Why Did God let This Happen to Me?

Kathy Gallagher knows firsthand the devastation and pain a husband's betrayal causes. But in this interview she looks at the blessings that come from trials and helps answer the question everyone who has suffered is tempted to ask: Why did God let this happen to me?

Mike: Kathy, the letter we want to deal with today is from Shirley, and Shirley is expressing something that many of us have asked, and it really can be boiled down to this: "why has God allowed this to happen to me?" Shirley is feeling like she's been abandoned by God. How would you respond to her?

Kathy: I like to share a little of my own testimony answer that question, Mike, because every woman I've ever dealt with has asked the same question: "why did God let this happen to me?" All women marry men that we love, and we marry those men believing that they're going to be our life partner, that we're going to have this wonderful loving relationship; we're going to have children... You know, I mean, it's not a fairy tale or a fantasy, it's real. You expect all that to happen, so when you get into the process of marriage and you begin to find out that there's unfaithfulness, that completely shatters all of a woman's dreams. "Lord, you knew," I can't tell you how many times I've heard that, "God you knew what he was doing when I married him, why did you allow this to happen?" And I said that many times myself; I just couldn't make sense of why God allowed me to marry Steve Gallagher. I was on fire for Christ I mean, I was a soul winner; it was exciting, it was dynamic; I was in love with Jesus Christ, He was in love with me. But within days finding out that Steve was in sexual sin—horrible stuff.

Mike: It's the age-old question: "why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?"

Kathy: At least in my life, Mike, all I can say, and I've counseled this for many years; because you can't make sense of this in the natural and it doesn't make any sense. But in the spiritual it makes a lot of sense because God uses suffering primarily to carve out of us habits and attitudes and sin that nothing else can get at. Finding out my husband was in sexual sin was the worst thing that could have happened to me, but it brought out things in me that I did not know were in there. Of course, I would have been happy to spend the rest of my life not even dealing with that stuff; I would have been happy to just have a mediocre Christianity and a mediocre marriage. That would have been fine for me, but God wasn't satisfied with that. I've been married 29 years, and I look back on those years and what I see is a long history of God's faithfulness, maybe not Steve's faithfulness, but I saw God's faithfulness and what I would say to Shirley and a lot of other women who have found themselves in that same predicament: feeling like "God, why did you let this happen to me?" God's letting it happen because he's refining, and, ladies, we need it just as much as the men do, and I think that we struggle a lot with that as women; we feel like victims when we found out that our husbands have been unfaithful. And we are, to a certain degree, we are victims of someone else's awful behavior. And yet, you can either choose to let God use it in your life and fashion you and mold you or you can become bitter, hard-hearted, divorce this jerk and move on, but you're going to have to deal with stuff. If you really belong to the Lord something is going to have to go in and deal with these issues.

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Mike: How do you ultimately deal, Kathy, with that very real feeling that you've been abandoned by God? It is a real feeling that you have.

Kathy: Yeah, it's very real but you know, Mike, all I can say, if you have truly been converted; you know in your heart of hearts that God is good, no matter what; you know that and it's real. This nation has created a nation of people who are very spoiled, and we have a very high expectation in marriage. So when something interferes with that, we immediately turn to God and start questioning God. The Lord is allowing things to happen in our lives because he's trying to get at things in us that nothing else will get to, and that's why I feel like sexual sin, as bad and awful as it is, and, you know, I get upset when I hear the stories of what men do to their families; it breaks my heart—but you're in that situation and you have to say in your heart "God you are for me, you are with me, and you're going to do something; you're going to bring about good through this."

Mike: One of the things that you said, you described the attributes, or the character, of God. How often do you think it's the problem that some of these women simply do not know what the character of God is and maybe they need to spend more time in the Word of God getting to know him so that they do know, not only what his promises are, but who he is.

Kathy: Right; and that was my problem in the beginning because I was still very young when all this broke, and I was just a new Christian, and I didn't know the Lord at all. Part of what happened for me when I found out about Steve's sin after I realized how much I needed God, I ran to His word to find answers for my marital problems but what I found was a God of mercy and compassion that's what I ran into, and I found a side to God that, again, I would never have known the Lord the way I know him, if I hadn't gone through what I've been through.

Mike: Amen. Kathy, I hope that'll be an encouragement and hopefully some direction to women who may feel abandoned by God.

Kathy: Thanks so much thanks Mike.