Reason

Because I love torturing myself, I occasionally use social media to check on some of the Christians I have known in the past who have shown signs of faith slippage.  Invariably I find what I expect.  It’s a sickness.  I need to stop.

Anyway, one lovely young girl from our past got a tattoo on her foot awhile back.  It reads, “Everything happens for a reason.”  She has a beautiful baby girl now.  Never been married.  I doubt she sees the irony.

I don’t know whether the young woman in question would consider single pregnancy an unwanted condition, either for herself or for women in general.  (Her commitment to Biblical morality was shaky on a good day back when we knew her.)  But surely she has come to realize by now, pregnancy happens for a reason.  And not because “God has a plan.”  Because a man and a woman intersected in just the right way.

We have this awful habit of making bad choices and then attributing some noble motive to the consequences that result — God is trying to teach you how to love unconditionally, or be less selfish, something like that.  But maybe the “reason” behind your situation is sin.  Maybe the lesson is, don’t do it.

You sin, you die (Ezekiel 18:4).  Yes, Jesus provides grace to get around that law (Romans 6:23).  But that doesn’t make sin less sinful.  And if we don’t learn the lessons God is trying to teach us, we may become severed from that grace (Galatians 5:4).