Why do good people suffer?

I would like to share something with you. A beautiful fellow human with a loved one with dementia posted in a Facebook support group that I am part of. She was feeling the pain of life. A family member died of cancer at 13, her father has dementia, her mother had to change her life plan to care for him... all the while another relative that she considers hateful and evil just goes through life seemingly unfazed. She was questioning it all - why do good people suffer, children die young, while bad people seem to thrive? I felt called to respond, and thought what I shared would be valuable for anyone wondering similar things. My response to her post is below ...

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We often cause ourselves extra grief and burden when we try to “make sense” of the infinite paradox that is life. We only ever get to see and experience a tiny sliver of it, but we innocently make conclusions about the infinite whole based on the assumptions we’ve made about the tiny part.

Ultimately, life will never actually make sense. We humans crave order and reason and cause and effect and when we can’t find it, we assume something is wrong. When really, life just does what it does, rarely with the kind of reason we would like. It is not personal. If you can broaden your gaze you will see that some children die young, some grow old. Some of the people you consider evil have horribly difficult lives, some seem to thrive. Some people you consider good become consumed with immense challenges, some float through life and spread their goodness for all. We want to make up that there is some sort of relationship in these things, but there isn’t. In this existence, chaos and creation will always share the same space. As will beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and grief. The whole will always make sense, but comparing the parts never will.

I’m sending you and your family lots of love and peace. 💜
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If you are reading this, I'm sending the same love to you and yours.

Much love,
Brianne