Life can be described in many ways — a mystery, a puzzle, a tapestry or a suspense. The bottomline is that it is full of twists and turns. There is no knowing what comes next. Sometimes life can simply deliver knockout punches that leave one reeling under the shock and numb with pain. Which is when we need to remember the words: “Everything happens for a reason.”

In the immediate aftermath of that event or development, all we are tempted to do is ask why? And often there are no immediate or satisfactory answers. It is only days, months and years later and in hindsight and from the vantage point of time that one acquires a perspective and realises that there was a reason for it all. Eventually, it becomes clear that one event led to another (sometimes traumatic thou-gh) and as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, the big picture emerges.
Marilyn Monroe, the Hollywood star who had a very tumultuous personal life, said, “I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you can appreciate them when they are right. You believe lies, so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself. And sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.”
When we lose a project that we were bidding for and thought we deserved to win, or when a job that we truly enjoyed goes out of our hands for reasons beyond our control, or the love of one’s life suddenly decides that the spark is no longer there, or the people who were pillars of support in our business turn against us, when we sustain huge monetary losses or when a major illness strikes, one is consumed by pain and hurt.
Life seems meaningless and God comes across as very unfair and even cruel. We are tempted to think that it is one of the things that God does for no explicable reason. Very often such testing times turn out to be a trial by fire, an experience to temper us and bring out the best in us and draw out aspects of us that even we didn’t know existed.
As Napoleon Hill said, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
It is perhaps eventually possible to rationalise and come to terms with the relatively smaller disappointments in life with the “everything happens for the best” philosophy and that “God has something bigger and better in store” argument — but where it simply doesn’t pass muster is when we lose loved ones and especially if someone dear to us died much before their time.
About a couple of years back I happened to be at a meeting that honoured families of brain dead patients whose organs were donated to other patients. The families of the grateful recipients too were in attendance. Nowhere else did the message of life and death come home so surely as on this occasion. Someone died and his or her dying was not in vain as someone else could live. Gruesome things had happened, a couple lost their only son — what meaning could there be in such a disaster?
The parents of the strapping lad who was no more, fought back tears to explain that despite their best efforts there was no stopping their son who insisted on zipping away on his motorbike without a helmet in the late hours. He ended up paying the price for it and plunged his parents into a lifetime of sorrow. What reason could there be in all of this? The parents for one decided to actively work for organ donation and two they became determined to turn the spotlight on road safety — two critical campaigns — to save sons of other parents from a similar fate.
In a sense they said that maybe they were the chosen ones for the task, though the route that God had taken seemed difficult to accept and digest.
A young woman I know whose life revolved around her husband and children found herself having to shoulder several new responsibilities overnight, after his sudden passing away. In time she braced herself for the task, did an admirable job as a single parent and reinvented and found a niche for herself as an entrepreneur. The only fallout was that her potential came to the fore and she set aside her own grief and helped to fill in for the husband, as she felt the loss of the children was greater than hers since they were too young to comprehend what was going on.
Accepting that everything happens for a reason can help us pick up the pieces and look to the future with hope, however bleak that may be at that point in time.