Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

by Kate Bowler

They are teaching me the first lesson of my new cancer life—the first thing to go is pride.

Live without forevers that don’t always come.

He wanted one last, hard cry, but his lungs were so filled with fluid that he couldn’t catch his breath. So the nurses were called and they managed to slowly drain his lungs so the boy could sob until that one horrible and satisfying full stop.

I used to think that grief was about looking backward, old men saddled with regrets or young ones pondering should-haves. I see now that it is about eyes squinting through tears into an unbearable future. The world cannot be remade by the sheer force of love. A brutal world demands capitulation to what seems impossible—separation. Brokenness. An end without an ending.

In a theological universe in which everything you do comes back to you like a boomerang—for good or for ill—those who die young become hypocrites or failures. Those loved and lost are just that, those who have lost the test of faith.

“I have known Christ in so many good times,” she said, sincerely and directly. “And now I will know Him better in His sufferings.”

I try to say something about dying in a world where everything happens for a reason.

Um, okay, can’t they both be bad? The pain of the world is being calculated, and according to some, compassion can be doled out only by the teaspoon.

There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain.

It seemed too odd and too simplistic to say what I knew to be true—that when I was sure I was going to die, I didn’t feel angry. I felt loved.

Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.

This is the problem, I suppose, with formulas. They are generic. But there is nothing generic about a human life.

just the ponderous pace of people singing, praying, and keeping their kids quiet during the sermon. The magic fades and reveals the church for what it is: a plain people in a boring building who meet until kickoff.

If I were to invent a sin to describe what that was—for how I lived—I would not say it was simply that I didn’t stop to smell the roses. It was the sin of arrogance, of becoming impervious to life itself. I failed to love what was present and decided to love what was possible instead. I must learn to live in ordinary time, but I don’t know how.

“Don’t skip to the end,” he said, gently. “Don’t skip to the end.”