From the beginning of time people have begged God to tell them…Why? WHY do terrible things happen to good people? Now comes this question for us to explore again, in a poignant letter and an electrifying reply…
Yesterday is usually Question and Answer Day on the blog…but because of the extraordinary nature of the exchange below, I am extending this feature one more day. I want you all to have a chance to see, and embrace with your heart, this entry. I hope you will also offer your comments — whatever you feel moved to write…
Question: Dear Neale: I have so much to say to you that it is difficult to know where to begin. A new friend gave me two CWG books, and they have changed my life in several ways.
First, much of what I read in Book 1 reawoke memories of beliefs that I took for granted as truths when I was a very young child. Various pressures made me forget those truths over the years, and I ended up believing that everything about me was wrong, though somewhere in my soul I still believed my truths. I married a man whose most important value was his and his family’s image in the eyes of society, and the marriage was a mistake. I hung in there for fifteen years and had four extraordinary children until I realized that I was dying in the relationship, and for my children’s sake I had to leave.
At first, our life without my husband was idyllic, and then things began to change. A lot of it was my fault: I discovered that I was a young woman again and that I had a lot of living to do. My priorities were split between enjoying major rebellion and what was best for my children. Then my eldest daughter, with whom I had always been at loggerheads, had her custody changed to her father and his girlfriend, in spite of all my pleas not to, and very shortly afterward, she caught a lethal virus while swimming in a still, fresh-water pond, and died after eight weeks in intensive care. My grief and guilt were overwhelming.
To compound it, a rumor (encouraged by my ex-husband) circulated that I had been responsible for her death by giving her an overdose of drugs, which was patently impossible. However, people believe what they want to believe, and that terrible rumor destroyed what was left of my life.
I tried to carry on our lives as best I could while sinking ever more deeply into a morass of depression. My other three children went to boarding school and I sold our house in the South and moved into our summer barn in the mountains in New York to be nearer them. I had several jobs and finally ran my house as a bed-and-breakfast because that was the only way I could survive and keep my children’s home. Finally the depression won out and I ended up in a hospital, suicidal.
After being told that if I went back to the mountains I would be either dead or back in the hospital within six months, I moved to another state. The children were all out of school by then and leading their own lives, and things began to look up. Then my beautiful, talented, warm-hearted, brilliant son was killed by a drunk driver one week to the day after his twenty-seventh birthday. why? What plan did your God have in that?
After my daughter died, by some miracle she and I were able to talk to each other. We forgave each other our badness to each other; she told me that what I had taught my children about what happens after you die was true, but I didn’t know a millionth of it, and that she was happy and well and would always be one of my guardian angels. How could she let that happen to my son then? What in God’s name was God’s plan? That was almost eight years ago, but I still rage and grieve and rage.
Last summer I decided that my life was useless and I needed a new one. I moved to a place an hour away from my youngest daughter, and am giving a jump-start to a new career. With the help of your books, I will make a success of it. But the books and the newsletters are sugar-coated. Although so much of CWG is valid and true (and I know this in my heart and soul), how can you explain the terrible, painful things that happen? Is it a punishment for a few terrified years of self-indulgence? Is it a karmic payback for sins of a former life that I’m not aware of in this one?
It’s hard to believe that I “chose” what has happened. Could anyone be that cruel? Reading the book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, took some of the pressure off, but the impression I got from that was that God doesn’t concern Himself with the everyday actions and tragedies of mere people, that we are to Him as ants are to us. That certainly contradicts what I always believed (and taught my children to believe), that God is in all things from a blade of grass to the mightiest star. If I am to go on believing that, then I also have to believe that God is unconscious and uncaring, which is hard for me because of my personal miracles.
Please, if you have God’s ear and voice, ask him why? why? Give me some answer that will take away the agony so that I can go on with my life. Platitudes won’t help. I truly need an answer. Please. You were given a beautiful answer for the woman whose adopted son died at twenty-one. Can you find one for me? Respectfully yours, Cynthia, address withheld.
Neale’s Response: Dear Cynthia, I was deeply touched by what you shared with me, and I only hope that my response can in some way be adequate.
Here is what I get, Cynthia, when I meditate on the situation you have described. Your son and your daughter made a pact before either of them came into their bodies. Their agreement was to arrive together and to leave together. These two souls have danced together many times before. They have laughed together and cried together; they have walked together on the path through the eons and across the centuries.
It may not seem this way to you now, Cynthia, but I can assure you that this is true. And when your daughter left and went to this golden place that she has described to you, your son was filled with a loneliness–experienced at the soul level–that is beyond anything you or I could possibly understand.
I do not know how close these two were in this lifetime, but I am very sure of how close they have been from the beginning of time. When your daughter left, it was only natural for him to follow. Your daughter did not “let this happened to your son,” as you put it, but, rather, allowed him the choice he was making. She did not try to stop him, nor in any way seek to prevent what occurred, because to do so would have been to interfere with another’s free will, and that is something that no soul on the “other side” would ever do.
I can tell you with absolute assurance that these two souls are happier now than you have ever seen them in your life. They are dancing together once more. They are laughing together again. And their only wish now is that you will release and let go of your anguish and your pain, of your rage and your grief.
These things, too, I can tell you categorically: what has happened has nothing to do with punishment. Your “years of self-indulgence” have nothing to do with it. As Conversations with God clearly says, God does not punish us, but always and only blesses us.
I know that it is hard to believe that you “chose” what has happened. At a conscious level, obviously you did not. At a super-conscious level, however, you agreed to give the gift of togetherness to these children, just as you gave them the gift of life. Both experiences were at some level painful, and both produced great joy.
Their is a grand plan, involving many lives together in the past, and many lives together yet to come. Trying to understand the plan is like trying to understand a snowflake. In the end, we can only behold the wonder of it. It does us no good to mourn the fact that it has melted. Far better for us to simply celebrate the beauty that it has brought into our lives.
I want to comment on your impression that God doesn’t concern Himself with the everyday actions and tragedies of His people. Conversations with God makes the same point that was made in the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This point is not that God does not care about us, but that God cares about us so much that He grants us total free will in the creation of the reality we choose.
God cannot impose His preferences on us. If He did, we would not have free will, but rather, we would simply be living lives which were being experienced according to a plan over which we have no control. This would not be fitting for enlightened beings, and we would soon become restless and unhappy. Just as our children would become restless if we told them everything we wanted them to do, stopped them from making every one of their mistakes, made sure that they never hurt themselves, or even experienced the possibility of hurting themselves. If we did that, it would be a very short time before they ran from us as fast as they could. For the human soul yearns to be free, not so protected that it can never experience anything that the Father does not want it to experience. CWG says clearly, “your will for you is God’s will for you,” and in this revelation is the answer to your question, Cynthia.
I’m sorry to have taken so much time with this response, but I have done my very best to reach inside, and not give you a shallow reply. I hope that you can return to a place of great joy in your life, knowing that everything is falling into place exactly as it should in order for you to be and to declare, to announce and to become, to express and to fulfill Who You Really Are. I send you love, and all the blessings from all the heavens. Thank you for writing to me, and sharing with me from the deepest part of your soul.
(Ask Neale may be accessed on a daily basis in the Messengers’ Circle at Neale’s personal website: www.nealedonaldwalsch.com. Each week Neale selects a question from those posted there, or from the book Questions and Answers on Conversations with God, and publishes it in this blog.)