You Okay?

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I am very grateful for the time our family was all together for the Christmas holidays. Our house is quiet—and a bit lonely—this morning, but it is filled with good memories of our time together. We are missing the happy scenes, scenes like three young grandsons in sleeping bags on the floor of our room. Each of them was awake and enjoying their warm sleeping bags when I got up yesterday morning and stepped carefully to my closet. I bent down to hug the six-year-old first. The first grandchild words that greeted me were his. “Hello, Precious,” he said with a smile.

Around this time several years ago, we were at the home of our son’s family. Our oldest grandson was two and a half. Naturally every word that came out of his mouth was precious—at least to his Mama, Da-Da, Notty, and Little. During the previous few weeks, his cute words had transformed into adorable paragraphs.

Like all of us, our grandson already knew that it is “not good for the man to be alone.” He loved to be connected to people, including his doting grandparents.

Then the Lord God said,
“It is not good for the man to be alone;
I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
Genesis 2:18

One morning while we were there, Ray coughed in the kitchen and the little guy called out from the living room, “You okay?” A while later I bumped my foot and said, “Ouch.” Again he asked, “You okay?”

Every person needs others who ask: “You okay?” Each of us also needs people who pay such close attention that they don’t have to ask, but they ask anyway, just so we know they care.

As I looked for an image to illustrate today’s post, I typed in the word pensive in the online collection of Smithsonian images in the public domain. I found this c. 1820 portrait of Rosalba Peale by her father Rembrandt Peale.

The young pensive woman who seems alone in her thoughts, the child away at college, the recently divorced cousin, the mother of a newborn, the widow who just spent her first Christmas alone, the mother whose son is deployed, the happiest and busiest person you know–they all need others to ask, “You okay?” It is one of the most precious gifts we can give or receive.

 But I hope in the Lord Jesus
to send Timothy to you shortly,
so that I also may be encouraged
when I learn of your condition.
For I have no one else of kindred spirit
who will genuinely be concerned for your welfare.
Philippians 2:19-20

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