You Don't Have to Believe "Everything Happens for a Reason"

If you've lost someone, you've heard it. Maybe at the funeral. Maybe in the casserole-and-condolences week that followed. Maybe from someone who loves you and simply didn't know what else to say.

Everything happens for a reason.

It's meant as comfort. For most grieving people, it doesn't land that way. And on this week's episode of Mosaic, I make the case that the phrase isn't actually what the Catholic Church teaches about suffering — even though it circulates in Catholic circles as if it were doctrine.

What we believe about why suffering happens shapes everything: how we pray, how we grieve, whether we feel obligated to find a reason for our pain, and whether we secretly wonder if God orchestrated our worst days on purpose.

Those aren't small questions. As women of faith, we deserve real answers — not platitudes, not bumper stickers.

What the phrase actually gets wrong

The instinct behind "everything happens for a reason" is a good one. The people who say it to you are almost always trying to offer something — to suggest there's an order to things, that what happened wasn't just pointless tragedy. That's a kind impulse, and I want to be fair to it.

The problem is what the phrase implies once you follow it to its logical end: that God planned this. That a specific death, a specific loss, was scripted in advance because some good thing was supposed to come out of it.

That is not Catholic teaching.

The Church teaches that God is not the author of evil. He doesn't cause death, disease, tragedy, or loss. Those things exist because we live in a fallen world — one fractured by sin, marked by fragility and mortality. God permits suffering within the freedom he gave creation. He does not cause it the way a screenwriter writes the next scene.

Theology has a name for this distinction: God's positive will (what he actively causes) versus his permissive will (what he allows within a broken world). It's a subtle distinction on paper. It matters enormously when you're the one grieving.

Consider Job. He loses his children, his health, his livelihood — and his friends show up with explanations. This happened because you sinned. God is teaching you something. Everything happens for a reason. By the end of the book, God rebukes those friends directly, telling them they have not spoken rightly about him. The man who gets vindicated is the one who refused the easy explanation — who sat in the ashes and said, I do not understand this. The Book of Job is, in a sense, Scripture's own argument against "everything happens for a reason."

A companion phrase that also needs to go

While I'm at it: "God doesn't give you more than you can handle."

People say this constantly to widows, and I understand the kindness behind it. But it's a misquote. The verse it comes from — 1 Corinthians 10:13 — is about temptation, not suffering or loss. It has nothing to do with grief.

And beyond the misquote, sometimes life genuinely gives us more than we can handle. That's why we need God, community, the sacraments, and each other. Telling a grieving woman that God calibrated her suffering to her exact capacity isn't comfort — it's a setup for shame the moment she can't get out of bed. That phrase says: you're failing. God thought you could do this, and you can't. That is not the gospel.

But doesn't Scripture say our days are numbered?

Fair question. Psalm 139 says all our days were written in God's book before one of them came to be. Job 14 says our months are determined. Doesn't that sound like "everything happens for a reason"?

It doesn't — and understanding why actually gives us something sturdier than the platitude does.

When Scripture says God numbers our days, it's speaking to his sovereignty and foreknowledge — nothing happens outside his awareness. Your loved one's death didn't catch God off guard. Their life was not some cosmic accounting error. But sovereignty is not the same as authorship of evil. Catholic theology — following Aquinas — distinguishes between God as the primary cause of all existence, and the secondary causes through which specific events unfold: illness, accident, the fragility of a body in a fallen world. God didn't lose control when you lost someone. He also didn't design that specific death as a scripted step toward a predetermined purpose.

Jesus makes this distinction himself in Matthew 10: he doesn't say the Father drops the sparrow. He says the sparrow doesn't fall outside the Father's care. Providence and causation are different things. Both can be true at once: God held that day in his providence, and God did not invent that particular suffering as a means to an end.

Three truths, instead of a platitude

1. Suffering is real, and God does not pretend otherwise. Christianity doesn't explain pain away. At its center is a man on a cross crying out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? — God incarnate, in agony, feeling abandoned. The cross doesn't hand suffering a tidy explanation. It enters into it. If you're in a place where you can't pray, where God feels far away, where the pain has no words — that place has a name. It's called the way of the cross. Jesus walked it first.

2. God can bring good from suffering without having caused it. This is where Romans 8:28 comes in — all things work together for good for those who love God. Notice what it doesn't say. It doesn't say all things are good. It doesn't say God caused all things. It says God can work through all things — including the terrible ones — toward good. God planned this and God can redeem this are entirely different claims. Catholic teaching holds the second, not the first. That's the whole idea behind a mosaic: not that the breaking was intentional, but that the artist can work with the broken pieces.

3. Suffering united to Christ has meaning. This is the distinctly Catholic piece, and the one I come back to again and again. St. John Paul II's Salvifici Doloris teaches that human suffering, when united to the suffering of Christ, becomes redemptive — not just meaningful in some vague sense, but participating in the work of salvation itself. This is what "offering it up" actually means: not suppressing the pain, not performing a peace I don't feel, but taking the real, terrible weight of it and placing it at the foot of the cross — Lord, this is what I have. I don't understand it. I give it to you. That's not a platitude. That's theology in action. And none of it requires that God caused my suffering to be true.

What this means for you

If "everything happens for a reason" isn't what the Church actually teaches, you are released from a heavy, exhausting task: finding the reason. You do not have to figure out why. You do not have to locate the lesson, the purpose, the silver lining that makes it justified. You do not have to arrive at a place where you can say, now I understand why God did this — because God didn't do it, not in the way that phrase implies.

What you're invited to do instead is more honest, and ultimately more peaceful: grieve the loss as the real loss it is. Bring it to God without needing to explain or justify it. Trust that the God who brings life from death is at work — not because he caused the breaking, but because he specializes in making something whole out of broken pieces.

I think about this often as a widow raising eight children. It made no sense to me that a good man would be gone from our home and from the world, and there are still days I feel that void. This past Holy Week was especially hard — I sat with sadness and no purpose I could name, feeling like half of a broken whole. On Easter Sunday, I heard something like an invitation: will you live for me. Giving my suffering to him hasn't given me answers. Just a steady faith that we are loved, and that God is making something beautiful from our brokenness — even on the days I can't imagine how it ends.

The verse I keep coming back to is Psalm 34:18: the Lord is near to the brokenhearted. Not "the Lord orchestrated your broken-heartedness." Not "the Lord is waiting at the far end of it." Near. Present. With you, right now. That's the God of Catholic Christianity — not a divine clockmaker who wound up the universe and programmed in our loss, but a Father who weeps with us and, because he is God, can also work a resurrection.

One more thing

The people who say "everything happens for a reason" to you are almost always trying to love you. They're uncomfortable with suffering — most people are — and they reach for words that seem like they might help. They're not your enemies. They're not bad Catholics. They're human beings trying to do something kind in a situation that makes them feel helpless.

You don't need to correct them in that moment. You don't need to carry any anger about it. But you do get to let the phrase go. You don't have to accept it into your grief as truth. You don't have to find the reason. You are not required to perform a peace you haven't arrived at yet.

Your job — hard enough on its own — is simply to let God be near.

This post is based on my "Mosaic" podcast episode "The Theology of Suffering." Next week I'll cover grief fog — the memory lapses, brain fog, and decision paralysis so many widows experience but few people explain.