We have heard often that “it rains on the just and unjust alike.” It isn’t that bad things only happen to good people. Bad things just happen. Being good is no shield against pain and loss.

Nobody “deserves” for something bad to happen to them. People may make bad choices and they have to deal with the repercussions. That isn’t what I’m thinking of when I say “bad things” That is an expected event. It isn’t “unfortunate” when a man gets heart disease after a lifetime where his only exercise consisted of making yet another trip through the buffet line. “Unfortunate” has at its root “fortune.” There is nothing about luck going on here.

I’m thinking about when an accident occurs or a mistake. When you go in for a tonsillectomy and the surgeon cuts your foot off instead. Or when a tornado comes to town and reduces your just-paid-off house to toothpicks. That “something bad” is what I’m talking about here.

Yelling at God won’t help. Wondering if you are guilty of some unknown sin won’t help. You aren’t being punished. It just happened. Now what? What do you do with your one-foot-having, no-house-having self?

Accept it and move on. Deal with your new reality.

Don’t cheer about the “bad guy” when “bad things” happen to him either. That is gloating. It wasn’t polite or pretty when you were five and did it. It is even uglier now.

So what do you do?

Practice with the idea of loss and disappointment just being a part of life. You can’t always get what you want, and sometimes that is a real blessing. Sometimes what we want isn’t very good for us.

Some parents will get their child a hamster as a gentle way to warm them up to the reality of death. Hamsters don’t live very long. So the child has the hamster as a way to brace themselves against the time when Grandpa is going to die.

Learn acceptance of what is, and forget about what was, and what might be coming. The past is gone, and the future is always changing. All you have is right now. Fighting against it only makes it harder.

Remember the Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr?

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.

It isn’t just for people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. It is for everybody. We are all addicts. We are all recovering. We are all returning to our roots, to our source.

We had it all figured out when we were babies. Then things got harder, and we got given a lot of rules and ways of thinking that weighed us down.

It isn’t easy to do this, this recovery. I think there is something in first acknowledging that we are broken. I think there is some healing in that.

I think there is some healing in knowing that the “bad stuff” isn’t personal. That it just happens.

You still get wet when it rains, but you don’t have to feel guilty about it.

Well, unless you are constantly forgetting your umbrella or hat, then that is all on you.