WHY?

I just got back from visiting a friend's son in hospital. The 20-something suffers from a muscle disorder that affects his walking , breathing and every motor skill that requires the use of muscles. The disease is hereditary and his father died of it at the age of 50 five years ago. The last time I saw Charles was when he and his mum visited my mum in hospital in August last year. He was fine then but was diagnosed with the disease a month later. From that point on it was down hill all the way. So one year later, he's lying in hospital hooked up to a machine which basically breathes for him. His mother Jo is half her already skinny self, from worry. She worries about her other son. I wonder how someone can go thru life with so many burdens. How resilient is the human spirit? How much can one take before breaking down? I'm not sure if I can go thru the emotional and physical roller coaster Jo is on. So I ask myself why does someone like Jo who seems the most Christian and good person have to go thru such difficult hardships in life ? Why do bad things happen to good people? Where is God in all this? If he has a purpose for making good people suffer , what is it? He gave Charles intelligence ( he was an A star scholarship holder ) who went into teaching after he completed his studies in England. So what was that for? Harold Kushner writes in his book " Why do bad things happen to good people" that God doesn;t make bad things happen to people . Bad things just happen. God's presence is felt in the way one copes with the "bad" situation. Even then I question why some people seem to be given more than their fair share of bad situations in their life and others seem to sail thru life without a care in the world. I know life was not meant to be fair. Were these people really so bad in a previous life that they now have to "deal" with all this hardship in this life? So religion expects blind faith. Even with so much bad happening in your life , one is supposed to trust that it will all come out good. How does that work? How many times have I heard this at wakes...." he's gone to a better place"......really? how do you know? Because the bible tells you so ?........the bible is a collection of short stories passed down by word of mouth from one person to another until some people decided to write it down. It was also the decision of one person / organization who decided which stories were to be included and which were to be excluded. OK I digress.....getting back to the hardships some people face. So there must be some purpose to all this. There must be a reason why some people seem to attact more sorrow than others. I really wish I knew the answer to this. My only prayer is that I don;t find myself in a position to start asking the question " why me?"