A young man emailed me this evening asking me the age old question, “why did this (a bad thing) happen to me?” Part of my response included a quote from Harlod Kushner in his book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” that I whole heartedly agree with, and thougtht I would share here in this blog.
“Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives
do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen
for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly.
But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies
from senselessness by imposing meaning on them. The question we
should be asking is not, ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be, ‘Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?’”
While there are so seldom satisfying answers, and all too many quesitons, the most important question must eventually become, “what now?”
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