When Bad Things Happen to Good People

“Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?”

She is experiencing fear and fatigue, but it comes out as impatience and anger.

Where do you get the strength to go on, when you have used up all of your own strength? Where do you turn for patience when you have run out of patience, when you have been more patient for more years than anyone should be asked to be, and the end is nowhere in sight? I believe that God gives us strength and patience and hope, renewing our spiritua

suffering and death in someone close to us bring us to explore the limits of our capacity for strength and love and cheer-fulness, if it leads us to discover sources of consolation we never knew before, then we make the person into a witness for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection.

And if you can do these things, will you be able to recognize that the ability to forgive and the ability to love are the weapons God has given us to enable us to live fully, bravely, and meaningfully in this less-than-perfect world?

forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all.

Prayer, when it is offered in the right way, redeems people from isolation. It assures them that they need not feel alone and abandoned.

One of the things that constantly reassures me that God is real, and not just an idea that religious leaders made up, is the fact that people who pray for strength, hope, and courage so often find resources of strength, hope, and courage that they did not have before they prayed.

Beyond putting us in touch with other people, prayer puts us in touch with God.