Nothing Just Happens

Bishop T.D. Jakes – Woman, Thou Art Loosed Conference 2001

“Three women – Naomi, who is the older woman, and Ruth, who was her daughter-in-law, and Orpah, who was her other daughter-in-law. Three women who’s commonality was pain. Pain is a strange company keeper. It brings the oddest people together. There is a secret fraternity that exists amongst those who have been in pain that is mind-boggling. It transcends the color of your skin. It transcends your background. When you have been through certain things, you feel for other people who have been through those things, because you relate to them. I personally don’t like to have a whole lot to do with people who have not been through pain. It’s nothing against them, I’m not jealous of them, I just can’t relate to them. I can’t relate to them and I am sure that they will not be able to relate to me. The parts of me that I need to have known, that I need to have touched, that I need to have fellowship, are tied up not in the successes of my life, but in the struggles of my life. For God has done more through my struggles. He’s done more through my struggles then he’s ever done through my successes. And if you look carefully at my successes, my successes are made out of the ingredients of my struggles. And you can never know my successes until you understand my struggles, because my struggles are the pathway that led me into my success. Are you hearing what I’m saying?

And so if you are going to have fellowship with somebody, you have to choose your friends and make sure that they have had something to die in their life. If you’ve never had anything to die in your life, you have the kind of optimism that is annoying. If you’ve never had anything to go wrong in your life, I don’t like to hear you preach, it aggravates me, it gets on my nerves because your preaching has not been balanced by failure. If you’ve never had anything to die in your life don’t counsel me, because you really don’t understand me because you don’t know why I am like I am until you’ve been where I’ve been. If you’ve never had anything to die in your life don’t sit there and tell me be a man, take it, don’t cry. You don’t know what I’m taking, you don’t know what I’m enduring, you don’t understand. Just because you read some books and took a psych class doesn’t mean that you are ready to deal with the issues of my life. There is something about going through death and loss and pain and misfortune and adversity. There is something about going through things that don’t seem fair to you. That once you go through them you need to make sense of the madness in your life since you can’t change what happened and you can’t alter what you’ve been through, at least you need to be able to think that there’s some greater good that’s going to come out of it.

It’s what they call bringing closure. To bring closure to it; to justify that I didn’t go through this kind of pain for nothing. I need to be able to feel like something good is going to come out of this. If I can’t do that then I feel like I’m a victim. I feel like I’ve been victimized and I forever feel sorry for myself and I’m not free to go on with my life, and I’m not safe to remarry again, and I’m not safe to get another job again, and I’m not safe in another church again, because I have unresolved issues out of my past; and I’m not ready to go forward with my life because I’m still tied up with where I came from. I need to know if I’m going to continue to worship God, I need to know that some demon didn’t get loose in my life and wreck my life. It’s not a mistake, it’s not an accident, God didn’t fall asleep on the job and the devil came in and wrecked the car. No, God never sleeps and he never slumbers. He’s in complete control and he knows where you are, and he knows how old you are, and he knows how much time you spent, and he knows what happened to you, and he knows who walked out and left you, and he knows who betrayed you, and he knows who molested you, and he knows who raped you, and he knows who rejected you, and he knows where you are in life, and he knows about your bills, and he knows about your degree, and he knows you dropped out of school, and he knows about what you didn’t get, and he knows about the health of your child, and he knows about the condition of your neighborhood. Understand that and tell yourself nothing just happens.