Everything is going to be ok

​My great grandfather's name was Evans Elliott. He was the coolest guy with the coolest name I ever met. Not just met, I was blessed to grow up with him right across the rural Ohio highway from the house I grew up in.

When I teach or do presentations on the developing brain, and talk about how much our adult brain reflects the wiring of our childhood brains, I always say my brain is wired to see the world as "everything's going to be okay."

These days I'm pretty sure that's not as much a me thing or a God thing as much as it is an Evans Elliott thing.

I suppose a lot of that is because my great grandmother was a compulsive worrier; all Evans Elliott had to do was sit next to her and, relatively speaking, he'd look like the calm in the storm.

But he is also a man who survived the great depression. In my eyes, though, he always seemed to have thrived it and not survived it.

This is a man who could reach deep inside a ewe and pull a lamb out like he was calmly pulling a candy bar out of a vending machine - me nearby wanting NOTHING to do with that candy bar - and moments later he'd sit there in the afterbirth covered straw feeding that lamb a bottle.

Kind of like that's just how life goes, mess to beauty.

I remember a couple of times vividly when the man, his cheek full of chewing tobacco, told me everything is going to be OK. And walked off as if he'd just revealed nothing more meaningful than the obvious.

I think more, though, I remember the feeling of everything's going to be OK that came with his presence.

Presence CAN be everything is going to be OK.

The day he died, I leaned on an old steel gate that opened into the pasture where I often watched him feed sheep or drive a tractor off to tend to the nearby fields. In that moment, I knew if I ever had a boy, I'd name him Elliott.

Or a girl.... 🤷‍♂️

17 years ago today, Elliott was born, with as the doctors put it, little more than a heartbeat. The doctor worked furiously to save him and collapsed his lung in the process.

In that moment, I remember saying the first prayer of my life. Oh, I'd said plenty of "our fathers" and "hail marys" and "the salvation prayer" and tons of scripted conversations with God we're taught or coerced into having over the years.

But this was a different kind of conversation. This was me and God and my own free will in the hall of a hospital that smelled and felt too much like death to me. Without my script, the only words I could come up with were, "God, I have no idea what you're up to here. But I trust you. I trust that everything is going to be OK."

Looking back, I don't know if I was having a conversation with God or Evans Elliott or how much they were even different that day. In the end, though, I felt God saying I know you trust that.

And it will be OK.

The past several years I've had to lean on that conversation a lot. I've had to lean on that reminder a lot. That it's going to be OK.

I don't suppose there's a greater reminder on earth than looking at my 17 year old son, a deep thinker, compassionate, a crazy New York Giants fan, and a kid who doesn't seem to worry too much.

A kid who always seems to walk around looking like it's all going to be OK.

There are many days lately when I bow my head, just me and God and my own freewill, and I say, "God, I have no idea what you're up to here. But I trust you. I trust that everything is going to be OK."

Today, I add, "I thank you God for the kid who once had little more than a heartbeat, for the kid who many days keeps this heart of mine beating, beating with more belief than I've ever had, that everything is going to be OK."

And today, I will also add, what his mom did that day will always be the most heroic thing I've ever witnessed. Our relationship these days is simply mom and dad, but there will never be anything simple about my relationship to that mom's heroism.

God breathed life into so many that day through baby Elliott. It will never be lost on me that he breathed it through her.

Happy Birthday to my baby Elliott. The one whose mere presence reminds me everything is going to be OK.

Because presence can be - everything's going to be OK.

(re-written from 2021