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

by Kate Bowler

But this is a book about befores and afters and how people in the midst of pain make up their minds about the eternal questions: Why? Why is this happening to me? What could I have done differently? Does everything actually happen for a reason? If I accept that what is happening is something I cannot change, can I learn how to let go?

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.

In a world of fair, nothing clung to can ever slip away.

My body was failing me, failing all of us. Pain rippled through my limp arms. I was no longer proof of anything that testified to the glory of God, at least not in the eyes of the people around me. I was nothing like a sign and a wonder. Instead, I was living in my parents’ basement, and I simmered with resentment. Wasn’t I better than this? “I used to be shiny,” I said to a friend with a sour laugh. “I really was pretty shiny at one point.”

There is something so American about the “show-and-tell” of our daily lives. A big house means you work hard. A pretty wife means you must be rich. A subscription to The New York Times shows you must be smart. And when you’re not sure, there will always be bumper stickers to point out who has the honor roll student and who finished a marathon.

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.

Mennonites are people with the land in their blood and a hopeless obsession with simplicity, frugality, pacifism, and Jell-O salads. I’m not Mennonite by birth, but I attended a Mennonite church, a Mennonite Bible camp, and a Mennonite wedding—my own. I married a gorgeous, square-jawed Mennonite boy when both of us were practically teenagers and he was still mildly enchanted by my propensity for spontaneous song.

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.

When will I realize that surrender is not weakness?

Each university has a chain of people accustomed to saying no or, as I am beginning to suspect, they are evil robots masquerading as humans programmed to decline your every reasonable request.

“Don’t worry,” says my dad, putting down his book. “Your mother and I have $140,000 in liquid assets.” I will only

find out later that my family have all appraised their homes and savings plans—every last one of them—to see what they can cobble together to save my life.

The thing I love most about my friends is summed up by their reaction to my ridiculous request. Later, one of them will tell me exactly what he had said to himself: “Thank God! Something I can do!” Their love has arms and legs and momentum. Their love has reach.

I walk past a gym and watch the women work out as if I’m an alien who crash-landed on a planet of the carefree and healthy. I know I am going to be getting chemotherapy no matter what, but when it was announced that I would be wearing a giant sack filled with chemotherapy fluid in a bag around my waist, attached to a giant needle that goes into the port beside my heart, I am just thrilled to be bringing fanny packs back into style.

But then Toban gave me the greatest speech ever given, which, looking back, I realize sounded a lot like the battle cry from Shakespeare’s Henry V (“We few! We happy few!”) but ended with “Look at them!” (He pointed dramatically through the window at the women taking the class.) “Do any of them look like they can crank out an enormous baby? Those little wimps? One lady just asked for filtered water, Kate. Filtered water!” I started to laugh, which meant I had started to breathe again. “You are going to go. back. in. there. and learn how to have. this. baby!” And then we marched back in there with Toban quietly percussing the theme song to Chariots of Fire.

“Why is everyone trying to teach us a lesson?” she asks, and we both feel tired just thinking about it.

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.

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.

Joy persists somehow and I soak it in. The horror of cancer has made everything seem like it is painted in bright colors. I think the same thoughts again and again: 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.

There is no life in general. Each day has been a collection of trivial details—little intimacies and jokes and screw-ups and realizations. My problems can’t be solved by those formulas—those clichés—when my life was never generic to begin with.

These memories would press her into periods of intermittent sorrow, and her boys remembered these, and how she’d go into her room and turn the key. I still wear her ring, a blossom of diamond flecks, which she meant for me. If she were here, she would understand the cost of living in the in-between.

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.

I have come to the end of what I know how to do. I know how to suffer. I know how to make the best of things. But I don’t know how to do the most basic thing—I don’t know how to stop.

My little plans are crumbs scattered on the ground. This is all I have learned about living here, plodding along, and finding God. My well-laid plans are no longer my foundation. I can only hope that my dreams, my actions, my hopes are leaving a trail for Zach and Toban, so, whichever way the path turns, all they will find is Love.

When someone is drowning, the only thing worse than failing to throw them a life preserver is handing them a reason.

The truth is that no one knows what to say. It’s awkward. Pain is awkward. Tragedy is awkward. People’s weird, suffering bodies are awkward. But take the advice of one man who wrote to me with his policy: Show up and shut up.