Recently, I went back to Julian of Norwich and her belief that “everything is going to be okay, and all sorts of things will be okay.” This line has become part of our collective memory. Even as headlines proliferate and patience wears thin, the rhythm remains steady.
To me, it keeps faith ironic rather than sentimental. Julian would understand. Her revelation that everything was going to be okay was more than comforting, it was shocking. “Oh, Lord,” she cried. “How can everything be okay?” She wrestled with that question for 15 years until she realized that the answer was not emotion but love, a divine force that accepts suffering without denying it.
Without that struggle, “everything will be fine” becomes a cliché. Its power lies in the life that proves it. It’s not a lullaby, it’s about daring to trust in love in the midst of destruction.
One critic recently wrote that Taylor Swift used to grow alongside her listeners, but now she seems to be breaking away from them. she is happy. Of course, I would like to quote someone’s profound words. “Despair makes me happy.” Kierkegaard said that people settle for an acceptable level of despair and call it pleasure.
Positive thinkers grow through misfortune and take no for an answer. yes. People with negative thoughts value humor. “Try, try, try again, then quit. There’s no point in being stupid about it,” said WC Fields.
Devotional author Martha Sponge writes about questioning, lamenting, and thanking God. Thank you for reminding me of what she believes in on my hardest days and on my best days. For her, the refrain of the dirge inspires trust. “Your faithfulness is great…Each morning I see new mercies.”
This refrain actually comes from a sad song about people facing tragedy, suffering, and their own wrongdoings. The Book of Lamentations is truly a lament. Broken joy. “Every morning I see a new headline.” Some mercy is hard to find.
The same question arises in another story. Despite all his faith and generosity, Job found himself in ashes, plagued by pain and emptiness. He echoed the dirge, saying, “Even when I cry out for help, God shuts out my prayers,” and in one translation adds, “Damn the day I was born.”
The question is not why bad things happen to good people. That’s why good things happen. Why is beauty and love worth dying for? Why courage, grace, and laughter persist. Why does music exist despite everything?
The story of Job warns against imposing our moral order on the world and blaming God for not adhering to our rules. Job’s friends make excuses and accuse him of not being truly faithful. But as Job discovered, evil flourishes not because God fails, but because the world is not designed to live up to our expectations.
This story asks what it means to be human when God is truly God. By revealing all of Creation’s incredible complexity, God said to Job:
In the end, Job is thankful that God has given him humility, which is like dust before God. Faced with a mystery, he realizes that judgment itself is mercy. Robert Frost imagined God saying: “That was the nature of the ordeal that you weren’t supposed to understand at the time. In order to have meaning, it had to seem meaningless.”
After the loss, words cannot be communicated, and “meaning” is only a small consolation. The important thing is simpler. It’s about holding hands, hugging, and having someone there for you.
Music helps. For me, it’s “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. The global hit transcends sentimentality with a timeless message of unity in difficult times. Withers wrote the song after leaving a small mining town and moving to Los Angeles, longing for the community he left behind.
He explained, “‘Lean on me’? My experience has been that some people actually do that.” “They’ll help you across racial lines. Someone who might stand in a mob that might lynch you if you offend them will help you in other ways.”
Years later, Wizards performed the song with Stevie Wonder and John Legend at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame here in Cleveland.
Sometimes you don’t know what to do or say and just being there can make a big difference. As Withers sang, “It won’t be long until I need someone to lean on too.”
Job forgave his friends. “Mercy never ends, but is renewed every morning.” Grace is amazing when joy is broken. We never doubt it more than when we doubt it.
TS Eliot understood Julian of Norwich, who wrote about the suffering of love in a world like ours.
everything will be fine
When the tongues of fire are folded
A knot of fire crowned with a crown
And the fire and the rose are one.
notes and reading
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Bill Withers with Stevie Wonder & John Legend – “lean on me” 4:32.
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Julian of Norwich – revelation of god’s love,transformer. And the edition. Barry Windito (2015), ch. 27. Julian received her ‘show’ in 1373 and spent some 15 years pondering its meaning before… long textIn it, she concludes that “love was what he meant.”
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See Mari Leonard Fleckman’s excellent post, “Julian of Norwich believed ‘all will be well.'” Would she say that today? ” Contains links to related articles america magazine (June 24, 2020). Available online. Leonard Fleckman is an assistant professor of Hebrew Bible in the Department of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross.
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“A new headline I saw” – Martha Sponge Daily devotional – United Church of Christ (October 10, 2025).
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“Do we like Taylor Swift even when she’s happy?” – Tyler Phogatt new yorker (October 5, 2025).
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soren kierkegaard deadly disease. Kierkegaard wrote that most people “despair without realizing that they are in despair” and therefore “settle for earthly pleasures and trifles and call it happiness.”
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“The more refined grow beyond despair…” – From “Why I Can’t Get on the Dwemer Train: Stop Whining About Western Civilization” – the druid stares back (Substack – October 10, 2025). – “Cultural detractors prey on Western civilization as some kind of all-encompassing evil. that’s bullshit” (druid teeth do not have happy In “kvetching” by Paul Kingsnorth. )
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robert frost – “God’s Word to Job” from mask of reason (1945).
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TS Eliot – From the last stanza of “Little Gidding,” the fourth part of a larger work. Quartet.
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From comedic to grim, or both, for grace, memories, or love that endures amidst loss, check out these novels: Caoilinn Hughes, wild laugh (2020); Marilyn Robinson lira (2014); and Kazuo Ishiguro, buried giant (2015)—or Lawrence Stern’s tristram shandya whole game of comic elegance and philosophical melancholy began. More gruesomely, Raskolnikov’s salvation at the end of Dostoyevsky’s novel is crime and punishment It makes no sense. The most important mysteries, from love to forgiveness to faith itself, lie beyond the reach of logic.
“The book of Job has survived because it views the universe in a strange rather than a rational way, and its spectacular absurdity is worthy of awe. Job’s friends preach optimism, like 18th-century thinkers. Job turns to pessimism, like 19th-century thinkers. But God answers with a mystery, and for the first time Job is comforted.”
—GK Chesterton, “Leviathan and Hook,” The Speaker, September 9, 1905; ChestertonBob Blaisdell (2015).
scandal of democracy
truth of matter
Approximately 2+2=5
Source: 2 + 2 = 5 – williamgreen.substack.com
