It’s gonna be OK.

“It’s gonna be OK,” I said, hugging hard, trying to send hope from my heart to hers. 

“When?” Anguish poured out through a cracked voice and salty tears. 

“I don’t know, but it’s gonna be OK.” 

It could easily have been a platitude—a polite remark hastily sent to fill the awkward silence that thickens the air, choking even the most sympathetic among us when human suffering is laid bare and there are no words. 

In another time and place, the phrase might’ve sounded tinny, even to my own ears. Like a penny tossed into a deep well or token words flung haphazardly into the abyss of another person’s unfathomable loss. 

But when I said “it’s gonna be OK”, I spoke as one who knows that sickening feeling that rises like bile when death lands a left hook to the stomach and you still haven’t caught your breath.

I remember the gut punch, but I also recall the first time the phone rang and my heart didn’t leap with anxiety. Or the morning that I woke up and realized that the undercurrent of sadness, my constant companion as one day blurred into the next, had settled into contentment somewhere along the way. 

I still don’t know the answer to when it will all be OK, but I’ve learned a lot about why it will be OK. Why it already is OK, even as we long to experience the fullness of that reality. 

I wear the answer on my right wrist—two silver bracelets that serve as a constant reminder to live with both the cross and the empty tomb in my line of sight. It’s gonna be OK, because Friday didn’t last forever. Sunday came and Jesus is risen. He is risen indeed, and the grave where death made its final stand? That stands vacant, now and for all eternity:

“He is not here, for he has risen, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.”–Matthew 28:5-6 (ESV)

I recently added a third bracelet to remind me about Saturday and how God’s grace sustains, even when the sun has yet to break across the eastern sky on Resurrection Day. I wanted a shiny, sparkling, visible reminder—something to spur me on through the messy and the mundane. A symbol of how trust is just as vital in the middle as it is in the moment of crisis or when you’re standing on the verge of a miracle. 

Maybe trust is even more important in the in between. It’s there, in the place of “not yet” and “stay faithful”, that Christ is formed in us. In No Man’s Land—where prayers still wait for answers, dreams lay dormant, and disappointment litters a desolate wasteland—that’s where pressure makes diamonds and faith is purified like refined gold. 

“Suffering is never for nothing,” wrote Elisabeth Elliot, a woman who returned to the Ecuadorian jungle to live out the gospel alongside the tribe of people who’d killed her husband. Drawing a circle around everything from burnt roast and overflowing washing machines to cancer diagnoses, she offered the following definition: “Suffering is having what you don’t want or wanting what you don’t have.” 

When I take an honest survey of my 39 years, I recognize that the greatest transformation in me has come as I received the grace to offer my darkest days and deepest pain to God, believing that he would deal with me faithfully. And he has. Always. 

These days, I’m finding that tragic loss isn’t the only kind of suffering that shapes human beings, for better or for worse. Trials are formative, whether big or small. When we don’t get what we want. When we do get what we never asked for. The shape we end up in depends on the hands we let hold us. Because those are the hands that will mold us.

Trials are formative, whether big or small. When we don’t get what we want. When we do get what we never asked for. The shape we end up in depends on the hands we let hold us. Because those are the hands that will mold us.

From minor annoyances to life-altering calamities and everything in between, I get to decide whether to clutch things into my own feeble fingers or entrust them to the Father’s strong and steady grasp. To choose the latter is to embrace a cross-shaped existence that anticipates resurrection life, living in it even now. It means surrendering to The Refiner—the God who brings gold out of fire.

And it’s gonna be OK.

“I will bring that group through the fire and make them pure. I will refine them like silver and purify them like gold. They will call on my name, and I will answer them. I will say, ‘These are my people,’ and they will say, ‘The LORD is our God.’”–Zechariah 13:9 (NLT)