Everything Happens 
I hear the phrase "God's plan" all the time. What usually follows this phrase is something to the effect of "we don't know what it is and can't hope to understand it." I find the second part of that very odd. People always seem to say that second part when something bad happens. When someone dies we want to know the answer to "Why?" but it never comes. The funny thing is, when something good happens we look at each other and say "Wow, what a coincidence."
People talk about things being a coincidence all the time. But what happened to "God's plan?" Is God only concerned with the big and bad things? If so, how big or how bad? What is too small or too good for God to care about. The answer is NOTHING! There is no such thing as a coincidence. Everything happens for a reason. Everything from stars exploding to someone sneezing happens for a reason.
Perspective
Now you may think that just because everything has a reason does not mean we can know what that reason is. I say that you are wrong. We can know those reasons. All we have to do is know how to look at the problem. You need the right perspective. Our entire existance is based on our perspective. Have you ever been given this advice before..."When you are having trouble figuring out a problem, take a break for about 10 minutes and come back to it." This advice is very good for some people. What it suggests is that if you stop thinking about the problem for a little while, when you come back to it, you perspective will be different. It works. The reason is works is because of the way we choose to use our brains. We get stuck on an idea or a way of looking at things. Our minds become like trains on tracks, they only go where the track leads. Sometimes, the track can lead no where. Taking that break resets the track and we are able to pick a different direction. The right perspective is all it takes in order to understand any problem
The Riddle
We need to look at life just the way we look at a really hard riddle. Sometimes you may not know the answer but that does not mean you cannot fiqure it out. My brother once told me a riddle. To this day I think it is the strangest and toughest riddle to figure out. The riddle is this, "A man jumps off the roof of a building. On his way down he hears a phone ring and realizes he was wrong. What was he wrong about?" This is one of those 20 questions riddles where you can ask 20 questions and the teller can only answer "Yes" or "No".
The answer is that the man survived a nuclear holocoust. He thought he was the last person alive on Earth and tried to commit suicide. When he heard the phone ring he realized that there was someone else alive. The point is that the answer is crazy and chances are you will never figure that out but, if you asked the right questions you might just get it. The same is true of life. The answers you want may not be right there in front of you but if you look hard enough and ask the right questions, pretty soon things start to make sense.
Questions
Life is all about asking the right questions and finding out the answers. Where most people get stuck is not that they ask the wrong questions, it is that they ask the questions in the wrong way. Let me give you an example, when someone dear to us dies, we ask ourselves "Why did this person die." A better way to ask the question would be "What good can this person's death bring." Don't get me wrong, I do not think that someone dying is a "good" thing. What I mean by "good" is that there is a positive affect that occurs that most people do not see. In this situation, a person's death brings all of the family together. Sometimes amidst all of the mourning, bitter arguements between family members get resolved and as a whole the family grows closer together. For a few families, funerals are the only times that they see each other. This is what I'm talking about as being a good thing. Another positive occurance is that we start to really examine all of the lessons and wonderful times that we shared with the deceasced. Many times, we remember little things that we took for granted before. That can be the most important thing of all, remembering the lessons that we took for granted.
