Yeah, I’m gonna disagree here.

My favorite two arguments for this are rapists and babies with cancer.

So, babies with cancer are pretty straightforward - there’s no way you can explain it as something good and there’s no way to explain this in any logical sense. That’s when people start feeling uncomfortable, because they know it doesn’t make sense, but hey, they have the ultimate argument! “God works in mysterious ways.”

The other one is a little more complex, but let’s go. Someone rapes some other person, let’s say a young man rapes a young woman. She has trauma for life, is scarred for life and is never gonna be the same. Let’s say some 40, 50 years later he truly is sorry for what he’s done, which I also can see happening. It doesn’t really absolve him in my eyes, but hey I’m not God and my ways are quite simple and not at all mysterious. The lady has been a good person all her life, so both of them go to heaven. And one day they meet in heaven. How is that fair to her? How is he able to get to the same place of rest as her? Well, the answer is simple, “God works in mysterious ways.”

So no, people don’t use it to mean “I’m not going to let this ruin my life”, they use it to say “I don’t really know how to respond to that because there’s no way that the answer would make logical sense”.