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

by Kate Bowler

It was certainty, plain and simple, that God had a worthy plan for my life in which every setback would also be a step forward. I wanted God to make me good and make me faithful, with just a few shining accolades along the way. Anything would do if hardships were only detours on my long life’s journey. I believed God would make a way. I don’t believe that anymore.

I plead with a God of Maybe, who may or may not let me collect more years. It is a God I love, and a God that breaks my heart. Anyone who has lived in the aftermath of something like this knows that it signifies the arrival of three questions so simple that they seem, in turn, too shallow and too deep. Why? God, are you here? What does this suffering mean?

A suffering believer is a puzzle to be solved. What had caused this to happen?

What would it mean for Christians to give up that little piece of the American Dream that says, “You are limitless”? Everything is not possible. The mighty Kingdom of God is not yet here. What if rich did not have to mean wealthy, and whole did not have to mean healed? What if being people of “the gospel” meant that we are simply people with good news? God is here. We are loved. It is enough.

We both grew up with unlimited hope that life was fair. But that confidence began to crumble in our hands as our twenties wore on. I lost control of my body. She lost a marriage when her husband’s immigration visa didn’t come through. Together, we lost faith in the whole concept of things being fair.

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.

From the Presbyterian point of view I am a passive vehicle of God’s grace. Like the lamb in Sunday school artwork, I am an adorable woolly passenger on Jesus’ shoulders. To believers in the prosperity gospel, surrender sounds like defeat. They write books with titles like Deal with It! to remind readers that there is nothing so difficult that God cannot accomplish it, and that you, sir or ma’am, had better get cracking.

All I know is that a cheerful person can look a lot like someone with total mastery over everything that would weigh a lesser person down.

Control is a drug, and we are all hooked, whether or not we believe in the prosperity gospel’s assurance that we can master the future with our words and attitudes.

The hardest lessons come from the Solutions People, who are already a little disappointed that I am not saving myself. “Keep smiling! Your attitude determines your destiny!”

crushed by the weight of solution-focused theology, have been unable to grieve.

I receive so many stories like this, the laments of bereaved parents who are asked to keep a smile on their faces. There is a trite cruelty in the logic of the perfectly certain. Those letter writers are not simply trying to give me something. They are also, always, tallying up the sum of my life, sometimes for clues, sometimes for answers, always to pronounce a verdict. But I am not on trial.

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

I read an article about how people in grief swear because they feel the English language has reached its limit in a time of inarticulate sorrow. Or at least that is what I tell people when I am casually dropping f-bombs over lunch as I explain the mysteries of Lent.

We found an Ash Wednesday service at a local Catholic church because I have always loudly proclaimed that Catholics, of all God’s children, are wonderful at being sad.

I found myself on Good Friday with nothing to do but hope that people might be free to talk on the darkest day of the Christian year. Seeing nothing on the church websites, I spent the afternoon calling around to see which service I could attend. It was awkward. Most were not holding services, but I was encouraged to come back on Sunday, when Jesus was risen.

“Everyone is trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent,” I say to my friends through gritted teeth and tears.

We want to tell ourselves a story—any story—so we can get back to certainty,”