Do you think everything happens for a reason?

Do You Think Everything Happens for a Reason?
I get asked this a lot — sometimes by a friend going through heartbreak, sometimes by a patient’s relative in the hospital corridor, sometimes by the quiet voice in my own head at 2 a.m. after a long call shift or a business deal that fell through. Do you think everything happens for a reason?
Honestly? I used to answer that question too quickly. I’d say “yes” almost as a reflex, the way we say “God is good” at the end of a testimony. But the older I get — juggling medical school, running King David Properties, showing up for the Foundation’s outreaches — the more I’ve learned that the honest answer isn’t a clean yes or no. It’s something closer to yes, but not in the way we’re taught to expect.
The Danger of Saying It Too Soon
There’s a particular kind of pain in hearing “everything happens for a reason” while you’re still bleeding. I’ve sat with families in hospital wards who just lost someone, and I’ve learned that theology delivered at the wrong moment isn’t comfort — it’s a closed door. It tells people their grief is premature, that they should already be at peace with something they haven’t even finished feeling.
So before I answer the question philosophically, I want to say this plainly: some things happen, and they are simply painful. Not every loss is a lesson wearing a disguise. Sometimes a thing is just evil, or just unfair, or just the result of someone else’s carelessness — and pretending otherwise can rob people of the right to grieve honestly.
But Something Doesn’t Let Me Stop There
And yet.
I think of the years I call “the hard years” — seasons where nothing about the timeline made sense to me. Setbacks that felt senseless while I was living them. Doors that shut so firmly I stopped knocking. If you had told me back then that those seasons were building the exact discipline, faith, and clarity I now lean on to run a business and carry a course load that doesn’t forgive laziness, I wouldn’t have believed you. I couldn’t have. You rarely can, from inside the storm.
What I’ve come to believe isn’t that every event carries a neat, individual reason stitched to it like a label. It’s something quieter than that: that God is not wasteful with our pain. He doesn’t always explain it. He doesn’t always redeem it on our timeline. But very little of what we walk through returns to us empty-handed, if we let it teach us instead of just hardening us.
Reason vs. Redemption
I’ve started to separate two ideas that we often collapse into one:
“This happened for a reason” suggests a kind of design — that the bad thing itself was necessary, planned, deserved.
“This can be redeemed” suggests something gentler and, I think, truer — that meaning can be made from what happened, even if the thing itself was never supposed to be good.
A business partnership that collapsed didn’t happen “so that” I’d learn negotiation. But I did learn negotiation from it — because I chose to extract a lesson from wreckage instead of just walking away bitter. That’s not fate. That’s what faith paired with intention looks like.
What I’d Say to Someone Asking Me This Today
If you’re asking me this because life just knocked the wind out of you, I won’t hand you a Bible verse and walk away. I’ll say: it’s okay if you don’t see the reason yet. Maybe you never will, not fully, not this side of eternity. But keep showing up anyway. Keep being teachable. Keep your hands open instead of clenched around the unfairness of it.
Because here’s the thing I’ve noticed, watching my own life and the lives of the young people I mentor through Catch Them Young: the people who come out of hard seasons stronger aren’t the ones who found the reason first. They’re the ones who kept moving, kept praying, kept choosing purpose over paralysis — and only looked back years later to see the shape their pain had quietly carved into something useful.
So — do I think everything happens for a reason?
I think everything can be given a reason, if we’re willing to do the hard, patient work of finding one. And until we do, it’s enough to simply survive the not-knowing with grace.