EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON?

I have never particularly liked the phrase everything happens for a reason. People usually say it after something terrible happens. You lose the job. The relationship ends. Your life catches fire. And somebody says, “Everything happens for a reason.” Lovely sentiment when it is not your house burning down.

Still, there are moments when I look backward and wonder if something disastrous changed the entire direction of my life. Not because God caused it. Sometimes it happened because I made a bad decision.

After college, I came home from what I generously described as “finding myself.” Apparently, I had looked everywhere except wherever I actually was. I had a degree, some life experience, and absolutely no idea what to do next.

So, naturally, I decided to become a police officer.

This becomes increasingly funny the older I get. I had never held a gun. I was not especially brave. I was less “run toward danger” and more “has anybody called somebody about that?”

Still, I started taking police exams around the country and eventually made it deep into the process with the Albuquerque Police Department. Test after test. Interviews. Physical exams. Psychological exams. Background checks. I even ran the required mile at more than 5,000 feet, discovering New Mexico had apparently misplaced some oxygen.

I passed everything.

Suddenly this ridiculous idea was no longer ridiculous. I traveled to Albuquerque. Looked at apartments. Looked at cars. Imagined living beneath that enormous Southwestern sky. For the first time since college, I had an answer when people asked, “So what are you going to do?”

I was going to be a police officer.

One final step remained: a polygraph.

They attached wires and sensors to me. I sat there believing I could see the finish line.

Then came the question.

“Have you ever used drugs?”

The truthful answer was yes.

For a brief period in college, I had smoked marijuana. More than thirty five years ago, that admission carried very different consequences.

I had about four seconds to decide what kind of person I wanted to be.

I wish I could tell you I chose courage.

I lied.

I said no.

What I did not know was that investigators had already spoken with my friends. My friends told the truth. They knew I had experimented with marijuana.

So did the police department.

The opportunity disappeared. Not because I had smoked marijuana. Because I lied about it. I had broken their trust before they ever gave me a badge.

And I was devastated.

It was not just a job I had lost. In my mind, I had already built a life around it. An apartment. A city. A uniform. A future. For the first time in months, I thought I knew who I was becoming, and in one conversation, that version of me disappeared.

There is a special kind of pain when you cannot blame anyone else. No unfair boss. No bad luck. No misunderstanding. Just you.

I walked outside into one of those impossibly beautiful New Mexico days. Across the street stood a small brown adobe church beneath a brilliant blue sky. Above it, a white cross.

I stared at it and yelled, “What am I supposed to do now?”

The church, rather annoyingly, did not answer. Crosses rarely do. At least not immediately.

I flew home. Life went another way.

Education found me. I became an educator, husband, father, writer. Entire parts of my life exist because that door closed.

That does not make the lie good.

I was wrong. I was afraid. I wish I had told the truth.

But owning what we have done does not erase it. It stops the past from owning us.

A wrong turn does not mean your life is over. A failure does not get to decide everything that comes next.

I still do not know if everything happens for a reason.

But I do believe God wastes very little.

Maybe redemption is God refusing to let our mistakes have the final word.

Sometimes the cross does not answer from across the parking lot.

Sometimes it takes half a lifetime to understand what it was saying.