"God made it happen"

This article and video is about a teenager who rolled her car while trying to avoid a skunk. She wound up with a broken back and neck. (Her best friend also wound up with bones broken throughout her body, including her back and neck.) In this article, she says, "They told me right out of the CT scan they saw a spot on my kidney...A couple of days later, they called us with the results that it was Pheochromocytoma (a rare form of cancer), and cancerous throughout my body." In the video, she says,"I believe that God made it happen at that point in time because that was the point in time that I was strong enough to handle it."

I wish her the very best of luck in battling the cancer, and I wouldn't deprive anyone of the beliefs that help them get through things like this. But personally, I find it hard to believe a merciful God has anything to do with situations in which young people get cancer, or are injured severely in a car wreck. This is the sort of problem that set me on the road to atheism, because the cognitive dissonance involved in believing simultaneously that God has a purpose in everything he does and that God strikes young people down with cancer was really too much for me to reconcile.