Does everything happen for a reason?

"By his wounds we are healed...but that are our wounds, too. The great artists have gained their wholeness through wounds..."
        --Madeleine L'Engle

A friend of mine wrote the other day asking, “Does everything happen for a reason?” I wrote him back and said that surely all the terrible things that happen do not happen for a reason. I told him that I have heard this old cliché at more funeral homes than I would like to remember. Another version of the same words is: “Everything works together for good…” which comes from Paul’s book of Romans. This is a partial truth—and partial truths are always dangerous. The real translation of that verse is that: “In everything God works together for good…” No—everything does not work together for good. All the evil in the world is surely not good by any stretch of the imagination. And yet—in the pain and suffering of life I believe we do not stand alone. I hang on to those wonderful words in the book of Hebrews: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” (Heb. 4.15-16)

Bono spoke at the 54th Annual Prayer Breakfast in Washington and said words that help me when I struggle with the problem of suffering. “The one thing on which we can all agree, all faiths and ideologies, is that God is with the vulnerable and poor. God is in the slums, in the cardboard box where the poor play house. God is in the silence of a mother who has infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war. God is in the debris of wasted opportunity and lives and God is with us if we are with them.”