This Beautiful Truth Quotes

“Make no mistake, redemption is local. Our ordinary is where the kingdom of heaven comes.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“I saw a star and its light was like something woven of hope and music, and the shimmer of it was a voice crying out to my spirit to keep hold, to take joy, and for a moment the whole of my suffering seemed unmade. The darkness became the false thing and the joy of that light, it was the truest thing I had ever known.

How can we believe what beauty speaks to us in the darkness of mental illness and cancer and abuse and death?

Because beauty calls to us with the voice of God.

We are answered not with argument or angry demands for obedience but with the presence of Immanuel, God here with us in the shadows. What beauty reveals is the intimacy of the divine in our grief. God gives us beauty, not as his argument but as his offering - a gift that immersed us in something that allows us to touch hope, to taste healing, to tangibly encounter something opposite to disintegration and destruction. Where suffering has made God abstract and distant to us, where brokenness leaves us with unanswerable questions, beauty allows us to taste and see God’s presence as he breaks into the circles of our inmost grief to remake the broken world.

Beauty offers us a theodicy of encounter.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“What we need is the healed capacity to imagine and believe the profound goodness of the future, to stand in the light of a happy ending whose power reaches into our present and draws us forward in hope.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“..I didn't yet understand that I could trust what a fallen leaf or an autumn feast, a lilting song or the coming of spring was speaking to me as true. I didn't see that these small glories had been offered to me as communion with my Maker.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“The real risk to faith is not to wrestle...”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We were not created for disaster nor formed for destruction, and to lament our pain is to honor the beauty God intended and yearn toward its restoration.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“God’s goodness comes to us amidst the battle and dust of our own suffering, our own long defeat. God always arrives with healing. But he is humble and meek, a king who comes in through the back door of our hearts not to conquer and raze our imperfections away but to hold and heal us by the intimacy of his touch, his presence here with us in the inmost rooms of our suffering. The power of God is radically gentle, never rough with our needs or careless with our yearning. God is fixed upon the restoration of our whole selves and souls, not just the bits that everyone else can see. Yet the very tenderness of his power is something we sometimes treat as his weakness or cruelty because we crave a more visible result.

The healing kind of power is not the sort we’ve been taught to respect by existence in a fallen world where power just means brute force. We want the swift and the visible: illness zapped away, money in our hands, brilliant doctors, prosperous lives, and conversion stories by the thousands. We crave visibility and approbation and health and big crowds that make us feel important enough to forget the frail selves we used to be. When we pray for God to come in power to save us, we often picture a scenario in which God invades our lives as the ultimate mighty man to banish our frailty and make us something entirely other than we are, capable of the will and force whose lack we so deeply feel.

But God cradles and cherishes our frailty, and that is where the true power of his love is known. I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far less interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts - they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of the story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands.

So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep so that we rise to ask what this kind and precious King commands, and so often his command is simply to open our hands so that they may be filled with his goodness. For when God arrives as the healer, we learn anew that the anguished hopes we carry are held within God’s hand like the hazelnut of Mother Julian’s vision. The story he weaves for us may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives, we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“He allows Job to question and grieve, to yearn and weep. But what he offers Job is not an explanation but an encounter. For Job is summoned to behold God’s goodness in the staggering pageant of creation, one so mighty in its loveliness that at its end, Job considers himself answered.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“God doesn’t offer explanation; but oh, he offers his own heartbreakingly beautiful self. God breaks into Job’s darkness by actually allowing himself to be summoned by Job’s cries for justice.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We live in an age that further drains and complicates our relationship with time by making our lives a ceaseless round of unbounded activity. In the modern world, we are increasingly less cognizant of the ancient rhythms of day and night, star and season, and less aware of the way those cadences influence our bodies and minds and allow us the boundaries of rest we need for healing. Electricity means we can banish the shadows and extend our days almost indefinitely. Insulated as we are by technologies of all sorts, caught up in the world of our screens, we are no longer as aware of cold and heat, summer and winter as a repeating symphony that reflects the real seasons of our own bodies and souls.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“Our humblest moments are the spaces in which God's reign returns to earth, and I believe that the beauty we claim and create in response to that in-breaking life can be a radical defiance of evil. We are called to courageous creation, for the making of beauty is our gentle and holy defiance of the forces of disintegration and the powers of darkness.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“The only possible defence for God against the charge of making a world riddled with suffering and violence is that He didn't,’ writes my Oxford tutor, Michael Lloyd.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We are called to faithfulness, to lives whose soil becomes the place where the stories of others are rooted. We are members one of another, and the way we deal with our sorrow and claim our hope will become the soil for the stories of our children and our spouses, our neighbors and our friends.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“One boy lost his battle there in the forest, but the other took up the fight in his honor, and, in the fierce pain of that memorial, I glimpsed the kind of beauty that is not so much the vision of something good as a defiance of the evil that is all you can see at the moment.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“And the story they tell us is of a world so evil, so shattered and grieved that we wonder how goodness could ever have been. In the shadow sight it sets upon us, we think of things like beauty or hope, story or song as frivolities that only distract us from the single, great reality of our grief.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“Redemption was a word I couldn’t quite comprehend at that point. Having heard it all my life, I associated it with what happened to sin-blackened hearts, but I wasn’t sure what it meant for good little God-fighting girls like me. I hadn’t yet understood it as the goodness of God invading my most intimate moments of depression, taking the shards of my broken self and setting about the work of new and mended creation. I still thought redemption was one big event that God did, not the whole of my daily story transformed by his generous life. But one thing I knew. I could not find it unless I took God’s hands in mine once more.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“In Scripture, we are given the story of God’s presence with us, not an outlined explanation of redemption but a tale that opens in a lush garden and ends in a feast the likes of which the world has never known. Wedged between two feasts is the story of both our breaking and our redemption, and the interesting thing about a story is the way it can contain the tension of impossible questions and embodied answers: that God is sovereign and Jesus wept, in protest, at the death of his friend. Or that God causes all things to work together for good yet cannot be tempted by evil and does not require it to accomplish his ends. Or that the God whose power upholds the world would show his strength by taking on our “injured flesh,” giving us his own flesh in return, the holy bread by which our hunger is sated and our souls redeemed. Or that the answer to our eternal hunger and need is to “take and eat” and be healed. As I was. As I am.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“As we see in the miracles of Jesus, God is against suffering. In the person of Jesus, he has assaulted it. Whenever we see Jesus and suffering together, we see him undoing it.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“God did not diminish what Job suffered, but there was God’s aching request for Job to behold the kind of beauty that allowed him to live in the tension”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“For if one thing had become clear to me in my own suffering, it was that there is a mystery to theodicy, one we may not unravel this side of eternity. God does come—oh, he comes—but that doesn’t mean the pain ends, yet.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“I could no more walk away from his existence than I could walk away from my own desire for breath.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“If there is one great beauty to which we are called by the in-breaking goodness of God, it is this kind of faithfulness.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness