Bad things happen all the time in this world. You can see it quite easily by just looking at the news headlines on any given day. Wars, famine, poverty, killing sprees, weather catastrophes, diseases, and more, I could keep going on with the amount of darkness that is pervading this world lately. This has often led many people, both those who have faith in something greater than themselves and those that don’t, to ask the age old question, “If there is a God, why would he (or she) let all these bad things happen?” And I was once one of them.
As much as I don’t like admitting it to myself or anyone else, I used to hold a lot of hatred towards God and blamed God for just about everything bad that happened in my life. As a kid I was mentally and emotionally abused by my family, I grew up with alcoholic parents, I was bullied constantly at school, and I was sexually molested by the age of 12. During my young adult years, I grew addicted to alcohol and drugs, my father left my mother and abandoned the family for awhile, I got jumped by gang members which landed me in the hospital, I was arrested for stealing, and I lost a best friend when I came out to him. By the time I became an adult, my father committed suicide, one of my closest friends died from AIDS related complications, my mother fell down the stairs drunk and died instantly when she broke her neck, and soon after that, I began to lose track of the amount of bad things that kept happening in my life. The common thing uniting all of them was my contempt for God. I, like many other people couldn’t understand why God allowed these bad things to happen and in my mind God became the cause for all of them.
This only led me to become filled with more darkness in life because the more I remained angry and blamed God for everything, the more I acted out in toxic behaviors. And the more I acted out in toxic behaviors, the more I blamed God for the bad things that kept happening while I acted out toxically. It became a vicious cycle that didn’t take me anywhere except into the depths of despair. For almost three decades I lived this way until I realized God wasn’t the cause for any of these things, either my spiritual sickness was, or someone else’s was.
For example, my father committed suicide because he was mentally sick and it was his own decision to check out of life early before he was truly meant to go. It wasn’t God who told him to kill himself. Or take my mother’s tragic fall down the stairs where she died instantly from a broken neck. God didn’t make that happen either, it was my mother’s evening binges of alcohol that did. Even using the example of that molester who took sexual advantage of me at the age of 12, God didn’t tell that man to do this, that man’s sickness led him to do it. And as for my own addiction prone life, God didn’t lead me into any of them, my desire to remain numb from all the pain in my life did.
I know many people might still say to all of this, “So what? God still could have prevented them from ever happening!” And yes, you’re right, God could have. But ask yourself the following questions on how life would look like, if God prevented everything bad from ever happening for the rest of our lives…
1. Would we ever seek God or anything greater than ourselves?
2. Would we ever grow stronger and learn any life lessons?
3. Would we ever have a desire to become more spiritual?
There’s many other questions I’ve asked myself on what could have happened if God prevented all these bad things from ever happening in my life. But the truth is that all of those bad things in my life helped me to grow with more love and light each time they occurred. I am who I am today because of them and I like who I am today. If God had prevented all of those things from happening, I might still be that same selfish and self-centered person who thought the world revolved around himself. And I didn’t like myself at all when I was that person. Maybe that’s why I hated God so much and blamed God for everything bad that happened in my life. As when I didn’t like myself, it was much easier to put the blame on God, or anyone else for that matter, then look at my own unspiritual behaviors or do what I could to heal from the results of other people’s unspiritual behaviors.
But to answer that age old question of why God let’s bad things happen. Maybe it’s really as simple as God sees how each of them will eventually shape every one of us into a person filled with a much greater capacity for love and light. I’m not God so I really don’t know the precise truth to this question. What I do know is that I am glad all those bad things happened to me throughout my life. They’ve led me to finding a much deeper and more loving connection to God and myself. They led me to living a more selfless based life where I am loving everyone more equally. And they’ve led me to writing day after day about each of them in here. Maybe now in knowing all this, you can see at least one reason why God might led bad things happen…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson