Everything Happens for a Reason

You know those little sayings that people have?  The ones they say to try to make you feel better about a situation...

"Everything happens for a reason"

"It's all part of God's plan" 

I hate those sayings.  They are really unhelpful when somebody is experiencing a trauma in their life, and sometimes they are downright painful to hear.  I know what you're thinking.   People who use those phrases mean well.  People really do believe these words, and they bring comfort to many.  But riddle me this: do they really believe there is someone up in the heavens, saying "Let's see, I think I'll give Alan lung cancer."  Or "Lynn needs to learn a lesson, so I'll make her give birth to her twins 3 1/2 months early.  Oh, and then after they have fought tooth and nail to survive, I'll take one of her twins away a year later."  Sorry, but I don't buy it.  I can speak from experience that when my own child was born almost 4 months prematurely, I wanted to throat punch people who told me that it happened for a reason.  Things like this don't happen for a pre-meditated reason.  There is no great plan.  Crappy things just happen sometimes. 

I talk with moms on a daily basis who are in the throes of fear and panic, watching their premature babies fight for every breath.  Preemie moms typically deal with an inordinate amount of guilt over their baby's early birth.  They constantly ask themselves if they could have done something different.  They feel that their own bodies failed their children.  They often ask what they did to deserve the punishment of watching their child fight for life.  They really don't need guilt being piled on by well meaning friends and family.  Unfortunately, that's exactly what happens very often.

Like I said, I understand that people are trying to be helpful, but it's up to the person in the trenches, the one going through the trauma, to decide if there is a reason for what they are experiencing.  As humans, we want to make sense of things.  Most of us find ways of learning from our experiences, even the bad ones.  But that doesn't usually happen until after the fact.  I think that when people say "everything happens for a reason" what they really mean is, "Sometime later, after you have gone through this, you will find a way to make this experience mean something."

Here's a perfect example.  I grew up with an absentee birth mother.  Long before my first birthday, I was living with my grandparents, and then by two years old my Dad and stepmother took custody of me.  I can count on one hand the number of times I saw or talked to my birth mother until I was 38 years old.  I grew up with serious abandonment issues.  I still have trust issues.  I still deal daily with self-esteem issues, and feelings of not being enough.  But, I have turned this experience into something that matters.  I chose to become an adoptive parent.  If I had not experienced all of the heart break I did as a child, I'm not sure I would have been moved to adopt.  I wouldn't have two of my amazing four boys.  So, in that sense, yes being abandoned happened for a reason.  But it's only in hindsight that I can see that.  When I was a teenager, going through the worst of it all, it would have fallen on deaf ears to have been told that it was going to be okay because it was all part of a bigger plan... that God was doing this to me on purpose. 

I guess the point of this is to caution you about these phrases that are both true and false at the same time.  Choose carefully when you say them to somebody.  From experience, I can tell you that in the middle of heartbreak and trauma is usually not the time.