Faith Happens

This review does reflect on the first season of the series available on Pureflix. No movie could be found at the time of the review, neither online nor specifically on their website as pointed out before the closing credits.

The series is overall great, and the individual testimonies and stories are very powerful. They chose different topics (adultery, child abuse, drug addiction, foregiveness, illness, money fraud, refugees ...) which they balanced very well and wove them into an overall story, where individual characters played initially secondary roles and then had their story told later on (or the other way around).

There are many painful stories which turn into redemption, but also stories of a Calvinist pastor which started with an intact family but then turned into pure evil in the form of adultery and a complete breakdown of a family, while telling the story from the perspective of the future couple, which was rather inadequate.

Another definitely inadequate part was in episode 2, when the pastor prayed in the counseling session and said in his prayer: "It doesn't make sense. And it's your (the Lord's) fault. (sobbing and pause) It's his fault. It's your fault." This sadly destroys quite a lot of the overall great production and of the lessons we can definitely learn from it. It is a mystery why they included such a prayer. Surely lamentation is sometimes ok, but this is not a prayer we could find anywhere in the Bible, to blame the Lord that it is His fault that this child abuse happened.

Otherwise a great production, but sad to not find the second season to continue.