Everything Happens for a Reason

There is a time to get, and a time to lose. A time to rend, and a time to sew.

I had been born with overly loose joints and, with all the sitting and typing for my dissertation, my natural asymmetry had become especially exaggerated. My body responded to this assault by seizing up around my joints, trapping nerves, and shutting down my arms

Spiritual laws offer an elegant solution to the problem of unfairness.

Why? Why is this happening to me? What could I have done differently?

It is a God I love, and a God that breaks my heart

God had a worthy plan for my life in which every setback would also be a step forward. I wanted God to make me good and make me faithful, with just a few shining accolades along the way.

Married in my twenties, a baby in my thirties

Oprah Winfrey is a one-woman crusade against “luck.” “Nothing about my life is lucky,” she has argued. “Nothing. A lot of grace, a lot of blessings, a lot of divine order, but I don’t believe in luck. For me, luck is preparation meeting the moment of opportunity.” Luck implies that there might have been a moment when, God forbid, good fortune might have gone next door. Luck might mean we cannot say, unbowed, with the poet William Ernest Henley: “I am the master of my fate. / I am the captain of my soul.”

In a spiritual world in which healing is a divine right, illness is a symptom of unconfessed sin—a symptom of a lack of forgiveness, unfaithfulness, unexamined attitudes, or careless words.

Your attitude determines your destiny!” says Jane from Idaho, and I am immediately worn out by the tyranny of prescriptive joy.