Listening to a story means we might feel some of the hurt in that person's life.   Our own stories already have lots of pain.  Another tale of woe is the last thing we need.  There is more hurt, more sadness in this world than most of us can imagine.  There is more joy than we can imagine too, but we have a knack for focusing on the bad stuff.  It draws our attention. It exhausts us:  dealing with our own bad stuff and the suffering of the people we love and what the news brings us every day.

No one escapes.  We can’t because, as Harold Kushner wrote, bad things happen to good people.

I long ago gave up trying to offer explanations for why those things happen.  Most of what I have heard has been a lame attempt by someone to justify their own limited world view.  Or it lets them live with some comfort at having avoided most of that sadness.  Or they surrender control of their lives to a force greater than they because they want anything that isn’t benevolent in their lives to beyond their control.

This is not the same surrender of people in a twelve-step programme who choose to confess to the reality of a higher power of some description.  They do this not to evade responsibility or thinking about the destruction they have to take responsibility for, but for the sake of discovering that they are not alone in their journey away from that destruction.

No, this is making God responsible for everything, and then being able to slough it off as His Will:  God needed that person to die, God needed to build character in you, God needed to glorify himself by showing how that person could transcend their suffering until their death.  Why do we think God needs any of that?  Why do we think God needs anything?