Have you ever experienced an event in your life where you find yourself in heartache, pain or despair and you wonder if you’re even going to be able to make it through the rest of the night? Your whole world crumbles beneath you and you feel like you won’t even be able to take another breath? You’re left feeling shattered, empty, and hoping that someone or something will just come down and take you away from this difficult life you’re living?

The more you try and figure out the reason for the pain and troubles life hands you, the more upset and angry you get at not only yourself, but at everyone else in the world too. A very famous saying that I’ve heard my whole life is that “everything happens for a reason,” but let me just tell you that I am a strong believer that not everything happens for a reason. Sometimes bad things happen to people for no other reason than just the fact that we are human beings and pain, heartache, death and disease are all part of the experience of being a human. Everyone assumes that life is supposed to be easy, but struggle and hardship are parts of life that everyone tends to experience at least once.

Many end up asking themselves, “How could any of this be God’s will for my life? Why does he constantly put heartache after heartache into my life? What have I done to deserve any of this?” But here’s what I’ve come to know about this whole situation: God’s will is not for anyone to have cancer. God’s will is not for someone to commit suicide. God’s will is not for an innocent teenage girl to be raped and left to fend for herself.

"God’s will is not for a terrible event to happen to us, it’s how we respond to the event that occurs that is His will."

For everyone out there who is struggling with life, or wondering how they’re even going to make it through the rest of the night, just know that God doesn’t plan for these terrible things to happen in your life. God’s will is for you to walk with him through the cancer, through the abuse, through the death, and for you to turn to Him and draw close to Him through all of the pain and the grief. God’s will is for us to use our painful life experiences in order to spread His message of hope and never giving up in order to spread it to the rest of the world and help others who may be going through the same life events.

If you don’t take anything else from this article, please know that God is not responsible for life’s pain. We are not responsible for the pain that we experience throughout our lives either. God doesn’t want us to hurt, he’s walking through the hurt with us. What we decide to do with the pain and the grief is what really matters in the long run.

Yes, not everything happens for a reason, but in everything that happens there is always a reason to find hope and persevere for yourself and for others as well. We have to respond in a way that brings good into a situation that seems to be impossible to overcome. We have to choose to bring meaning and purpose into our lifetime of suffering. Like the Ransomed Heart Ministries once stated, “If you want to get to know someone, you need to know their story. Their life is a story. It, too, has a past, present, and a future. It, too, unfolds in a series of scenes over the course of time.” Yes, everyone experiences hardships throughout their lives, but I believe that we can make it through whatever life throws our way because it’s important to stick together and lean on each other through the good times and the bad.