Let’s talk about karma, because I think we’ve gotten a little sloppy with that word.

Somebody lies to you.

Somebody cheats you.

Somebody treats you like dirt.

Somebody spends years hurting people and then finally gets knocked on their backside.

And somebody says, “Karma.”

I understand why we say it.

I’ve said it myself.

There’s something satisfying about believing the universe is keeping receipts.

But here’s the problem:

That’s not actually what karma means.

And the more I’ve learned about it, the more I’ve realized that I don’t need karma to explain why our choices matter.

I believe something much bigger than, “What goes around comes around.”

So what does karma actually mean?

The word karma comes from Sanskrit and basically means action or deed.

In the religious traditions where karma originated, particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, karma involves the consequences of intentional actions. What we choose, why we choose it, and how we behave all have consequences.

It’s not simply:

“Be bad and something bad will happen to you.”

It’s a much more complicated religious and philosophical idea.

And in many of those traditions, karma is connected to rebirth and consequences that extend beyond this particular lifetime.

That’s important because that’s not what I believe.

I don’t believe there’s some cosmic scorekeeper sitting up in heaven saying:

“Well, Deb’s neighbor was rude to her on Tuesday, so let’s make sure she gets a flat tire on Friday.”

That’s not how I see God.

And frankly, I’m glad it isn’t.

I believe in sowing and reaping.

There’s a biblical principle that sounds a lot like karma at first glance.

You reap what you sow.

But I don’t think that’s the same thing as karma.

I don’t believe the universe is balancing some giant set of scales.

I believe God sees.

He sees what we do.

He sees why we do it.

He sees what other people don’t see.

And He sees the things we get away with.

That’s an important distinction.

Because I’ve spent enough years investigating people to know something about human behavior:

People are very good at controlling the story other people see.

They can look generous and be selfish.

They can sound compassionate and be cruel.

They can quote Scripture and still treat people terribly.

They can tell everybody they’re the victim while conveniently leaving out the part where they created half the problem.

But here’s the thing about behavior.

Behavior leaves tracks.

You don’t have to know everything about somebody to notice the direction their footprints are going.

Eventually, character shows itself.

Not because karma came knocking.

Because we become, in large part, what we repeatedly choose.

That’s where “you reap what you sow” gets uncomfortable.

If you constantly sow suspicion, don’t be surprised when nobody trusts you.

If you sow cruelty, don’t be surprised when people stop feeling safe around you.

If you sow dishonesty, don’t be surprised when people question your word.

If you sow kindness, integrity, patience, and truth, those things begin shaping the life around you, too.

Sometimes the harvest is immediate.

Sometimes it takes years.

And sometimes, we’re not around long enough to see it.

That’s the part people don’t like.

We want the scales balanced right now.

We want the person who hurt us to hurt.

We want them exposed.

We want everybody to finally know what we know.

We want that moment when somebody looks at us and says,

“You were right about them all along.”

I’ve wanted that too.

But I’ve learned something.

Wanting justice and wanting to watch somebody suffer aren’t always the same thing.

And there’s a line between the two that we need to be honest about.

And then somebody decided my broken leg was karma.

This is where this subject stops being theoretical for me.

After I broke my leg, someone actually told me that breaking my leg was my karma because I didn’t care about or love my mother.

Let that sink in for a minute.

A woman breaks her leg, and instead of asking if she’s okay, somebody decides her injury is evidence that she deserved to suffer.

That’s not wisdom.

That’s not compassion.

And frankly, I don’t think it’s even an accurate understanding of karma.

It’s judgment dressed up as spirituality.

And there’s something else that bothers me even more.

The person saying it didn’t know my heart well enough to make that judgment.

They didn’t live my relationship with my mother.

They didn’t live my history.

They weren’t inside my conversations, my memories, my struggles, my decisions, or my prayers.

They saw a piece of a story and decided they knew the whole book.

That’s a dangerous habit, especially when we put God’s name anywhere near it.

I don’t believe every painful thing that happens to us is punishment from God.

This is an important distinction for me as a Christian.

Bad things happen.

Bodies break.

People get sick.

Cars wreck.

People fall.

People make terrible choices.

Other people make choices that hurt us.

Sometimes there is a direct consequence for something we’ve done.

Sometimes there isn’t.

And sometimes life simply happens.

I don’t believe my broken leg gave anybody evidence that God was punishing me for how I felt about my mother.

And I certainly don’t believe another human being has been given the authority to make that declaration on God’s behalf.

Jesus Himself pushed back against the idea that suffering automatically proves somebody was more sinful than everyone else.

In Luke 13, Jesus addressed people who had suffered tragic deaths and asked whether they were worse sinners because of what happened to them.

His answer was essentially no.

Their tragedy wasn’t proof that they were morally worse than everyone else.

That’s important.

Because human beings have a nasty tendency to look at somebody else’s suffering and try to explain it.

Sometimes we do that because uncertainty makes us uncomfortable.

Sometimes we do it because we want the world to feel orderly.

And sometimes, if we’re honest, we do it because we’d rather believe someone deserved their suffering than admit that terrible things can happen to people who didn’t earn them.

But that’s not faith.

That’s our need for a simple explanation.

And let’s talk about mothers.

I don’t need to rewrite my relationship with my mother to make somebody else comfortable.

Love isn’t always simple.

Families aren’t always simple.

Some relationships carry affection, pain, history, disappointment, loyalty, anger, forgiveness, grief, and complicated memories all at the same time.

And sometimes loving somebody doesn’t look like being able to give them everything they wanted.

Sometimes loving someone means setting boundaries.

Sometimes it means forgiving them.

Sometimes it means accepting that a relationship isn’t what you wished it would be.

And sometimes it means grieving what you needed but never received.

Nobody standing on the outside gets to reduce an entire lifetime of relationship to one sentence.

Especially not:

“Your leg broke because you didn’t love your mother.”

No.

I’m not going to accept that as truth simply because somebody said it with spiritual language attached to it.

I don’t need to see somebody punished to know that God saw what happened.

That’s probably one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned.

I don’t have to get even.

I don’t have to orchestrate their downfall.

I don’t have to convince everybody.

I don’t have to spend the next ten years collecting evidence for a case God already knows everything about.

And yes, I say that with a little humor because my investigator brain sometimes wants to build the whole damn case.

But faith asks me to put the file down sometimes.

God doesn’t need my evidence locker.

He already knows.

That doesn’t mean I become foolish.

It doesn’t mean I stay where I’m being mistreated.

It doesn’t mean forgiveness requires trust.

And it sure doesn’t mean I hand somebody the keys to my house because I’ve decided to have a forgiving heart.

I can forgive you and still lock the door.

I can pray for you and still walk away.

I can wish you healing and still decide you don’t get access to me anymore.

That’s not bitterness. That’s discernment.

And then there’s grace.

This is where Christianity gets very different from the popular idea of karma.

Because Christianity doesn’t teach me that everybody simply gets exactly what they deserve.

Thank God for that.

Because if we’re being honest, none of us want a system where we receive only what we’ve earned.

We all need grace.

We all have things we’ve done that we’d rather not have displayed on a billboard.

We all have moments when we weren’t our best selves.

We all have things we wish we could go back and do differently.

Grace means our worst moment doesn’t have to become our identity.

It means repentance matters.

It means change is possible.

It means God can redeem what we’ve messed up.

And it also means I don’t get to decide that somebody else is permanently beyond redemption just because they hurt me.

That’s God’s territory.

Not mine.

So no, I don’t believe in karma.

I believe in choice.

I believe in consequences.

I believe in accountability.

I believe in grace.

I believe people reveal themselves through what they repeatedly do.

I believe God sees what human beings miss.

And I believe there are some things I need to stop trying to control.

Because here’s what I’ve discovered:

I can spend my life watching somebody else’s field to see whether their crops come up, or I can tend my own garden.

That’s the part that matters.

What am I planting?

Am I planting resentment?

Am I planting fear?

Am I planting judgment?

Am I planting kindness?

Am I planting truth?

Am I planting forgiveness?

Am I planting courage?

Because eventually, whether anybody else notices or not, I will live among what I have planted.

And that’s a sobering thought.

It’s also a hopeful one.

Because it means I’m not powerless.

I can’t control what somebody else does.

I can’t make them tell the truth.

I can’t make them apologize.

I can’t make them understand what they did to me.

I can’t make them become the person I wish they were.

But I can decide what I plant next.

And maybe that’s the better question than,

“When is karma going to get them?”

Maybe the better question is:

“What am I going to grow from this?”

Because I don’t need revenge to prove that something happened.

I don’t need karma to make God fair.

And I don’t need to carry somebody else’s wrongdoing around in my heart waiting for the universe to punish them.

God sees.

I choose.

The seeds get planted.

And eventually, the truth has a way of showing up in the harvest.

That’s what I believe.

And for the person who thinks my broken leg was God’s way of punishing me for not loving my mother:

You don’t know enough about my life to make that judgment.

And neither do I know enough about yours to make it for you.

That’s the humility I think we sometimes forget.

We can believe deeply without pretending we’re God.

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