I don’t know if there’s anything more frustrating to hear when you’re going through something than “everything happens for a reason.” But the older I get, the more I see go wrong, and the more I grow in my faith, the more truth I think there is to it.
I think about COVID, I think about the 2020 election, I think about the decay and degeneracy all around us, I think about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, I think about what’s happened in my own life. There are times where I struggle to make sense of it, and as much as I hate to admit it, there are times where I feel like a victim.
I won’t pretend I’ve fully overcome those feelings, and the farther I get in my walk with God, the more I doubt anyone ever does. But something is changing, and now I find myself reaching an understanding that God truly is sovereign.
When you’re experiencing tragedy, pain, chaos, and evil it’s easy to doubt God. It’s easy to wonder where He is, what He’s doing, why He’s letting it happen. When it first starts, you might just think it’s a trial you have to overcome, and stand strong in your belief in God and His promises. But as it drags on…and on…and on…or the obstacles begin to pile one on top of the other, and nothing seems to give — no matter how hard you pray or how hard you try, a lot of us find ourselves asking those questions, and doubting His plan.
I think about how much COVID changed our lives and our world. The pandemic wasn’t particularly hard on me. I didn’t lose my job and I didn’t lose any loved ones. But a lot of people did. People lost their businesses, their livelihoods, family members, friends and freedom. And we saw the most violent and abominable power grab in history. We saw churches shut down and the elderly forced to die alone without funerals while they let criminals riot in the streets.
And they used COVID to justify massive mail-in voting efforts that made it easier for them to defraud the nation, and subvert the will of the American people.
I think about what a disaster Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been for this country. I think about them taking a sledge hammer to our already fragile post-COVID economy, blowing our border wide open, with a stronger and more visible commitment to transgender inclusion than our own military.
I think about how close Donald Trump came to being murdered. I think about the head turn that saved his life. I think about the Secret Service’s notorious and unprecedented “missteps.” I think about that rally being the only one CNN had ever live streamed. I think about how obvious it was that some of the most powerful people in the world wanted him killed on national television.
And it’s easy to feel like our country is falling apart with no rhyme or reason, and become filled with anxiety about what our future holds.
But how many people saw the government, the pharmaceutical industry and the political left for what they were, and never would have seen it if it weren’t for COVID?
How many people would have remained lifelong Democratic loyalists if it weren’t for the catastrophe that the Biden-Harris administration has been?
How many people looked around at the Sodom and Gomorrah that we’re becoming, and decided to start going back to church?
How many people were plotting and scheming to kill Trump, only to have their plans thwarted by what’s difficult to describe as anything but divine intervention?
Earlier this year, I had the worst black out of my life. I could only remember maybe the first 30 minutes of the evening. There was no paper trail. There was nothing on my bank statements that gave me any hints about where I’d gone or what I’d done. It terrified me. It happened two weeks after I was let go from my job of six years, and even though I was panicking internally about the situation, I was definitely putting on an air of nonchalance about it in public and around my friends. And the more time has passed, I wonder if I needed that to happen to realize early on that I was a mess, I wasn’t handling things nearly as well as I thought I was, and I needed to drastically reevaluate my relationship with intoxicants, especially while I was dealing with the stress of unemployment.
In the last year, I’ve also experienced betrayal and evil unlike anything I ever have – both romantically and platonically, and I think it’s the angriest and most confused I’d ever been with God.
I’ve had my heart broken before, and I’ve had friendships end before, but this was unlike anything I’d ever been through or even witnessed outside of television.
I literally didn’t know that adults behaved this way until it happened to me. And I didn’t understand why He would let these people into my life in the first place.
The human, stubborn, self-righteous, and wounded part of me was convinced these people were irredeemable reprobates that wouldn’t deserve urine from a hobo if they were on fire.
But the Holy Spirit reminded me that even if they were pathological liars, even if they were delusional hypocrites, even if they acted with no moral compass, good existed in them. I had seen it.
Maybe faintly, maybe barely, but it’s somewhere in there.
On the one hand, I don’t think we’re similar, at all. In my mind, comparing me to these people is like comparing Lindsay Lohan to Joseph Stalin. Sure, she’s made mistakes. But did anyone die? (They aren’t murderers as far as I know but I’m being dramatic to make a point)
But on the other hand, I know that we’re all worse than we like to think we are. I know that I’ve hurt God again, and again, and again. But He chooses to see a good in me that I don’t deserve. He chooses to see me not as my sin, not as my shortcomings, but as someone who is capable of doing the right thing no matter how many times I’ve done wrong. And I’m not as angry as I used to be, because I think the Lord let these people into my life so He could teach me to love like Him.
On the micro levels and the macro levels, I’m starting to believe that even if everything doesn’t happen for a reason, most things do. And that even when it seems like God has abandoned us as a people based on the political landscape or abandoned us as individuals based on our personal circumstances, He is with us, and our suffering is never in vain.
what do you think?