"Everything happens for a reason" -- and other lies I've loved | Kate Bowler

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 June 2019

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In life's toughest moments, how do you go on living? Kate Bowler has been exploring this question ever since she was diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 35. In a profound, heartbreaking and unexpectedly funny talk, she offers some answers -- challenging the idea that "everything happens for a reason" and sharing hard-won wisdom about how to make sense of the world after your life is suddenly, completely changed. "I believe that in the darkness, even there, there will be beauty and there will be love," she says.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features Divinity Professor Kate Bowler recorded live at TEDMed 2018.
0:09.1	There is some medical news that nobody, absolutely nobody is prepared to hear.
0:15.5	I certainly wasn't.
0:17.3	It was three years ago that I got a call in my office with the test results of a recent scan.
0:23.6	I was 35 and finally living the life I wanted.
0:27.6	I married my high school sweetheart
0:29.6	and had finally gotten pregnant after years of infertility.
0:34.6	And then suddenly we had a Zach,
0:41.3	a perfect one-year-old boy slash dinosaur, depending on his mood,
0:43.3	and having a Zach suited me perfectly.
0:47.3	I had gotten the first job I applied for in academia,
0:51.3	land of a thousand crushed dreams.
0:55.0	And there I was working at my dream job
0:58.1	with my little baby
0:59.6	and the man I had imported from Canada.
1:04.0	But a few months before, I'd started feeling pain in my stomach
1:07.2	and had gone to every expert to find out why.
1:10.5	No one could tell me. And then, out of the
1:13.7	blue, some physician's assistant called me at work to tell me that I had stage four cancer and that I
1:21.5	was going to need to come to the hospital right away. And all I could think of to say was, but I have a son.
1:30.1	I can't end.
1:32.1	This world can't end.
	...

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