Genetics and Bad Luck

We ask what causes our medical afflictions, often from a place of great emotional as well as physical pain. We have made up answers throughout our history, as we find it hard to accept answers that don't have a story attached to them.  We now find it ridiculous that anyone could ask Jesus whether it was the man's sin or his parents' that caused him to be born blind, yet many of our hypotheses even now aren't better. They are sometimes even the same. Your parents committed the sin of having you vaccinated, though we may transfer that to Big Pharma, or The Medical Establishment, or Government. Your community committed the sin of allowing bad neighborhoods, resulting in physical danger, stress and lasting medical effects. Negligent manufacturers, drunk drivers and the bars that served them, smoking, obesity...Some of these things are at least partial explanations.

We don't like "bad luck" as an answer, because the story eludes us then.  "Genetics" is also unsatisfying, as it does not fasten tightly to a cause. The guilt of "I gave my son this condition in the moment he was conceived" leads immediately to "but I got it from my mother, and she from her father" and so on endlessly. It runs in our family. It becomes the bad luck explanation eventually. The refinements that we inherited risk or predisposition but not disease are not emotionally different.

For Christians this is both easier and harder.  Easier, because we know that there might be a meaning more important than our pain behind it, whether a specific lesson for our specific life, or a general lesson that suffering comes to us all; harder because we then take it personally when we wonder why Omnipotence has allowed this. We are not alone in the void, but we now wonder if our companion there really has our best interests at heart.