As most of you know, every Thursday, I drive to my parents’ home to have breakfast with them. We eat English muffins with peanut butter, drink the Starbucks coffee that I pick up on the way, and talk about all kinds of things. Sometimes they even indulge me and allow me to do balance and strength-training exercises with them. One of the greatest things about my parents is that they love to talk. I also love how my dad always makes the same joke, week after week, about how I “suck all the air out of the room” with my very long-winded stories (with my louder-than-the average-bear voice). I always giggle, knowing deep down that I got that long-windedness straight from him. And I’m glad that I did. It’s one of the many things I am learning to really love about myself.

This week, as I drove home from my Thursday morning breakfast, my mind drifted back to my childhood home at 5156 Revere Road. I didn't realize it back then, but there was always this unspoken knowing in our home that everything always works out—that no matter how something looks in the moment, everything REAL is always deeply OK.

This wasn't something that I ever heard explicitly—in those exact words—but my parents LIVED it and they modeed it effortlessly.

Everything real is OK.

I remember watching them go through some remarkably challenging times over the course of my eighteen years at home. There were unexpected financial crises, illnesses, loss, grief, and a myriad of other things that most people in our culture might describe as “awful” or even “unbearable.” And yet, I don’t recall either of my parents ever buying into that cultural narrative. There was always a very quiet, steady expression of what I can only describe now as childlike faith. They seemed somewhat unflappable by the storms of life. Their roots ran deep in the soil.

Once when Pete and I were navigating a pretty steep and unexpected financial crisis during the 2008 crash, I remember being mesmerized by the belief, “This is catastrophic.”

I went to my parents’ house crying. And they both smiled, unaffected by my dramatic perception of reality. Not in a dismissive way, but in that same “knowing” way that, no matter what something looks like on the surface, everything REAL is OK.

“Do you love Pete?” was their question.

“Of course I do.”

“Does Pete love you?” they asked.

“Yes.”

“OK, then, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go take our three granddaughters to the park to play. None of that costs you a dime.”

Our financial difficulties of 2008 did not go away during that season, but our experience of it changed entirely.

The outside conditions looked exactly the same. The mounting debt was there. The not-knowing how we’d pay all the bills was there. The reality of three small children to care for was there. But WE were OK. The shift was completely internal.

The same thing happened when my sister Amy received word that her husband Jon had been killed in action in the war in Iraq. Amy was in her twenties and had a 13-month old baby. In the hours, days, weeks, and months that followed, my parents were the steady hands. They were the Light in the room when everything felt heavy and dark. I remember when my dad took on the job of going through the autopsy report that was mailed to my sister. At the time, Amy simply could not bear to look at it. In her own words, she explained it this way: “Dad was able to reframe my original narrative of what Jon went through and what he looked like (after he was killed), by giving me more digestible information. I had all the worst-case scenarios in my head, but Dad offered me truthful information in a way that I could really hear it.”

In the midst of unimaginable loss, my dad held the details of Jon’s passing without collapsing into the narrative of it. Similarly, my mom cried when she cried. She felt frustration and overwhelm when those things moved through her. But throughout that time, there was something much greater holding all of it: “Even this does not dismantle our OK-ness. Even in grief and loss, what is real is not shaken.”

There were, of course, very real moments of overwhelm. There were very real moments of heart-shattering grief.

But somehow, there was a gentle, stable background hum running through it all, playing the nonsensical, illogical melody, All is Well.

Nothing REAL—Not Love, Peace, Joy, nor Laughter—can ever been touched. They can be veiled for a while, for sure. But they can never be taken away.

Even in those early days after Jon’s burial, I remember moments of belly laughing with my sister and parents. I remember moments of pure lightness and delight. How was that possible? I don’t know, but it helped fertilize that seed that had been planted in my childhood. Even when things seem awful or feel awful, there is a felt-sense knowing that there is another reality happening at the very same time. I don’t need to understand it or even feel it or make sense of it. Being open to it is enough.

The outside circumstances of life don’t have to change for there to be a simple openness to the possibility that everything real is OK. Sometimes, that alone, changes everything.