“Everything Happens for a Reason”

Does it? Really?

I heard this statement a handful of times over the course of the birth of a long-awaited child in early February. It related mostly to the challenges of long distance travel, but as I kept hearing it, I kept wondering (to myself), “really?”

As I rolled that all too common thought over in my mind I was surprised it had come from the lips of friends with whom I thought I shared a particular theological view. It’s nothing we’ve ever discussed, and perhaps they didn’t mean what I took it to mean, but it did give me pause.

Does everything happen for a reason?

Do I think everything happens for a reason?

I don’t. In thinking long and hard about theodicy I have come to  believe, at least for now, that sometimes life just happens. Given the parameters of this place and this time, a lot of life just happens. Given gravity, things fall down. Given submersion under water, people drown. I don’t think God caused my father’s cancer, nor do I think he caused my colleague’s murder. I don’t think God was responsible for the death of our friends’ infant son, nor the Japanese tsunami. Just like knowing CEOs delegate means I don’t think the CEO of an international conglomerate controls the daily cafeteria menu, I don’t think God micro-manages his creation such that “everything happens for a reason.” God’s delegation of responsibility to man indicates he has relinquished some of his control. Just like God lets gravity control some things I believe he lets man control some things – like whether I put my left sock on before my right; like whether I will respond to his love or not. Given a universe established according to his laws and love, sometimes cold germs get passed. Sometimes planes are late. Sometimes tectonic plates move.

But in the midst of life “just happening” is Emmanuel. In the midst of life’s happenings is the God who never leaves nor forsakes, the God who alone redeems. And given a God of love and relationship this makes sense. Given a “control-freak-God” we would have to say “everything happens for a reason.”  But this quickly makes God responsible for evil and this is not who God has revealed himself to be.

I understand when brothers and sisters talk of the comfort they receive from believing God is in control of everything that happens, that nothing befalls them that God doesn’t allow. I have no doubt that they mean well, but telling the freshly bereaved parents of an infant child that “this is all in God’s plan,” and “everything happens for a reason” is an unspeakable horror, an egregious heresy. To hold this abhorrent belief is to make God alone responsible for every damnable event of human history. That God will bring good out of it doesn’t mean God caused it, either actively or passively. It does mean that God is the faithful redeemer, exactly who he revealed himself to be.

We tend to major in the minors, to get stuck on the “why is this happening?”  But there is often no answer for the why questions. Sure, sometimes there is. As my late father-in-law smoked a pack of Camels a day for 50 years, he knew why he was succumbing to lung cancer.

God has not revealed himself to be the god of “everything happens for a reason.”

God has revealed himself to be the one who loves and redeems, the one who can bring good out of even that which he does not cause, even that which he is not responsible for, even the most horrific evil conceivable.

This is who the God of all love has revealed himself to be. This is the God who calls to us and woos us.