There’s a certain kind of phrase that rolls off the tongue easily when we don’t know what to say. “Everything happens for a reason.” “God has a plan.” “This must be part of something bigger.”
They’re meant to soothe, but too often, they wound.
I’ve sat with people who lost a child, who were betrayed by a spouse, who survived abuse, and I’ve watched well-meaning friends and family reach for those lines like band-aids. What they don’t realize is that they’re often just covering a gaping wound with sentiment.
Bad things happen… unspeakable things, and not everything that happens to us carries some divine blueprint behind it. If we start believing that every tragedy was designed or allowed by God, we turn the Creator into something monstrous. What kind of loving God would decide that a child’s death was necessary to make a parent more compassionate? Or that another person’s cancer was required to “teach us a lesson”? That theology is as twisted as it is lazy.
Suffering, loss, and evil exist. They’re part of the chaos of a broken world, not the curriculum of a cruel teacher. The test of faith isn’t in accepting that God caused our pain—it’s in what we do with it. Do we shut down, or do we search for meaning inside the ruins?
General Dwight D. Eisenhower, before he became Supreme Commander or President, was simply a father who adored his little boy, Doud Dwight “Icky” Eisenhower. In 1921, at just three years old, Icky died of scarlet fever. Eisenhower was shattered. In his diary, he wrote that losing his son was “a tragedy from which we never recovered.” There was no divine reason for that death. God didn’t take Icky so Eisenhower could someday lead armies across Europe. And yet, the empathy, steadiness, and moral gravity that Eisenhower carried through the horrors of World War II were shaped by that pain. The suffering did not come for a reason, but he found reason in it.
I’ve been spared that kind of heartbreak, and I’m thankful for it. I haven’t buried a child or endured catastrophic loss. But like so many people, I’ve lost jobs that I loved or didn’t get the job I wanted. I’ve lost friends and loved ones who died far too soon, and pieces of myself along the way. My eyesight has faded over the years, and I may face blindness in the future. Still, I cannot imagine a God who would inflict suffering, mine or anyone’s, as part of some master plan. That would make Him no better than the worst of mankind, willing to sacrifice the innocent for a lesson someone else needs to learn.
That’s the crucial distinction. Life isn’t a puppet show. We are not being toyed with for some cosmic lesson plan. The world is filled with randomness and free will, beauty and brutality, all tangled together. We can’t always make sense of it, but we can choose what we make from it.
When people say, “everything happens for a reason,” what they often mean is “I can’t bear to face how meaningless this might feel.” But faith and resilience aren’t about pretending there’s a reason; they’re about finding one. They’re about refusing to let suffering have the last word.
Resilience is born not from the belief that tragedy was meant to happen, but from the courage to wrestle purpose from the wreckage. The people who rise from loss aren’t the ones who believe their pain was ordained; they’re the ones who dig deep enough to turn it into compassion, conviction, or love.
So maybe next time someone suffers, instead of offering a hollow “everything happens for a reason,” we could say, “This should never have happened. But I’m here. And when you’re ready, we’ll find meaning in this together.”
That’s not cliché. That’s compassion.
Dr. Wesley