The Logic of Everything Happens for A Reason

When people say they believe "everything happens for a reason", what they are NOT sayings is that there are things that happen for no reason. What they really mean when they say it, is that they believe that everything happens for a "divine" or "pre-ordained" reason. And typically, they mean it happens for a reason that, while perhaps not understood, is for a "good" reason. [For the non-divine, everything DOES happen for a reason because everything has a cause and effect.]

Now, if we follow that logic, then anything that happens is, ultimately, for the best, for "me" the believer.

I believe that life is a journey not a destination and, like many journeys, companion travelers come and go along the way. If I believed that "everything happens for a reason" then I would except the coming and going as "pre-ordained" and hence, best or for the betterment of me.

Sometime after my first marriage ended, I realized that we had both ended up in better places than when we started. The question, however, is, had we not come together, would we have ended up, in the same time frame, better or worse than where we started? There is, of course, no way to answer this. But if I believe that "everything happens for a reason" then I should assume that it was better for both of us to have come together and thus, in the end, better for us to have come apart as that also was for the best of both of us. This would mean, then, that my journey and her journey needed to intersect for a time in order to bring us to a better point. Once that point was reached, our paths then led in different directions and we parted to carry on with our own journeys.

So, should I have looked upon my divorce as a bad thing or a good thing? At the time, we saw it as a bad thing and only in hindsight is it perceived differently. But, perhaps I should view all future "negative" events as really positive in that they are there to move me further along my journey. And while the "going away" of people we care about seems to be sad, perhaps we should not look at it that way but should instead rejoice that we have had the time we did together. Certainly, nothing that we know of precludes the possibility of our meeting again sometime in the future--with the assumption that we either 1) are better than when we parted or 2) perhaps are in need of each other again.