Osler's Razor

I've often heard people say that "God won't lay on you more than you can bear."  I have a few issues with that.

The first is the assumption that God is ladling out tragedies to various people, measuring carefully to make sure everyone gets enough.  This doesn't comport at all with what I see around me.  Some people (myself included) largely avoid tragedy for much of their lives, while others suffer blow after blow.  To ascribe this to God with such certainty seems unnecessary.  God is much more than any of us, and we don't understand what he is doing much of the time-- that is in the nature of the God/man relationship.   It might be that God micromanages each event on earth, I suppose, but it also might be that he has allowed us to suffer unequally without his direction at each moment.  We don't know which it is, or if it is at some point in between.  The Bible is clear that God knows all that happens, but that does not mean that he directs each thing that happens.

My second problem is that it seems that sometimes a persons burdens are too much to bear.  They may claim that they are a "survivor," but often that means that they are not dead.  The emotional damage of tragedy has marked them, transformed them, into something much different than what might have been if their lives had proceeded without tumult and despair.

The older I get, the more comfortable I become with the answer of "I don't know," and that includes my answer to the question of "why does God allow tragedy?"