Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

“Everything happens for a reason.”

People often say that when something has gone badly wrong.

Usually they are trying to help.

Maybe a relationship ended. Someone got sick. There was an accident. A job disappeared. Someone died.

And somewhere in the middle of all that pain, somebody says:

“Everything happens for a reason.”

But what do we actually mean by that?

If we mean that everything has a cause, then yes.

Things happen because something caused them.

But usually that is not really what we are asking.

What we mean is:

Was this meant to happen?

Was there some deeper purpose behind it?

Is there a reason that will eventually make sense of what happened?

And my answer to that is:

No. I don’t believe everything happens because it was meant to happen.

Sometimes an accident is just an accident

In June 2024, I dropped off a rental car at Brisbane Airport and walked from the car rental area to meet a mate so we could head to a youth camp OAC was running that week.

While walking along the footpath, I turned a corner and stepped onto an uneven section of concrete.

And down I went...

The path had stones embedded in the surface, presumably to make it less slippery.

Unfortunately, those stones also made a pretty terrible surface to land on.

I tore five ligaments in my left ankle.

I broke my right leg in two places.

My right knee hit the concrete hard enough to leave significant scarring.

At the hospital, I was told I had sprained my left ankle and torn a muscle in my right calf.

So, after being patched up and given some crutches, I continued on to an OAC camp called Worldview.

And in one of those weird ironies, my job at the camp was to present a session on suffering, which I did sitting on the side of an armchair in constant pain.

At that point, I still had no idea how badly injured I really was.

The correct diagnosis came after I returned home and got proper scans.

Eventually my left ankle required major reconstruction.

More than two years later, I still wear an AFO brace and live with daily pain.

There is no neat ending to this story yet.

Some well-meaning people have tried to tell me that God did it and why.

Maybe God was trying to slow me down and force me to rest.

Maybe he wanted to teach me something.

Maybe he was trying to get me to focus on him more.

But I don’t believe God tripped me over at Brisbane Airport to teach me something.

I think I stepped on uneven concrete and had a terrible accident.

Sure, there is some irony in teaching about suffering while carrying injuries I did not yet fully understand.

But irony is not the same thing as purpose.

A cause is not the same as a purpose

Imagine someone who has been drinking gets behind the wheel of a car and causes an accident.

There are reasons why the accident happened.

Alcohol impaired their judgement and reaction time.

They chose to drive.

Maybe addiction was involved.

Maybe there was a personal crisis.

Maybe they were angry, depressed or simply reckless.

All of those things might help explain:

How did this happen?

But they do not necessarily answer:

What was this supposed to achieve?

That is a very different question.

Sometimes terrible things happen because someone uses their freedom to make a terrible choice.

The Bible calls that sin — choosing our own way rather than God’s — and our sin can cause pain not only for us, but for other people as well.

Sometimes people make decisions without thinking very much at all.

Sometimes their thinking is affected by alcohol, drugs, anger, fear, exhaustion or pressure.

And sometimes there is no bad moral choice behind what happened.

Something breaks.

Someone falls.

A body becomes sick.

Weather becomes destructive.

A piece of equipment fails.

Sometimes things just go wrong.

That does not mean there must be a hidden reason behind them.

We should be careful about explaining somebody else’s pain

One of the things Christians can do badly is tell people what God was apparently trying to achieve through their suffering.

“God did this because...”

“God needed to get your attention.”

“God is teaching you something.”

“You’ll understand why one day.”

Usually people mean well.

But unless God has actually revealed why something happened, we should be very careful about telling somebody else what God was supposedly trying to achieve through their suffering.

More than two years after my accident, I still cannot tell you what lesson God supposedly needed five torn ligaments, a broken leg, surgery and years of pain to teach me.

And I am not going to invent one.

That does not mean I think God is absent.

It means I do not have to make God responsible for the accident in order to believe he can be present in what happens next.

Redemption is different

This is where Christianity gives me a different kind of hope.

God is a God of redemption.

Redemption means God can take something that was genuinely painful, damaging and unnecessary and bring something good from it.

But whatever good comes later does not make the original event good.

Imagine someone loses a person they love.

Years later, their experience of grief might help them understand and care for someone else going through the same thing.

That can be genuinely meaningful.

But it does not mean the person they loved needed to die so they could become more compassionate.

That turns redemption backwards.

God does not need to have caused something in order to redeem it.

And redemption does not mean eventually discovering that the terrible thing was secretly good after all.

It means God can take something that was not good and refuse to let it have the final word.

What about “God works everything for good”?

There is a Bible verse people sometimes use when talking about this.

Paul writes:

Notice what it does not say.

It does not say:

Everything is good.

It does not say:

Everything that happens was necessary.

And it does not say:

Every painful event happened because God had some hidden lesson in mind.

It says that in all things God works for good.

That is different.

God can work in what has happened.

He can work in what follows.

He can take something that was never good in the first place and still bring something good from it.

That is redemption.

But what if I still can’t see the redemption?

That is where my own story currently sits.

I still wear the brace.

I still have pain.

The accident still affects what I can do.

And I still cannot point to some deeper meaning and say:

That is why it happened.

Maybe one day I will see something good that God has brought from it.

Maybe some part of it will shape how I understand pain or how I respond to somebody else who is suffering.

I honestly don’t know yet.

I have hope that God will redeem something from it.

But I do not have certainty about what that will look like.

And that’s okay.

I’m trusting that the story isn’t finished yet.

That is very different to saying everything happens for a reason.

Hope does not require a neat explanation

Maybe something has happened in your life that still makes no sense.

Maybe people have tried to give you explanations that never really fitted.

Maybe you have been waiting for the day when everything suddenly makes sense and you finally understand why it had to happen.

Maybe there was no hidden reason.

Maybe somebody made a terrible decision.

Maybe something failed.

Maybe illness came.

Maybe it really was just an accident.

Christian hope does not require us to pretend otherwise.

It gives us something different.

God can still meet us in what happened.

He can work in what comes next.

He can redeem things that never needed to happen in the first place.

And ultimately, Christianity says suffering, evil and death will not have the final word.

So perhaps the question is not always:

“What was the reason this happened?”

Maybe, for now, it is simply:

“What might God still do with what happened?”