By Angela Chandracomar

“Why is this happening to her …and to me? Why is God so cruel?”—This was a question a close friend of mine asked the day after an emergency situation occurred to her grandma, whom she watched deteriorate for months after a late diagnosis of bone cancer.

Despite our efforts and unwavering faith along the pathways of our lives, we can’t help but ask ourselves how deserving we are of certain consequences. After coming to terms with my own spirituality, I had settled on a belief that each person was brought into this world to carry out a mission in his/her lifetime—a mission predetermined by a Superior Being.

However when I did a clinical rotation at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), the question of “why” started to enter my heart again, hitting a deeper emotional string. “Poor baby,” I thought, “you didn’t do anything to deserve this.” As a nursing student, I’ve seen toddlers undergoing surgery with little hope of survival, infants that were comatose with neurological underdevelopment related to premature birth, little babies taking methadone to alleviate withdrawal from pain medications.

So, if everyone does in fact have a mission in this world, what then is the mission of these sick little children? To what higher purpose do they serve in their ephemeral existence? Is it merely a sacrificial one? To show the world cruelty? To inspire positive change?

Even the most morbid of scenarios can lead to positive change. Like a phoenix reborn from its ashes, goodness soon burgeons out of a barren situation. Preventative education, health initiatives, special interest groups and social activists are born. People learn to make better choices from the mistakes of others.

We experience. We learn. We accept. We overcome. We grow.

But is this too much of an optimistic explanation, a naïve outlook on suffering? Is it blasphemous to think that the PICU babies’ purposes were God’s way of helping us overcome our own devils?

If this is the case, then this is an amazingly strong message being sent forth.

It seems we only come to realize the magnitude of our strength AFTER the time of crisis has passed. We feel a strong inclination deep down somewhere in the fiber of our being to overcome. Most of the time the feeling is empowering and frightening at the same time—there is underlying hesitation and doubt. And within that spiritual struggle, a choice is born, remiss of certainty.

One night someone very close to me looked at me with tears in her eyes and asked: “Why me? Why did God put me in this world, after I worked so hard for so many years and still nothing and no appreciation?” She had experienced a crisis that led her to question her marriage, trust, God and almost everything that happened in her life. I could only remind her that God had an important mission for her to carry out, and that her whole life was exemplary of that mission in ways that she probably hasn’t yet realized.