Did God Make Me This Way?
I never thought about this pertaining to me before. Due to the ongoing discussion of the gay issue, we often see the discussion about whether God made people gay, whether it is a quirk of nature, whether it is learned behavior or any combination thereof.
I’d like to apply that same set of reasoning to a different biology discussion. That of my birth defect.
I was born with a combination cleft lip and cleft palate. It is the most common birth defect occurring about 1 in 600 births. Birth defects in general affect one out of 33 babies born in the US. (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/birthdefects.html) They range from very minor to so severe the child cannot survive.
Why would God do this to His children? He is their Father.
From the age of about 3 days and continuing on into adulthood, I had numerous operations to correct my breathing and eating problems and to make my appearance more normal. From an early age, I was teased and make fun of by other children, even my own brother because of how I looked and talked. I had speech therapy from a very small age and into High School. I became very, very self-conscious by the time I was about 11 years old. The problem, in large part, made me both shy around people I didn’t know, but comfortable around my close friends who knew me. I didn’t participate in class very much and I fell in love with the refrigerator.
I never contemplated suicide as it was not a very popular option when I was younger (like it seems to be now) and I don’t remember being depressed about the situation very much, except when it came to getting dates. My shyness was probably the greatest inhibiting factor.
Why would God do this to me? He is my Father.
I grew a mustache as soon as I could and a beard shortly thereafter to hide behind. It has helped a lot over the years.
I eventually decided to no longer let my problem affect my life. I still wasn’t very good at the dating scene, but I did get up enough courage to meet and date my wife. We’ve been married for 28 years and have 5 children. And, I joined the LDS Church as well.
I never questioned whether God made me this way. I had enough classes in biology to understand that sometimes nature and pregnant mothers (diet, smoking, etc.) make mistakes and you end up with a situation that might not be normal. In some cases, the situation is actually a positive thing, as people can be much smarter than normal or born with some other very desirable attribute. It doesn’t always have to be a negative occurrence.
If you follow the reasoning that God made me this way, then perhaps my lip and palate should not have been repaired. After all, this is the way he wanted me to be.
But, again, I never believed that God made me this way. It is, in fact, a quirk of nature, outside the norm, attributable to both biological and external forces at work before birth.
One of the things I have learned about God, our Father, is that He lets things happen and does not intervene very often in normal processes. Even when those processes don’t turn out exactly right. Some would say we are given these challenges as a means to grow and learn while in this life. I am not so sure. We all have challenges of one kind or another throughout our lives. But are they given to us?
Why would God do that to us? He is our Father.
Wheat & Tares 
Nicely said. The same issues come into play when comparing the blind and the deaf communities.
Jeff, this is a topic of interest to me. Thanks for covering it with your own unique perspective.
The fact that God’s children are born with “defects” and “gifts” of various kinds is a subject the scriptures can help us understand.
The most notable defect all of us have is that of being natural men and women–enemies to God (Mosiah 3:19).
Then we have scripture telling us that the Lord gives us weaknesses so we’ll be humble (Exodus 4:11, Ether 12:27).
Next, we are taught that the Lord will prove us (Abraham 3:25).
There are other scripture that could be brought to bear that gives us insight into the conditions we encounter in morality.
I’m persuaded that Heavenly Father knows everything, meaning their are no mistakes and loose ends (2 Nephi 9:20, Moses 1:27-28).
Our experiences in mortality are designed to bless us to realize the greatest blessing we can receive: eternal life (D&C 14:7).
To keep this short, due to time restraints, I included several scriptures. I hope each one of them will be read and pondered over so my comment will have meaning.
Jared,
Thanks for sharing the scriptures.
The question is: does God give us unique weaknesses or our we given the same weaknesses inherent in the natural man.
I am not sure about there being no mistakes. If God allows nature to run its course, then I think it does. He chooses not to control that.
Great post, Jeff. I had never known this about you before.
I guess the issue (which you seem to have resolved for yourself) is that many people don’t want to believe so much in natural processes divorced from God. So asking, “Why would God do this?” is logical to them because they don’t have natural processes to punt the blame to.
“Why would God do that to us? He is our Father.”
For me the answer is that He didn’t and that He’s not even ultimately responsible. And I don’t believe that He gave us these things to help us grow or be better. One of the functions of religion is to try and make sense out of why the world is the way it is and for me to place God in that role as puppet master just makes no sense to me at all. I have been exposed all my work life to suffering and physical disability and hardship and to think that God was somehow responsible is inconceivable to me. My way of making sense of things is just to leave God out of it.
I believe that you’re getting into some sticky philosophical ground. Whether God created you that way is irrelevant because he still ‘allowed’ you to suffer. if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent (which is LDS doctrine) then the fact that he allows people to suffer is philosophically indefensible (allowing people to ‘grow’ is not a defense). As far as I know, the only reasonable response is strip God of at least one of those powers.
I have come to believe that God is far less involved in the day to day lives of people than we’re taught to think in the LDS church, but perhaps it’s because I believe in coincidence.
I will mention that the scriptures say that the only way to offend God and kindle his wrath is to not recognize his hand in all things or disobey the commandments.
#3 Jeff–
I’ll illustrate my point with a link to a nine year old girl who has been given a special gift.
I’m of the school of thought that Heavenly Father gave her this gift, what she does with it is up to her. Agency comes into play. It the same with a gift of defect. But I think Heavenly Father is all-knowing.
We could also open this topic up to the infamous who use their agency to a bitter end. History (including the present and future) includes those who create terror and misery with their time in mortality. Are they part of the Lord’s plan?
“Who sinned master that this man was born blind?”
Is the world imperfect or not?
I think this post is an excellent frame for those classic questions.
I think you framed this nicely Jeff. Evolution also contributes to this. Perhaps God lets lots of things happen that are part of the natural process of evolution. Without genetic mutations our species would never have survived to live this long and may not be around in the future. Sometimes birth defects and other genetic mutations stink for the individual…but perhaps in the long run allowing genetic mutations to occur will be a blessing that allows for humanities ultimate survival. Short term suffering on the individual level leading to long term survival on a group level?
One thing I do not get about this issue. Why did God do this to me/make me this way? For example, a person sees someone’s brother die, a sister, a parent. They see it happening before them and they seem to understand that it’s just life. But when something happens to them, suddenly there’s no God. Why would God do this to me? Why did he take my mother? So you see it happening to others and it’s just life but when it happens to you, there’s no God? Same thing with why did God make me this way? But to be honest, there are some terrible things in nature that happen that we are all secretly are glad they didn’t happen to us. Gay, hermaphrodite. But going through some kind of deviation like this must be tough. What do you do? What can you do?
I’m not sure this means what you think it means.
What if the only way for man to become God, is to experience life in a contingent universe, where things just happen?
This may be contrary to the traditional Abrahamic-religion understanding of a God who is heavily involved in controlling the natural world, not to mention a whole truckload of scriptures, but I think it matches what I observe from the world better than any other theology.
God does not “make us that way,” or any way, except inasmuch as He set up a universe with natural evolutionary processes which He knew would ultimately result in the emergence of a creature in His image, capable of contemplating Him.
The genetic mutation rates necessary to get us from sponges to people are good, in that they resulted in the evolution of physical bodies capable of supporting intelligence, and also bad, in that they also resulted in cancer, birth defects, viruses, and mosquitoes.
And as the follow-up to #8:
“Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.”
Perhaps that is also the answer to the question in the title of this post, not only for the working of flashy, instant miracles, but for the working of miracles over time.
I’m curious to know, Jeff, if you would say that you would be the same person if you were not born with that defect?
I know in the difficulties I’ve faced in my life (which are largely an effect of mortality), the power of God has been made manifest.
Jon,
I think you incorrectly classify things.
You act as if everyone has a different reaction to “a brother, sister, a parent” dying than they do to something happening to them. But this isn’t true. Some people lose faith over something that happens to someone else, rather than something that happens to them.
So, it’s not the case that “happens to someone else = life” and “happens to me = no God.” Different people react differently to different life events.
From my perspective, either or do not speak for or against god. God doesn’t cause either mothers, brothers, or sisters to die, and he also doesn’t cause things to happen to me, because well…I don’t have any compelling evidence that God does *anything*.
Being gay isn’t something, IMO, to be “secretly glad it hasn’t happened to us.” What non-gay people should be glad about is that some great and significant part about them isn’t stigmatized by society.
Justin—”allowing people to ‘grow’ is not a defense”
Why not? Because you don’t like it, because it’s uncomfortable?
I was born with a large birthmark on my forehead, many surgeries later, the area is flat, but I have very little eyebrow on one side, and scarring.
I don’t remember getting teased about it, people were just ALWAYS asking what happened to me.
I think Heavenly Father sends us down here to earth, and while I believe he can and probably does on occasion become directly involved in “giving” people specific trials, I think generally, it’s just random- part of the condition of mortality. The point is taking any trials we get and learning from them. Doesn’t really matter where or who they come from.
I have a friend who is paralyzed from the neck down. She doesn’t complain, rather she believes that she wouldn’t be “who she is” without being paralyzed. Take away her paralysis and you take away part of what makes up her identity.
Jeff, it sounds like this experience largely affected who and how you are. Would you want your cleft palate taken away? If you hadn’t experienced what you did…would you be a different person, perhaps someone you wouldn’t want to be, or perhaps someone your current self wouldn’t like?
Jeff:
Short answer: if He had made you any other way, you would have been someone else. I also have physical defects. I developed juvenile diabetes in 1964. By now, while nothing is entirely broken, most of my major systems are damaged. Yet, even that is an expression of love; it seems the genetics that give rise to diabetes also provide better protection against being miscarried in the womb. The defect increases the chance for the unique me to live at all, and that is a great gift
The universe is not broken. Natural laws exist to expand physical and spiritual (and probably a few other kinds of) life in all its possibilities. It isn’t about pain avoidance; it’s about maximizing potential. Everything happens so that everything can BE. That IS the reason in itself.
“Theodicy is the attempt to explain God’s goodness and power and reconcile these with the evident evil in the created world.”
I rely on Truman Madsen’s approach to the problem with the issue of theodicy. He says that God is NOT omnipotent in that He can’t create a world for His children to advance in without allowing for “evil”. There must needs be opposition in all things in order for us to become like Him. Agency allows for failure as well as success in His creations.
Part of mortality is for intelligences to try to control matter. If things were perfectly Netwonian and predictable, this wouldn’t be much of a test. There is therefore some uncertainty built into matter/the universe/etc. A side effect of this is that “imperfections” occur. A small random event can, through a butterfly effect, lead to a bigger event. It’s neither for nor against God’s will, but is part of the basic uncertainty of things. (NOTE: This is actually planned as a later post and will be more fully developed when there is more space than a comment)
Justin T, neither you nor the philosophers are in a position to judge God’s motives for what he does, except as he reveals them to us.
Jeff, thanks for this post. My sister was also born with a cleft palate (though thankfully not a cleft lip — I was a young adult before I learned that these two were often connected).
My mother, my brother, my sister and I all share a congenital condition which is visible and troublesome. Thanks largely to my mother’s astounding example, I never felt put upon because of the condition, though I have felt the negative effects (and as I grow older, almost daily).
Ironically, counsel from Elder Packer (whose why question seemed so uncharacteristic to me) has been most helpful. Over ten years ago I attended a regional priesthood leadership meeting where he presided. During the course of the afternoon (perhaps in response to a question), he spoke of the difficulty with the question Why.
He suggested that in this life we simply may not get a satisfactory answer to that question. And therefore a more productive question is “What next?”
Without her ever articulating it, I saw looking back that that approach was my mother’s, as well.
Andrew S:
I just think people are born into some terrible situations that you can’t help thinking ” What Was God Thinking”? I guess we have to trust that he will take care of everything in the end and all of our questions will be answered.
re 22:
Jon, I know that’s what you were thinking.
I just am trying to point out that there is plenty of disagreement on what those “terrible situations” are or why they are terrible.
@alice
I agree 100%
@17)
I know exactly what Jeff is talking about here.
My mother had a cleft palate which wasn’t repaired until she reached adulthood. Ironically, she had the surgery the same day I did when I was eight years old.
I think, feel and know that I understand my mothers’ frustration better than anyone else in the family. Communication disorders are the worst to deal with because no matter how intelligent one is, if you have difficulty speaking, or you sound too funny people won’t listen and will discard what your saying. My foster mother had to go to the school constantly and argue with my teacher who kept trying to put me in lower reading groups when I read aloud she had difficulty understanding me. My reading test scores however were off the charts, so they knew I understood the material.
I still have issues with certain people at work because they insist on acting like children on a playground and want to make fun of my speech because they think its funny.
But I do think this issue is way different than the issue the church has with the Gay/lesbian SSA issue. Of course, if there is a way to correct a birth defect, any parent would choose to fix and correct the problem. I don’t think there is anything to fix for the people who are SSA.
The problem is that there may well be ways to relax and reform the hardwiring involved in sexual orientation and identity, which seems more like an EPROM than anything else.
Stephen,
But suppose you did relax or reform the hardwiring involved in sexual orientation and identity…wouldn’t you then really change the identity of the person? Sexuality isn’t incidental, so I would say yes.
Basically, to change sexual orientation would be to say, “Be someone else.”
Which would lead to a number of issues, such as I see played out in the deaf community over technology that restores hearing.
Cf. this comment at BCC.
I am rather surprised at this post and the comments. I do understand that one way to look at homosexuality is by comparing it to a disease or a disorder of some sort. This would mean that in the resurrection the “problem” would be corrected and all that is necessary is to rigorously deny the temptations during the short mortal part of our existence.
But I am not so sure that orientation works that way in all cases. What if, instead of comparing homosexuality to cleft palate or deafness, you look at it as a normal variation of the human condition, like skin or eye color? If orientation is a vital and natural part of individuality, it seems harmful to force people to live their lives as if they were going to be changed in the resurrection, to never be able to accept their own true nature.
I think BiV is raising an excellent point of clarification. I think ALL of the events of our lives are examples of natural variability, as are all of the ways every choice made by everyone has ripples for people yet unborn.
Whether we see our circumstances as opportunities for which we should be grateful or as crosses to bear is itself a choice, if perhaps a subconscious one. This is true of ALL events, not just those (whatever they are) that determine sexual orientation.
I don’t think God tries to fit us into some one-size-fits-all model. I grant that it’s easier to see that viewpoint from CofChrist than LDS versions of Restoration theology, as I noted at http://thefirestillburning.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/does-god-squash-ets-how-human-is-human/
Waiting for Answers
The path to the heights was twain at the pass;
both took me to vistas of awe.
The rocks on the tail ways provided a rest;
as I trudged further up towards the sky.
Occasional goat, or a bobcat be furred;
made a growl, or a bleat as a greet.
E’n the boulder at top of the crest
provided the lesson with seat.
That sturdy fine crag was cleft.
Hit by lightning, twice sheared, weathered worn;
it told me a story or two.
Resting tip top of the largest grand peak;
it had been touched by God’s hand through and through.
Ruler of nature, ruler of men, ruler of Universe too.
Destruction, Creation, Repair and Rebirth;
His Hand shapes each life, old and new.
Only in wisdom He’ll give all reasons “Why?” ;
We wait for his wisdom and truth.
With bodies imperfect or nature’s grand show;
It’s just mortal LIFE, till there is perfection’s renewal.
@30)
My sentiments exactly, someone born with a cleft palate or some other abnormality is not the same as someone who is a homosexual. IMO its’ like comparing apples to oranges. A birth defect is just that a defect, or for instance if you broke your leg, of course you would fix it. Sexual orientation, is not even in the same ball park. The people who want it fixed just don’t, nor do they want to understand the complexities or nuances in behavior.
I don’t think the point of this post is to compare clef palates to homosexuality.
Just looking at how we view life in relation to our experience with Heavenly Father.
Alice, I agree. However, as neuroscience continues, there is a lot being done with erasing memories and similar changes.
Andrew, if I lose my memory am I the same person?
(We just watched Wall-E with the kids last night).
When Wall-E gets a new computer chip, he’s not the same robot until something reminds him of his past. So the memories must have been stored somewhere else too.
Who volunteers for a study like that though. Yikes.
re 35:
Stephen, I tend to say no.
Firetag, #18,
“Short answer: if He had made you any other way, you would have been someone else. ”
I imagine this is true.
Seems a lot of people seem to miss the point of my post. the post is not about my cleft palate, it is about whether God makes people a certain way. Some think he does, some think that God does not intervene in the nature process. Birth defects are mere evidence that the nature process is sometimes flawed.
How far that those flaws extend is anyone’s guess. There are both biologic reasons as well as external forces causing defects in children. Is God one of those forces?
And then to ask the question again, Why would he do that? He is our Father.
Jeff:
I’m coming from a somewhat non-standard theology here, but I sit on the boundary between conventional Christian theology that God creates existence out of nothing, and a more (traditional?) LDS view that God exists within a framework of natural law in which there is Heavenly Father, Heavenly Grandfather, etc. (although I know LDS don’t use the latter term) There’s no Book of Abraham in our CofChrist canon.
The boundary to me is the point where there is nothing but Godhead. I am suggesting that reality would NOT be better than it is if there were no pain. Reality would be LESS than it is if there were no pain.
Pain isn’t a bug in the natural system; it’s a design feature, optimized to maximize God’s own complexity and intelligence — His glory.
Is that unfair to the individual? Well, that’s why nature encompasses parallel universes, to even out the risk so that the best of all of our individual experiences can be salvaged for our spirits to use. And in this case, the best means that which we would cherish as uniquely us. Even those who cherish darkness by their nature would be more miserable in any degree of light so that justice and mercy are both served.
“And then to ask the question again, Why would he do that? He is our Father.”
As I mentioned earlier the only way that any of this business makes any since to me is to say that He didn’t make us the way we are, whether we see him as our father or not. You have had the physical challenges with everything attendant and I’ve had mine. My own father didn’t, on purpose and with forethought, put hardship in my life. Why would I imagine that God would do that? No scriptural evidence just the only option that to me makes sense.
#48, Firetag,
I do very much appreciate your view as someone who does sit in the middle somewhat between us LDS and the rest of Christendom. I don’t know that the Book Abraham has any bearing on this issue and I am not even sure that LDS theology is particularly in play either.
If God is no respecter of persons than why would he purposely make one person strong and the other lame? The challenge of living this mortal life is the same for everyone in that we must deal with the hand we are dealt. For some it is extraordinary challenge from the very beginning of life.
For some it occurs later and is non-physical in nature.
So, in the end, I am not sure that God, our Father gives us specific challenges, but I know that He gives us the tools and teachings which allow all of us to overcome them to one extent or another and return to Him.
We have to choose to make us of those tools and teachings.
Jeff,
In response to your question:
Romans 9: 18-23 NIV.
I guess it should be noted that Mormons have a specifically different interpretation of these scriptures in Romans than many Christians (especially Calvinists) for important theological implications as to free will…
“If God is no respecter of persons than why would he purposely make one person strong and the other lame?”
Jeff, this is where answers are possible in 21st Century cosmologies that weren’t available to Joseph Smith in the 19th Century, even though parallel earths are a robust prediction of most viable modern theories, and the Book of Moses fits that interpretation better than Kolob ever did.
On some of those earths you’re the strong one, I’m lame; on other earths, it’s the other way around.
Andrew’s point in 43 may be exactly true, but the justice of it is a lot easier to swallow once we realize that the things that face our physical bodies average out over our spiritual existence, which is a COLLECTIVE property of all of our physical lives.
With parallel earths, there is NO reason to assume a one body to one spirit correspondence. Christian theologians would not have thought of a one spirit / multiple body solution any more than Jewish theologians would have thought that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. Indeed, conventional theology really has to explain why exactly would God create DIFFERENT spirits to inhabit bodies identical in every detail, choice, experience, and history EXCEPT THEIR LOCATION IN SPACETIME. Why should physical location of a body matter to a spirit?
I surely hope that theologians are done burning heretics, or I’ll have to borrow MH’s gravitar.
37 “re 35:
Stephen, I tend to say no.”
Then, by being born, we cease to be who were were in the pre-mortal existence.
Yes, this *is* a problem for Mormon theology…of course, Mormonism defines the self differently…
#43, Andrew,
I am not sure that does answer my question. Fore-ordination and/or predestination does not seem to address natural occurrences such as we are discussing.
Jeff,
You’re using natural occurrences to get God off the hook for fore-ordination and/or predestination.
“Why would God do such a thing?” is a question asked to people who believe that it is God — and not natural occurrences — which is responsible. The person asking it WANTS the person answering it to say, “Oh, right, God wouldn’t do such a thing.”
But actually, the answer to the question is simple (and not so palatable): God does it to show the riches of his glory to those who aren’t as hosed.
Andrew,
I don’t think so, because natural occurrences aside, does not necessarily prevent someone from living up to their foreordained destiny.
Plus, it is not a question of whether God could do this to me, it is a question of does He?
It depends on how tied one’s foreordained destiny is with the natural occurrences that have occurred.
For example, what if faith is a gift and not something freely chosen. Then if one has been “made by God” to be faithless, then either one’s foreordination is faithlessness (e.g., to be reprobate…the damned…in Calvinist terms), or one’s nature is a stumblingblock to his true foreordination.
When you ask, “Why would God do such a thing?” that question in a roundabout way answers “Does He?”, not “Could He?” The question arises because one side says, “God made me x way,” NOT because one side says, “God could have made me x way.”
I quote:
“The universe does not conform to out desires and wishes. It takes no notice of us and our aspirations. The earth’s tectonic plates move and sometimes they move in ways that cause destruction. It rains and sometimes it rains too much or not enough and causes distress to humans. There are such things as bacteria. Sometimes they get established in our system and cause us disease. We live in a dynamic universe and sometimes events are to our benefit and at other times to our detriment. That’s the way the world is.”
I think that the universe was set up like it was so we could choose to be good. The universe has differences. We call things good or bad or whatever. At the end of the day, we need to love God and love our fellowman. I don’t know that any of this is something that God specifically does to each of us.
ADMIN: Time to wake up.
These commenters don’t even know the name of my B&.
Ether 12:7 should answer most of this.
As for Jeff Spector’s cleft palate, evidently he’s turned it to a strength. Hide it with a beard so it doesn’t garner undue attention, but he realizes that it’s simply a feature, not the measure of the man that he is.
Stretching this sort of this to the PRACTICE of homosexuality is quite a stretch, though. The INCLINATION, if one considers how both heredity and early childhood (both beyond the pale of free agency) factor in, might be said to be “Gawd” made one “that” way. Just as some people have short fuses, some are adrenalin junkies, etc. To say that one must practice homosexuality merely because he feels the urge is to say that we are slaves to our baser desires. That I absolutely cannot buy. What, then, would distinguish us from mere animals if our ACTIONS are dictated by instincts?
I think of the plight of a lady friend who joined the Church a little over a year ago. She in her time has sampled “from both sides of the buffet.” Is is because deep down she IS a lesbian? I doubt it, since she twice in her life tried lesbians relationships and couldn’t handle them. She was raised as the proverbial good little Southern Baptist girl from Texas and studied geology at Baylor. She was also a gymnast and competed both in high school and in college, in fact was an alternate for both the ’84 and ’88 Olympic teams. She claims to have slept with both her high school and college coaches (female) as well as several teammates. So, was it a “natural” inclination or was it an “acquired” taste? She feels that it was a bit of both, in that, in order to get affection which she had trouble getting from men (which she had no problem being physically attracted to and sleeping with), she was willing to get physical with a woman. She says that she still feels the inclination, but, with two daughters that themselves are quite the budding gymnasts (they may just reach Olympic gold), she doesn’t want them to be influenced by any lesbianism.
I see any sexual indulgence, whether bad or good, as something that one acquires a taste for. As was put in the 2005 version of the “Longest Yard”…”Oh, they may be ugly now (speaking of prison queens), but in six months they’ll look like Beyonce”.
On a lighter note as to the “acquired taste” thing…when I was first dropped in the Italy Rome Mission in 1980, the “Apes” took us greenies to dinner in a trattoria and ordered “acqua minerale”…which I then though tasted like crap. In six months (pun intended), I made sure that my budget included a 250 lira “bichierre di acqua minerale” every day, especially during the hot Italian summer. I still fork over a few bucks at Safeway for a bottle of San Pellegrino. At least, in this case, the only harm is to my pocketbook for funny-tasting water!
#55, Doug,
“Stretching this sort of this to the PRACTICE of homosexuality is quite a stretch, though.”
This really has nothing to do with my post. My post is about what God controls and does not control as it pertains to the earthly birth and condition of people.
I think God does make us certain ways, our past is predestined, the environment we grow up in determines what kind of people we will be. People cant choose their parents and alot of other things in life. God is always in control, he makes people a certain way to humble them, and so through our weakness we will depend on him. If everything were perfect in our lives we wouldn’t see a need for God. I aldo remember the Lord telling paul his sttrength works best in his weakness, and it’ll also make them a stronger person.
Also to say to someone you chose to be bipolar, mentally ill , born with out a limb, or blind is extremely hurtful! I also remember reading about the blind man, one disciple asked if his mother or father sinned and the Lord simply said it was for God’s glory. God is in control of everything, he knows what kind of parents you’ll be born to and the traits you’ll inherit from them and the kind of advantages and problems you will have, to say that he doesnt means that he isnt all knowing nor in control which is false, he is in control all the time. Our problems, in my opinion, serve to give us character and realize our weakness and depend on God.