'Broken Hallelujah"

On my way to the office today I was listening to Christian radio and I heard a song I have heard many times before. It’s a song titled “Broken Hallelujah” by a group called The Afters. As I listened again to the words, I realized this is where most of us live. We all have likely had those ‘mountain top’ experiences of faith where God has moved incredibly in our lives and like Peter in Matthew 17:4 where after Jesus had been transfigured on the mountain he said, “Lord, it is good for us to be here.” It IS good for us to have those times but alas the valley calls. We could never know what the mountain top looked like where there never any valleys. As life goes by it seems as though the valleys are deeper and darker and the mountain tops seem to be a little less frequent; the questions seem to come much quicker than the answers and we hang on to our faith as everything else seems to get stripped away.

If confession is good for the soul, I need to admit that my faith is often a lot more like Job’s than it is Peter’s on the mountain top. In Job 1 almost everything Job had was stripped away; his children, his wealth in his livestock, and soon his health would leave him as well. At the end of chapter 1, after all of this trouble has come into his life, I think we read his ‘broken hallelujah.’ Job has heard that his children perished in a storm and he demonstrates his grief by shaving his head and tearing his robe. But then the scripture clearly says “he fell to the ground and worshipped.” Do you think worship was easy here? Do you think Job really felt like worshipping? As praise is a part of worship do you think praise flowed easily from Job’s lips? I think all Job had to offer the Lord that day was a ‘broken hallelujah.’

The words to the song go like this: “I can barely stand right now. Everything is crashing down, and I wonder where You are. I try to find the words to pray. I don't always know what to say, but You’re the one that can hear my heart. Even though I don’t know what your plan is, I know You’re making beauty from these ashes. I’ve seen joy and I’ve seen pain. On my knees, I call Your name. Here’s my broken hallelujah. With nothing left to hold onto, I raise these empty hands to You. Here’s my broken hallelujah.”

That’s where I am living today; not in an absence of faith, but with a ‘broken hallelujah.’ There was a day that I would have felt less than spiritual to admit that praise was not an easy thing; that it did not readily flow from my lips. But I have watched too many pastor friends, out of feeling an obligation to be the epitome of spirituality to their people, set up a straw man for those same people; a man that when the winds of life blow is easily swept away. There are a lot of things I do as a pastor and I am SURE that not all of them are good. But one thing I try to be is transparent.

I know some of you reading this are on the mountain top right now with the Lord and like Peter, you tell the Lord “it IS good for us to be here.” But many others are in the valleys that invariably accompany the mountain tops and for you today your praise to the Lord is a ‘broken hallelujah.’ Here me when I say there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. I think a part of our faith walk is having those days when we find prayer difficult and praise unlikely. If that’s where you are I think affirming what Job did is enough. Job 1:21 records Job’s words as, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I shall return there. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” … a broken hallelujah.