Three years ago Nathan Foster interviewed Miriam Dixon about Julian of Norwich. He introduced the conversation with words that ring even more true today: ​“I don’t know about you, but the world feels like it’s coming unglued.”

Julian’s fourteenth century world also was coming unglued.

She was six when the Black Death arrived in Norwich, England. The disease would go on to kill up to half of the city’s population, no doubt including some of her family members. While little of her life is known until age thirty when she fell ill and received her famous visions, it’s clear she lived amidst immense tragedy, pain, and civil unrest.

In one vision, she ponders a question most of us ask at one time or another: Wouldn’t it have been better if sin had been prevented in the beginning? Julian is best known by Jesus’ tender answer:

“It was necessary that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Those words take on more meaning and comfort when we see they weren’t a platitude penned from ease, but a ray of truth emerging from a dark time.

Still, in hard times we might ask, ​“Really, Jesus, all shall be well?”

I imagine Jesus looking at us, eyes ocean deep with empathy and goodness: ​“Yes, child, all shall be well.”