The English mystic and Benedictine nun Juliana of Norwich (1342–1414) had reasons enough to worry. She lived during the Black Death that killed 75 million people in medieval Europe. Many people interpreted the bubonic plague as divine punishment, but not Juliana. In her unapologetically optimistic view of life, she believed that God loved every person and that he would redeem every tear. In her book of visions called Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love — by some accounts the first book published in English that was written by a woman — Juliana wrote one of the most well-known sentences in all of Christian history that's also the perfect antidote to worry.

In her thirteenth vision or "shewing," Juliana concluded that she was wrong to worry about the sins and sorrows of life. Jesus told her that these trials and tribulations were, in fact, "behovely" (from which we get our word "behoove"). Even our sins and anxieties are somehow incumbent uponus. They're part of our human story. Despite "all the pains that ever were, or ever shall be," Juliana believed that God longs to "comforteth readily and sweetly." He does so by reassuring us that, because of the certainty of his boundless love,

"All shall be well, and all shall be well,
and all manner of thing shall be well."