Part 1 of Where Were You: This Is My Luck

Early in Bruce Almighty (2003), Jim Carrey plays Bruce Nolan, a Buffalo TV reporter convinced God is out to get him. On his way to work, his girlfriend Grace hands him a strand of prayer beads the kids at her daycare made. “They will keep you safe,” she tells him. He says he is going to need a miracle to get to work on time.

Then he hits traffic. The scene is a man coming apart over a commute. His meeting has started without him. He has the beads in his hand. “This is my luck!”

Nearby, a body is being loaded into an ambulance. Bruce is sitting in a working car, healthy, late. He is the safe one.

It is a joke, and it works because we recognize it. I have done my own version. The light turns red as I reach it. The food takes an extra ten minutes. Something small goes sideways, and out comes the vocabulary of catastrophe: of course, this would happen to me, that’s just my luck.

That is not suffering. It is inconvenience. It can be annoying and frustrating, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is a different kind of thing, and getting the word right matters, because the word belongs to the person in the ambulance.

Blessed Are You Who Weep Now

“That’s just my luck” sounds like a throwaway line. It is actually a small theological claim. It says nobody is in charge, the dice came up against me, and I got less than I was owed. When I say it about a red light, from a warm car, on a full stomach, I am not honoring God. I am grading his provision as a bad day.

Scripture has a word for that, and it is not “suffering.” In the wilderness, Israel is fed every morning with bread from heaven, and complains about the menu:

We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic, but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at. (Numbers 11:5–6)

Nothing at all but this manna. That is “this is my luck,” with breakfast on the ground every morning. Paul offers the other posture: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty” (Philippians 4:11–12).

If you want to know what suffering is, Jesus lists it. Matthew’s Beatitudes are the familiar ones, and some of them point inward: the poor in spirit, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Luke’s version is blunter:

Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. (Luke 6:20–21)

Then he turns around: “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry” (6:25).

He does not bless the people who waited at the light. He does not bless the housed, the fed, the clothed, and the warm. That is most of the people who will read this, me included. He blesses the poor, the hungry, the weeping. Sit with that.

So here is my working definition, and I will hold it loosely: suffering is harm that cannot simply be waited out. The light turns green. The food arrives. Poverty, grief, and hunger do not change on a timer.

There is one more name on Matthew’s list: “Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” (Matthew 5:10). Persecution is not bad luck. Somebody chooses it. That is the door into the half of this problem I think I understand.

The Open Book Test

Here is the simplest way I can say it. God gave us the playbook. We failed the open book test. That is moral suffering.

Moral suffering is suffering that somebody chose and that could have been avoided. It happens at two levels.

The first level is personal. You choose, and you pay. Lie to someone you love, and the guilt and the loneliness that follow can eat you alive. The pain is real. I am not going to call it small. But in most cases it was preventable, and the person who could have prevented it was you.

The second level is societal, and it is harder. A large group chooses, and people who never took part pay. Take climate change. Warming oceans feed stronger storms, and the people who will get the worst of it are mostly not the people who caused it. Oxfam’s 2023 Climate Equality report found that in 2019 the richest tenth of humanity was responsible for half of global carbon emissions, and the poorest half for less than a tenth. The family in the path of the storm is largely guilt-free, and pays anyway. No one person did it. We did it together. It was still chosen, and it was still avoidable.

Hunger works the same way. The world grows enough food to feed everyone, and hundreds of millions of people go hungry anyway. I wrote about that in An Open Book Test: we do not have a quantity problem, we have a distribution problem.

Jesus was asked about this kind of suffering directly. Some people told him about Galileans “whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices,” and he asked them back: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? No, I tell you” (Luke 13:1–3). Pilate chose. The Galileans paid. Jesus refuses to make it their fault.

Here is the hard part. Free will that lands only on the chooser seems fair. Free will that lands on bystanders feels like a defect in the design. But it is not God holding the match. It is us. Moral suffering is consequence, not punishment. With great power, as Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben put it, comes great responsibility, and God gave us the power.

Why Not Just Make Us Good

The obvious question is why God allowed it at all. If he is all-powerful, why is there anything but peace?

My answer is that free will and determinism do not mix. A world where everyone is guaranteed to choose well is a world where nobody really chooses. God could have built a world without moral suffering. It would have been a world without us in it, at least not the version of us that can love, because love that cannot be refused is not love. He had to pick one or the other. He picked freedom and accepted the risk that we would use it badly. That is the free-will defense, which runs from Augustine, the fourth-century bishop of Hippo, to the philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who argued in God, Freedom, and Evil (1974) that even an all-powerful God cannot create free creatures guaranteed to do only good.

So moral suffering is possible to eliminate in theory. Every person would just have to choose well, every time. In practice, with free will in the room, I do not expect it.

There is a second objection that sounds like the same one but is not. If God is all-knowing, he knew what we would choose. Doesn’t that make the choice his? The classic answer is Boethius’s, written in prison in the sixth century: knowing a choice is not causing it. I picture it the way a large language model works. The model’s weights are something like character: everything that has shaped you so far. The sampling is something like choice: real open-endedness in what comes out next. God knows the whole system, not by predicting the output but by seeing it. The analogy breaks, and I know where. Randomness by itself is not freedom. A dice roll is not a decision. The agent has to author the choice. That question deserves its own part, and it will get one.

What tells me God planned for our failures is that repentance exists. “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves,” John writes, and then: “If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins” (1 John 1:8–9). The father of the prodigal son sees him “while he was still far off” and runs to him (Luke 15:20). You do not build a road home for children you expected never to leave.

Someone will quote Matthew 5:48 back at me: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Greek word is teleios. It means complete or mature, finished in the sense of grown up, not flawless. We were never expected to be perfect. We were expected to be good. That is a huge difference. An open book test assumes you will need to look things up.

A Different Story

That is the half of the problem that makes sense to me. The other half does not.

In the same passage where Jesus refuses to blame Pilate’s victims, he brings up a second disaster: “those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the other people living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you” (Luke 13:4–5). Nobody in that story is holding a sword. A tower fell. And in John’s Gospel, when the disciples see a man blind from birth and ask, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents?”, Jesus answers, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned” (John 9:2–3).

Childhood cancer. Earthquakes. Disasters nobody caused and nobody chose. Free will does not obviously explain those, and I am not going to pretend it does. I have a theory or two, and I hold them loosely. Natural suffering is a different story, and it is the next one.

Grace told Bruce the beads would keep him safe. He had them in his hand when he said “this is my luck,” and the ambulance was loading someone else.