What do we do when the world breaks?
When the World Breaks,
And you find that you have been robbed in spirit
When you look to that place within where you would hope
to find hope
And joy and power and peace
And instead find a poverty
May you know that you are in the terrain of heaven
Because the soul is not a closed system
We are conduits of God
And the open-heartedness
that allowed you to be robbed as
you suffered
is the very disposition that will allow you to be filled with
the Divine.
When the world breaks,
And you suffer great loss
Whether it’s the loss of hope
or the loss of a dream
or the loss of a beautiful arrangement
or the actual loss of someone you loved
May you mourn bravely
And in naming the void where the gift once stood
May you discover the eyes of your soul dilated
Your inner being flooded with light
For nothing good can ever be lost in God
And the glory we yearn for is still with us
When the world breaks,
And you find your strength bridled
Either by circumstance or systems
When you find yourself unable to take for yourself the
things you need
May you trust than an open hand is all that’s needed to
receive
For you will inherit everything
As nothing Real was ever the possession of those who have
bridled you in the first place
When the world breaks,
And you find yourself aching for things to be made right
Either within you or around you
Whether the fractures have happened in your life or have
come against your life
May you trust the sacred pangs of hunger
May you know how holy your parched palate is
And rather than allowing your thirst to be slaked by false
promises and faux justice
May your ache become a compass that leads you to a feast
of peace
If you have been wronged and are finally given the rightful power of the victim to exact revenge
May you remember that you were forged from the same
moral fabric as the one who violated you
And without creating a false equivalence between victims
and those who have perpetrated their suffering,
May we remember our own need for mercy
If you find your heart darkened by cynicism,
May you see past the illusion that corruption is the final
word
May your own shadows be the proving ground for a more
perceptive vision
And may the eyes of your heart be enlightened,
Giving you an uncommon capacity to see God,
to see light,
in even the darkest corners of our world
If you find yourself called out into the borderlands
Into the no‑man’s‑land beyond your own faction
Forsaking group belonging,
And if in those borderlands you find yourself desperately
alone
Feared by your enemies and called a traitor by your own,
May you discover that you have become a child of God,
claimed by the divine
May you discover a cosmic and irrevocable sense of
belonging
as you walk the lonely path of peace
If you find yourself persecuted,
Made a target by the powers of disorder that are breaking
the world
May you know that you have become a threat to the
disorder
You have become a conduit of the divine
You have become an agent of love
So when the world breaks and it tries to break us
May we trust that we, too, will be raised up.
Peace to you, friend.
In this groundbreaking book, Pastor Jason Adam Miller re-examines the Beatitudes—eight paradoxes found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount—and points to a whole new way to find hope in the midst of suffering.
If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that the world is broken. The world we thought we knew vanished, and so many of us are now struggling to make sense of a world that’s not what we thought it was.This book is about what happens when the fundamental picture we had relied on – our sense of how everything holds together – falls apart. For some, this moment comes when a global pandemic upends our security. For others, it’s a partner leaving, or a terrible diagnosis, or the death of a loved one. Many of us have felt our worlds breaking when long-held beliefs about God or faith slipped through our hands. Whether the details are global or personal, the experience is the same: you discover that the framing reality you were living in has fractured.
But here’s the good news: The world has been breaking for as long as we can remember. We’ve been here before, which means we can turn to ancient, perennial wisdom to help us sort through these urgent problems. In When the World Breaks, Jason Adam Miller explores the possibilities for hope hidden in the paradoxes Jesus spoke when he taught the eight blessings – often called the Beatitudes – recorded in the beginning of Matthew chapter 5. These strange blessings name our experiences of suffering and are built on a particular kind of hope. This book is a meditation on those teachings as a transformative way forward when we suffer.
Lyrically written, theologically rich, and supremely accessible, When the World Breaks reveals an unexpected way to look at these familiar verses, giving readers hope that God is with them in their suffering, and helping them become the kind of people who can put things back together.