God did not do this to teach you something
The sentences kind believers say at gravesides and hospital beds, why each one breaks in the hand, and the one picture of God against which every reason offered to you can be tested.
Everything happens for a reason. Someone said it to you. They said it in a hospital corridor or beside an open grave, and they meant well, and it did not help. You may have felt guilty that it did not help. You need not. You were not wrong.
The sentence rarely comes alone. God needed him more than you did. He never gives you more than you can handle. One day you will see that this was a blessing. This will make you stronger. The people who say these things believe in God and love you. Most of them are afraid of the silence in the room, and a sentence is easier to hold out than a hand.
Lay the sentences side by side and they turn out to be one sentence wearing different clothes. Each takes what happened to you and assigns it a purpose from God's side, with complete confidence and nothing to show for it.
Why they break
The first trouble is the confidence. Whoever says it is claiming to have read God's private intentions for your life. Isaiah heard the Lord say that His thoughts are not our thoughts. No prophet dared to assign a meaning to a stranger's grief on his own say-so. Job's friends tried it, and at the end God told them they had not spoken rightly of Him.
When a visitor explains why God let it happen, they are doing something that belongs to God alone, and He has not done it here. It costs nothing to say and it cannot be checked. It is guessing, at a graveside, in His name.
The second trouble is worse. Each reason turns the evil into a tool. If the accident happened so that you would grow, then the accident was sent, and someone aimed it.
The words "for a reason" carry God's authorship in through the back door, and they do something else as well. A means to a holy end must have been a hidden blessing all along. So the tumour becomes a gift with the paper still on. The Christian faith has never asked you to think of the intruder as a teacher. Any sentence that requires it has left the faith, however piously it is dressed.
The third trouble is what the reasons do to you. They turn you into an object lesson. Before the visitor arrived you were a person to whom something terrible had happened. Now you are teaching material in a course you never enrolled in, and the person you lost has become the visual aid. You can feel the moment it happens. The visit is over then, even if the visitor stays another hour. God does not break some of His children in order to educate the others.
Fruit and reasons
There is a complication, and honesty requires it. Good does grow in the soil of suffering. You will meet people whose patience or whose faith was visibly deepened in their worst years, and they will tell you so themselves, with gratitude. I am one of them. I can point to things in me that only grew in the dark. I noticed them afterwards, looking back, rather than while they grew.
So were the visitors half right? No. The difference between what they said and what I have just said is small in the words and enormous in the life.
Fruit is noticed. Reasons are assigned. A person looks back and says: I would not choose that year again, but look what God grew in it. That person is speaking from inside. They have found something, with Him, in their own time. None of them believes the loss was arranged in order to produce the growth, and the sum that makes the growth worth the grave is one they will never accept.
Paul's line about this is quoted at bedsides so often that it has worn thin, and it still says something exact.
We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28 RSVCE
It promises a Worker inside every event rather than a hidden goodness inside the event itself. The evil stays evil. The betrayal was still betrayal and the tumour was still an intruder. What the promise claims is that none of it gets the final word, because Someone is at work inside it whose intentions towards you are good.
"Look what God grew in my loss" is testimony. "God did this to grow you" is trespass. The two sentences are cousins. One is spoken by the person who bled, afterwards, to God and to whoever they choose. The other is spoken from the next chair, to someone still bleeding, on God's behalf and without His leave.
The test
Here is what you can do with the reasons that were spoken over you by visitors long gone. Take them out one at a time and hold each against the only picture of God I trust.
He is kneeling in the dirt beside a man born blind, and when His own disciples ask whose sin caused it, He tells them that no one's did. He is standing outside the tomb of His friend Lazarus, and He weeps. He knows what He is about to do, and He weeps anyway. Try to put "everything happens for a reason" in that mouth, outside that tomb, with those tears on His face. It will not go, and you can let it fall.
Any reason that could not be spoken by Him, at that graveside, was never His.
What He thinks of your suffering, He has shown in person. What He means to grow in you, He will show you Himself, from inside and in His own time. He will never once call the intruder His idea.
If you are the visitor, the whole counsel is short. Say that you are sorry and that you love them, and leave your reasons in the car. Job's friends managed seven days of silence before they ruined it, and the silence was the part that helped.
And if you are the one in the bed or beside the grave, and the reasons have gone quiet, two sentences remain that you can carry even in the fog. Nothing that touches me got past Him. He is at work inside it, for me, now. They answer a different question from the one the visitors kept failing. Instead of why, they tell you where He is.