Recently a cousin of mine asked the question "Why does God take all the good people and leave all the jerks?" She lost her husband a year ago in a terrible accident. She is grieving, and likely will be for many years. Loss is a very difficult thing to process - it's so painful.
She seemed to be asking this question in an effort to truly find peace, perhaps tired of the cliches that people had been offering.
This was my response to her.
In order to have peace of mind I think of it this way...
Every single spirit/soul/person is on a divine mission to experience the rich diversity of experience available to humans, but each can not experience all of it at once, they can only experience aspects. So, each comes into this world with the intention of having certain experiences in their human life - both "positive" and "negative" experiences.
So, not just experiences like falling in love, being a parent, or being rich, but also experiences like having a broken heart, having an illness/disease (curable or incurable), or being poor.
And experiences such as what it's like to be a kind, generous, loving person, or a person who is fearful all the time of everything, or a person who consistently makes bad choices, or a person who can be described as nothing other than pure evil and "a waste of space"... Yep, they are divine, too.
Some people float through life on a cloud of "easy" and others have a hell of a time, and yet others fall on a spectrum between the two.
There are a million directions to go with this idea... and I'm NOT saying that people living in poverty asked to be poor and shouldn't receive assistance! Or that racism/sexism/classism (or any ism!) are justified. Rather, it may be that part of one person's experience living in poverty is to experience an incredible act of generosity, or to experience the unique human struggles of a lifetime of such poverty, or the struggles and issues of emerging out of poverty only to be thrust back in, or even to escape poverty and live "a nice middle class existence". It may be that many people have incarnated in order to experience the incredible power of leading a movement for change. Who can ever know besides that spirit/soul/person/God/Goddess/Universe?
The point is, we can't keep all the nice people and get rid of all the jerks - the jerks are here on a divine mission, too... (And it isn't necessarily to make life hell for others! Although it sure seems that way.)
My way of coping with this is to allow for a purpose for everyone, and for every experience. And that also gives purpose to my experiences (both pleasant and unpleasant). It also gives me the inner peace of being able to release my anger at people who make things suck for everyone, and focus on my self and my own experience (and how I impact the experience of my loved ones).
Perhaps there is something within that you'll find useful for your self... or not! Take what works for you and discard the rest.
