Angry with God

Angry with God: An Honest Journey through Suffering and Betrayal, Brad Hambrick (New Growth Press, 2022) 

This is the fifth and final book in the new Ask the Christian Counselor Series by New Growth Press. Brad Hambrick skilfully leads the reader through an exploration and processing of their anger and grief due to suffering, betrayal or loss. As such, it’s quite specific - aimed at the Christian who is angry with God or others for what has happened to them. Hambrick helps with processing the hot emotions of grief in a way that allows for self-reflection, honesty, discovery, and growth. 

With very small, bite sized chapters, Hambrick logically leads through a compassionate exploration. He starts by considering anger itself, and how to pace oneself along the path of exploring it. He guides in the construction of a timeline of events and topography of pain to chart the emotion connected with it. He strongly encourages the finding of close friends with whom you can walk the path. These are helpful set-ups for the deep work he later encourages. Starting to address the theological complications of how to view pain and suffering, he comforts with the truth that your pain is not a riddle to be solved (why? why me?), but an experience to be processed and a journey to be endured. 

Section 2 (Articulating your pain) leads the reader to analyse the events that led to the anger and distress. Explore what was good amongst the pain, what happened factually (enabling you to move from primarily emotions to learning and considering). Whether things that God’s people did affected your relationship with God, and what other things made the pain worse. All of these help to move from angry grief to memorialising grief. Section 3 is a detailed exploration of the multifaceted effects of the pain played out in emotions, thoughts, relationships, choices, and our view of God. This is where honest assessment of how we have reacted to our situation has played a part and how we have choices moving forwards. Section 4 is where resolution begins to come as our faith matures, we understand suffering as part of life, we accept that we only understand partially. So, we make decisions of how to live moving forwards, and how to move towards hope. Section 5 brings the reader back to the gospel through the lens of creation, fall, redemption, sanctification, and glorification. Having done the hard work of grief and anger processing, hopefully the promises of God for this life and the life to come now bring further hope and understanding. 

There is a lot of value in this short book. Hambrick uses counselling skills and processes skilfully, and sensitively combines them with gospel truths. It is a counselling tool in your own hands. Additionally, a counsellor could use this to assist a client through a grief process. While not naming them, many concepts he flagged were familiar to standard counselling practice - the timeline, Neimeyer’s meaning making through grief, Stroebe’s & Schut’s dual process grief model, and various CBT concepts. A very helpful resource.

I was given an ecopy of this book in exchange for an honest review.