I got the call last Saturday. “Aaron passed away last night,” the friend on the other end told me. I was in shock. Aaron was basically my age, and he had a precious 3-year-old daughter and a young wife. He was on the worship team at my last church. We had played, chatted, and worked together for over two years. How could this be? How could someone simply die like that in the middle of the night?

Aaron’s funeral was today. Apparently, he died of an epileptic seizure. There were nearly 1000 people at his funeral, and it was extremely emotional. How could God allow this to happen? Why didn’t He stop it? These questions have haunted me ever since I first heard the news, and I think I’m just now starting to come to grips with the fact that sometimes these things are just a part of life. Sometimes bad things happen to good people.

Aaron and his family

It struck me today during the funeral how differently I viewed these kinds of things now that I have been out of Gothardism for nearly 10 years. Within Bill Gothard’s ideology, there is a great deal of emphasis on the principle of “cause and effect.” Bill alludes to this fact on his own website, when he states that he has taught the Basic Seminar for 40 years “to help people understand the cause-and-effect sequences of life.” There is certainly some truth to this mindset. If I go jump off a building, I will fall. However, Gothard has taken scriptures such as Galatians 6:7 (whatever one sows, that will he also reap) and used it to basically say that if one follows Biblical principles, success will be the result. Unfortunately, life is not always so simple.

My friend Aaron was a good man, a good father, and a good husband. Sure, he wasn’t perfect. I also know a lot of rotten people who seem to be living the good life of fame, fortune, and wealth. They have achieved the “success” that Bill promises only comes from obedience to certain “principles.” How is that fair?

10 years ago, I would have been looking for the “cause” of God’s anger and judgment. I would have suspected some secret sin and tried to figure out why God would have taken him home. I would have been like Christ’s disciples in John 9, who in reference to a blind man asked Jesus: “who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

The truth is simple: Sometimes bad things happen to good people. God sends rain on the just and the unjust (Matthew 5:45). Even Job, a righteous man, suffered mightily. However, the truth is that in the midst of tragedy and triumph, God’s grace is always there. Sometimes He allows these things to happen so that His grace is made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). Sometimes these things happen that His glory is displayed through our circumstances (John 9:3). Whatever the case may be, we as believers in Jesus know that “all things work together for good, for those called according to His purpose (Romans 8:28).”

Life is not always easily explainable. My opinion is that we shouldn’t really even try. God’s ways are so much higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9). It’s in times when tragedy strikes that we should simply cast ourselves upon His sustaining grace, knowing that He will never leave us nor forsake us.

Let me leave you with the lyrics of a song sung at Aaron’s funeral today: