“Everything happens for a reason.” Or is it, “God can bring reason out of everything that happens”?

I wrote both of those quotes on the board. Then I asked my students to choose one. It elicited a discussion on the idea of suffering and evil; and the part God plays in it … or not.

In my 24 years as a police officer, I saw a lot of suffering. Sometimes it made sense. Often it didn’t. But it always left me with an insatiable sense that we could deal with it by embarking on one of two paths.

Recently, one of my former cohorts came back from a conference on school shootings. Seems like they’re happening more often, doesn’t it? God forbid we call them what they are: evil. It’s been said before that “a world without ultimate answers leads to nihilism,” the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless. Never has there been such an irrefutable force of secularism that seeks to answer life’s question of evil, absent any absolutes. And nowhere is evil more absolute than in the eyes of a police officer.

So what’s the connection between evil, suffering and God? We need look no further than Brittany Maynard, the woman with a brain tumor who was exposed to an onslaught of support for taking her own life. I am no one to judge the intensity of someone else’s suffering. No one is. And I believe that God’s mercy is great enough to overcome anyone’s decision. But perhaps what strikes me is how effortlessly the media can enter into these discussions absent the God-factor.

We wrestle with discussions on evil in the same way. Say, for instance, the evil of a 13-year-old who walks into a school, kills some people, then himself. Did I mention the kid wasn’t bullied at all? So where’s the motive? Seems the media can’t come up with one this time. Forgive my bluntness, but when our culture is leavened with the idea that there is no Supreme Being, is it any wonder so many people act without fear of the afterlife? Or when some only preach the mercy of God, conveniently forgetting there’s justice in there somewhere, why should I fear punishment? And what about suffering? If there’s no God, then suffering is just about me, right?

I remember asking that last question once. Luckily, I lived in a community that helped me answer it with truth. Years ago, my grandmother, a saintly woman, contracted cancer. Naturally, I believed God would allay her suffering. After all, she was a good person; why should she suffer?

When her suffering lasted, I questioned God’s goodness — in fact His existence — until I spoke with a priest friend who told me: “The next time you’re at your grandparents’ house, watch your grandfather.” Watch my grandfather? What did he mean by that?

I took his advice. The next time I was there, I watched my grandfather intently. I saw this man — formerly distant, and perhaps a bit hardened — uncharacteristically waiting on his wife, changing her sheets, cooking for her, and changing her dressings. I saw virtue in him that I never knew existed. It was then I began to understand, but only through the eyes of faith. My grandmother was a saint, after all. You see, if God had come to her and asked her if she’d be willing to suffer a bit … to embrace that which others more secularly minded might shun, for the sake of her husband … to help him become a better man, I know what her answer would have been. It would have been yes.

Suffering: If we’re all part of the human family that God wills us to be, doesn’t my suffering affect you? Evil: If God is a just God, is there not a sense we’ll have to answer for our lives on earth?

Our souls are shaped with the impenetrable score of whom or what we’ve give our lives to: God or culture, life or death. We have the right to choose. But perhaps we’d all be better off if we started asking the right questions. And demand our media do the same.

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Paul Stuligross, a former police officer, teaches theology at Livonia Ladywood High School.