Suffering is not easy.
Suffering comes in many forms, wears many faces, and affects us all differently. Many treatments of suffering, from academic studies and biblical commentaries to the everyday advice we get from friends, family, and mentors, focus on how to ignore, fight through, cope with, or even resign ourselves to our afflictions. In other words, the advice we get is often focused on transcending, or getting past, the suffering we all encounter in life. Many of the shows, articles, podcasts, films, (etc.) that deal with suffering of one kind or another also seem to present the sufferings of others in ways that allow or even encourage us to consume them as entertainment.
In A Broken Hallelujah, Andrew Gardner offers us something quite different. Andrew doesn’t minimize the incredibly difficult and painful things his guests have gone through, nor does he encourage us to dwell on these ordinary and extraordinary events for their own sake. Rather, through rich conversations with people from different backgrounds and perspectives, Andrew invites us to inhabit the spaces where suffering is met with a wide variety of other forces, emotions, practices, and experiences. There’s hope in these stories that is very real, tempered by harsh and potent realities of pain, disappointment, and loss. Across the range of experiences explored so far (I write this review early in the show’s second series), an overarching message seems to be that there’s not one right way to find and wrestle with God in the midst of our struggles. Each of the guests, and the host, instead invite us to learn from their stories of being in relationship with Him in quite different ways, and how these relationships come to change through experiences of suffering, often but not always in highly unexpected ways.
These stories are rich, deep, personal, heavy, dark, beautiful, and challenging. I am thankful to Andrew and his guests for sharing them, and I hope that he and they continue to have the ability and the courage to make this inspirational programme for many years to come.
