain in the valley of the shadow for now. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want…He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul…Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me” (Psa. 23:1-4).