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

by Kate Bowler

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.

It will not be the life that I promised to my husband. It is a poor imitation of the future I had planned. Lord, take this cancer away. Save me. Let me be a wife and mom and professor who loves you and lives to tell of your glory.

The promise of heaven to me is this: someday I will get a new set of lungs and I will swim away. But first I will drown.

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.

Infertility and disability should have taught me how to surrender, taught me how little I can control the conditions of my own happiness. Instead, that helplessness has only thickened my resolve to salvage what I can from the wreckage.

They will carry my death in their checkbooks, vacations deferred, sleepless nights, and the silence of Sunday morning prayers when there is no daughter left to pray for. I am the death of their daughter. I am the death of his wife. I am the end of his mother. I am the life interrupted. Amen.

I have been all kinds of cheery. But positivity has become a burden. And it’s a burden I assumed when I decided that, in the darkness of Advent, I would save myself.

“See?” I say to my dad. “I’m not a normal person.” “No,” he says softly, reaching out to pull me to him. “You’re a superhero. But I wish you didn’t have to be.”

The pain of the world is being calculated, and according to some, compassion can be doled out only by the teaspoon.

When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God.

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.

“Everyone is trying to Easter the crap out of my Lent,”

We would need to prepare to think beyond “cured” and “dying” and think, instead, about how to get me from one good outcome to another.

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

Plans are made. Plans come apart. New delights or tragedies pop up in their place. And nothing human or divine will map out this life, this life that has been more painful than I could have imagined. More beautiful than I could have imagined.

5. “Oh, my friend, that sounds so hard.” Perhaps the weirdest thing about having something awful happen is the fact that no one wants to hear about it. People tend to want to hear the summary but they don’t usually want to hear it from you. And that it was awful. So simmer down and let them talk for a bit. Be willing to stare down the ugliness and sadness. Life is absurdly hard, and pretending it isn’t is exhausting.