I was sitting in my living room after the CPS worker had driven away in the van with the girls and all of their belongings when I first really thought it:

I don’t believe God wanted this pain for any of us.

People had already started saying everything happens for a reason. I know they meant to comfort me, but I was completely heartbroken, and at the same time, my whole worldview was starting to come apart.

I could not accept that this pain had come from God. I could not believe that He had looked at those little girls, looked at me, and decided this loss needed to happen because there was some lesson waiting for us on the other side of it.

That was one of the first times I really started picking apart what I believed instead of simply accepting the language I had always heard around faith and suffering.

I kept coming back to Romans 8:28:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

My mother had taught me that verse when I was growing up, but she had never taught me that it meant everything happens for a reason. She taught me that even when bad things happen, if we seek God in the middle of them, we can still find something good through Him. That He is the one who can restore what has been stolen from us.

That is not the same thing.

I believe God created a world that was intended to be perfect, sinless, and in harmony with Him. But that is not the world we live in now. We live in a world where people have free will, and sometimes people use that free will to hurt other people. Sometimes bodies get sick. Sometimes systems fail. Sometimes terrible things happen that were never good, never necessary, and never something God chose for us.

I believe that about the sexual abuse I experienced as a child. I believe that about losing the girls when the adoption fell through. I believe that about the way Tyree treated me. I believe that about losing my mother early to Alzheimer’s. None of those things were good, and I do not believe God caused any of them.

What I began to understand after losing the girls was that Romans 8:28 was not promising me an explanation. It was promising me the possibility of restoration.

Working toward good did not mean believing God would keep every hard thing from happening. The hard things were still going to happen. But afterward, we had a chance to work together with our Heavenly Father to find good in the aftermath. Not because the loss was good, and not because He caused it, but because destruction does not have to be the end of the story.

Losing the girls gave me a heart for people who lose children in many different ways. Strangely, it also gave me compassion for birth parents.

That is complicated, because their experiences are not the same as mine. The reasons children are lost are different. The circumstances are different. But I know something about loving a child and then having that child no longer be yours to raise. That grief gave me compassion for people I might once have understood only from the outside.

The sexual abuse I experienced as a child changed me in another way. I know what it feels like to be a little girl who is afraid she will not be believed. My mother did believe me, but I still remember the fear.

So when something happened to my daughter, I believed her. When something happened to my son, I believed him. There was no hesitation.

Being that little girl made me certain about the kind of mother I would be when my own children needed me. It gave me one more part of my voice, one more place from which I can write honestly about what happens when children are hurt and what they need from the adults around them.

My relationship with Tyree, my second husband and Rae’s father, taught me something different. I had to learn that just because he could not love me the way I wanted to be loved did not mean I was unworthy of love. His treatment of me did not get to decide what I was worth.

And then there is my mother, where the restoration feels different because I do not believe it is finished yet.

I lost her early to Alzheimer’s. There is no lesson that makes that okay for me, and there is no version of that story where I decide it was good that my mother got sick. I believe I will see her again. That is part of my faith.

Some things, I believe, God restores here. Some things we may not see restored until later.

I think Christians sometimes rush too quickly to find the reason. We want suffering to fit into something tidy. We want to be able to say, this happened because God needed to teach you something.

But I do not think God has to cause the wound in order to heal it. I do not think He has to send the loss in order to restore joy. I do not think He has to choose the terrible thing in order to help us find meaning afterward.

Romans 8:28 does not say that all things are good. It says that in all things, God can work toward good.

That leaves room for me to say something was wrong, that it should not have happened, and that I would undo it if I could. It also leaves room for me to believe that God can still meet me there.

I do not believe everything happens for a reason. I believe bad things happen in a broken world, and I believe God can still meet us in the aftermath and help restore something that was lost.

Sitting in that living room after the girls were gone, I could not believe God wanted that pain for any of us.

I still don’t.

But I do believe He can meet us in what comes after.