When the World Breaks

Pastor Jason Adam Miller takes a fresh look at the Beatitudes, the eight paradoxical blessings that open the Sermon on the Mount, and finds in them a different path to hope when life falls apart. The book starts from a familiar experience: the sense that the picture of reality you relied on has cracked. For some, that rupture comes with a pandemic that shakes everyday security. For others, it arrives through a departing partner, a serious diagnosis, or the loss of someone they love. Many people also feel their world give way when the beliefs about God or faith they once held no longer hold.

Miller argues that brokenness is not new, and that people have faced it for as long as there has been history. Drawing on ancient wisdom that has endured across generations, he examines the blessings Jesus spoke at the start of Matthew chapter 5. These sayings, which seem strange at first, name the experience of suffering and rest on a particular kind of hope. Rather than a set of instructions, the book is a meditation on these verses as a way forward through pain.

Written for readers who want to reconsider familiar Scripture, the book offers reassurance that God is present in suffering and considers how people can become those who help put broken things back together.