Do you believe everything happens for a reason ?

I believe that everything happens for a reason, in a "chaos theory" kind of way. If it's happening, it's happening as a result of previous events that happened -- this includes actions we have caused in the hope of improving our lot in life -- not because you or I would like them to happen out of the blue, or because we deserve or pray for them. For people to believe that random events happen for some chance for personal, financial, or emotional development is, at best, projecting one's hopes and unmet organismic needs into a large vat of predetermined physics, chemistry, biology and finance equations.

Underneath all the pretensions of free will, personal destiny, and so on, there are these seemingly supporting facts: our minds are tremendous arrays of memories, sensations, thoughts, feelings, with near limitless interactions of all these elements resulting in the paths of our lives. Yet beneath all that, our minds are also sub-arrays of intricate bio-machinery, arranged down to the molecular level, and overwhelmingly programmed to react in just a few ways.

Think, for example, of the last ad you had no intention of clicking on while you were working, but did. A certain mass-tested arrangement of colors and/or text caused you to click that ad. Or perhaps long-buried memories involving similar colors or words did the trick. Either way, things happened for a reason: massive pools of other human brains were tested through the Internet to see what the lowest common denominator was for ads. And you became part of the post-test group responding positively, and generating income somewhere in an Internet business model.

I am assuming the gist of your question deals with calamities, disasters, random acts of kindness, opportunities for promotion, the personal decisions of others, and so on.

Most of the things that happen to you happen to you as a result of your actions. You create an event infrastructure that is raising you in your life, simply supporting you, or dragging you sideways or down. The skills and processes you acquire to advance in life are empirical. So is this event infrastructure, though you can always change its effect on you.

Of course, the rest is random and often can't be helped or avoided. Stephen Crane said it best:

"A man said to the universe: "Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe, "The fact has not created in me a sense of obligation."

The universe is inconceivably busy, a meshwork of meta-gears which produce results but grind other gears into dust... and, eventually, new gears. The universe doesn't have a tracking system to determine what ephemeral kindnesses and punishments have been administered. A bug being blown off course by smoke from a factory, a 1900s economic model made obsolete, a woman left broken-hearted because her man left without a word: the universe isn't keeping score, at least immediately. Over the long run these bugs may develop a resistance to human pollution. The skeleton of the economic model may be revived in a Web 3.0 platform. Or the woman's bloodline may die out because she loves no one else. These latter events, not the immediate causes, have happened for reasons we as observers can better understand. But, given enough observers and archived knowledge, we can also understand most of the original happenings.

To think that an event happens for a reason, a personal reason, is to exclude how it affects other people. A promotion to bank manager might cause another man to lose his car and his livelihood because the bank no longer accepts uneven payments. A hurricane might bring a teen couple together for the rest of their lives, but it might extinguish the lives inside an entire hospital ward at the same time. The union of these two sweethearts might produce a few extra generations of children, but they could all be slightly mutated from contamination of the water at the time of the hurricane. For rare or large-scale events -- lottery wins, explosive business starts or catastrophic failures, wars, explosions, natural disasters, killing sprees -- one's chances of finding a human-related reason for such things, instead of the culmination of hundreds and thousands of natural laws -- is microscopic. Psychology, legal theory, economics, statistics, neuroscience, social sciences, philosophy: these are more where your answers lie. And if they don't, then it's just metaphysical pot luck, and what you do with it depends next on you.

So pardon me while I scratch my nose for a moment. It's predetermined. :D