It sounds biblical. Millions assume it is. Yet the proverb that comforts at every funeral is found nowhere in Scripture, and the gospel it imitates says something far braver, and far kinder, than the slogan ever could.
Some proverbs are wrong because they are foolish. This one is dangerous because it is almost right, and it fails people in the exact hour they most need the truth.
Today’s WordPress prompt asks us to share a proverb we think is completely wrong and make our case.
After careful consideration—and despite the risk of upsetting generations of grandparents, teachers, and motivational speakers—I nominate this classic: “Everything Happens for a Reason”
RISE & INSPIRE
I Used to Say It at Every Funeral: Why “Everything Happens for a Reason” Is the One Proverb I Had to Unlearn
I used to believe the proverb “Everything happens for a reason,” but later I realised it no longer fit my experience or thinking, so I had to stop believing it.
A CONFESSION
I said it for years. I said it the way you pass someone a glass of water—reflexively, meaning well, certain it was the kindest thing in the room. Standing beside a casket, holding the hand of a widow, looking into the hollowed-out eyes of a parent who had just buried a child, I would lean in and offer the line I believed was wisdom: “Everything happens for a reason.”
I believed it. That is the part I am least proud of. It was not cynicism or laziness; it was conviction. I thought I was defending the goodness of God by assuring people that no sorrow was wasted, that somewhere in the machinery of providence a gear was turning that would one day justify the pain. I thought a tidy universe was a comforting one.
It took me a long time to understand what I was actually doing. I was not comforting the grieving. I was tidying my own discomfort. And I was, without meaning to, handing wounded people a sentence that would quietly deepen the wound.
The Day the Sentence Broke in My Mouth
There was a particular afternoon. I will not give you the details that are not mine to give, but I will tell you the shape of it: a death that no theology of mine could file under “for the best.” Young. Senseless. The kind of loss that does not round off into a lesson. I opened my mouth to say the words I had always said, and for the first time in my life they would not come out. They sat in my throat like gravel.
Because I could see it now—see what the sentence does to a person who is actually listening. “Everything happens for a reason” tells the grieving mother that the reason she is searching for already exists, fully formed, and that her job is to find it. It hands her a riddle at the precise moment she has no strength for riddles. Worse, it implies that the God she is crying out to authored this specific horror on purpose, as a means to some end she is not yet enlightened enough to see. I had been calling that comfort. It is not comfort. It is a quiet accusation—against her, for not seeing it, and against God, for arranging it.
I stood there silent. And the silence, it turned out, was more honest than anything I had ever said.
What the Proverb Gets Wrong
Let me be precise, because the proverb is seductive exactly where it is false. It trades on a half-truth, and half-truths are harder to expose than outright lies.
The half that is true: God is not absent, and nothing is finally beyond His reach to redeem. The Scriptures are full of ruin turned to glory—a betrayed son who becomes the salvation of the very brothers who sold him, a cross meant for shame that becomes the hinge of history.
But notice what the Bible actually claims. It does not say the betrayal was good. Joseph tells his brothers plainly that what they did, they meant for evil. He does not rewrite their cruelty as a blessing in disguise. He says something far more careful and far more powerful: God meant it for good. Two intentions, not one. The evil was real evil. The good is a separate act—God reaching into the wreckage and bending it toward life. That is not the same as saying the wreckage was secretly a gift.
This is the distinction the proverb erases. “Everything happens for a reason” collapses both intentions into a single divine plan, as though suffering arrives pre-loaded with its own justification. The gospel says something braver: suffering is often meaningless—and God is in the business of making meaning out of what had none. The reason is not buried in the event, waiting to be excavated. The redemption is worked, afterward, by grace, often through the very people who refuse to pretend the pain was good.
“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” — Genesis 50:20
Why It Is Not Even in the Bible
Many people who repeat this proverb assume it is Scripture. It is not. It is a folk distortion, usually traced to a flattening of Romans 8:28—and the flattening matters. Paul does not write that all things are good, or that all things happen for a reason. He writes that God works all things together for good, for those who love Him. The verb is the whole sermon. Things do not work themselves out. God works them. And He works them together—weaving, not excusing; redeeming, not rationalising.
Strip out the working God and you are left with a closed, fatalistic machine: a universe where every cruelty is a necessary cog, where the drunk driver and the diagnosis and the betrayal were all required. That is not Christian providence. That is closer to fatalism wearing a Sunday coat. It comforts no one who is truly suffering, and it slanders the God who weeps at tombs before He raises the dead.
What I Say Now
I do not say “everything happens for a reason” anymore. I have buried it, and I do not intend to dig it up.
What I say now is smaller and, I think, truer. I say: I am so sorry. I do not understand this either. I say: God is not the author of this horror, but He is not absent from it, and He has not finished. I say: you do not have to find the reason today, or ever—that is not your burden to carry. I say: let me sit with you, and let us trust that the One who brought life out of a borrowed tomb is still able to bring something out of this, in His time, without ever once calling it good.
That is a longer thing to say than a proverb. It does not fit on a sympathy card. But it has the great advantage of being honest, and the grieving can always tell the difference between a formula and a presence. They could tell, I now believe, all those years I was offering them the formula.
The Reason I Let It Go
Here is the irony I have made my peace with. I abandoned “everything happens for a reason” for a reason. Not because I believe less in the providence of God, but because I believe in it more—too much to reduce it to a slogan that makes Him the engineer of every grief. I would rather worship a God who redeems evil than one who requires it.
Some proverbs are wrong because they are foolish. This one is dangerous because it is almost right, and it fails people in the exact hour they most need the truth. I said it at too many funerals. I will not say it at another.
And if you are reading this in the middle of a loss that refuses to make sense, hear the better word: you are not waiting to discover why this was good. You are being held by a God who calls it what it is, grieves it with you, and has not yet spoken His final sentence over your story.
Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 06 June 2026
Johnbritto Kurusumuthu
Founder
RISE & INSPIRE
If reflections like this one speak to you, I would love to share them as they are written. Join the Rise & Inspire family below, and each new piece will find its way gently to your inbox.
Explore more at the Rise & Inspire archive | Daily Prompts
© 2026 Rise & Inspire.
Website: Home | Blog | About Us | Contact| Resources
Word Count:1466