It’s okay to not be okay. I’ll repeat it for the people in the back. There are going to be days, and maybe even seasons, you’re not putting on a smile that stretches from ear to ear. People may ask where the once ever-present accessory went in the form of “Are you okay?” You might not be, and that’s okay.

It is possible to appreciate who Jesus is, love him, and continue to “get” all the fruitful clichés we had embedded into our heads, while struggling to have your heart beat the same words. That distance is a treacherous one—which of course, I am referring to the distance between your head and your heart. That distance is the difference between understanding something and believing it, hearing something and knowing it, finding out about something and finding hope in it.

For all my Bible-loving friends, I’d like to extend a little piece of humble truth that can truly make the leap from head knowledge to heart knowledge. Ecclesiastes 11:3 states,

“If clouds are full of water,

they pour rain on the earth.

Whether a tree falls

to the south or to the north,

in the place where it falls,

there it will lie.”

Before I continue, I would like to allow those words to sink in a bit. Remember that awesome chapter in the Bible when God looks at his children and says, “Everything will go perfectly in your life”? (I sure don’t.) It seems that we have the idea engrained that “living a life of faith” is synonymous with “living a life of little struggles.” This verse, as well as the rest of this chapter, stand as a reminder that that is not the case. Rain will come. Trees will fall. God is not going to stop those things from happening to his creation.

If we jump to Ecclesiastes11:5, we are hit with an even more humbling truth.

“As you do not know

the path of the wind,

or how the body is formed

in a mother’s womb,

so you cannot understand

the work of God,

the Maker of all things.”

Now, modern science can define exactly how those things occur. Yes, the intersections of heat and pressure create the wind. However, there still is the question of “why?” Solomon did not stress the specifics of the head knowledge within this verse because the key is the heart knowledge.

Solomon knew that what mattered more was that God is divine and we are not. True happiness and hope comes when we place our lives in the hands of the Almighty.

I will never understand why God does what he does, but I am finding that he is intentional with everything. The King of Kings will allow hurt, without intentions to hurt. Pain is never wasted. Nothing is wasted, and that is okay.