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

by Kate Bowler

Other people wanted to assure me that what I’d had was enough. “At least you have your son. At least you’ve had an amazing marriage.” I had been stripped down to the studs, and everything of worth I had accumulated was being appraised with a keen eye. I became certain that when I died some beautiful moron would tell my husband that “God needed an angel,” because God is sadistic like that. This is what I thought about sometimes. What people would say to the man with sandy hair and eyes I had loved since we were fifteen and thought we would never die.

They don’t expect God simply to be fair—they expect God to rain down blessings.

Fairness is one of the most compelling claims of the American Dream, a vision of success propelled by hard work, determination, and maybe the occasional pair of bootstraps.

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.

“You are perfect, my darling, just as you are. You are the gospel.”

Where she goes, I go, but we both look a little ridiculous.

Spiritual laws offer an elegant solution to the problem of unfairness. They create a Newtonian universe in which the chaos of the world seems reducible to simple cause and effect. The stories of people’s lives can be plotted by whether or not they follow the rules. In this world there is no such thing as undeserved pain. There is no word for tragedy.

There is a time to get, and a time to lose. A time to rend, and a time to sew. But at baby showers and dinners for job promotions,

I am bargaining.

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

These are my best hopes for you, that you press forward at last. I don’t know how to die, but I know how to press this crushing grief into hope, hope for them.

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.

did not tell them how few of their words are needed but how much their hands are wanted, a hand on my back as I tear up, a hand on my head for a soft prayer for healing.

When I feel I am fading away, these hands prop me up and make me new.

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.

Toban and I get into a stupid fight when he finds me eating a huge, puffy Rice Krispies Treat. Don’t I know that sugar causes cancer? He doesn’t even believe that food has caused my particular cancer, but all this talk of nutrition has infected him with a poisonous hope. Maybe I can be the cure.

St. Teresa of Avila once said: “We can only learn to know ourselves and do what we can—namely, surrender our will and fulfill God’s will in us.”

Cancer wants to take it all.

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