This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

by Sarah Clarkson

Overview

We live in a broken world. Amid the daily realities of sickness and isolation, disappointment and pain, it can be profoundly difficult to grasp the real goodness of God. But this is where God breaks into our darkness with beauty. In the wonder of creation, in art or film, story or song, in the kindness of his people and the good they create, God breaks into our pain in a tangible way, teaching us to trust his kindness and hope for his healing. Beauty is a voice singing into our suffering, beckoning us toward restoration.

In This Beautiful Truth, Sarah Clarkson shares her own encounters with beauty in the midst of her decade-long struggle with mental illness, depression, and doubt. In a voice both vulnerable and reflective, she paints a compelling picture of the God who reaches out to us in a real and powerful way through the "taste and see" goodness of what he has made and what he continues to create amid our darkness. "To recognize and trust God's gift in pain," she writes, "empowers us to create and love as powerful witnesses to God's healing love in a hopeless world."

If you want to renew your capacity to recognize and encounter God's beauty in your life, this hope-filled book will show you the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781540900517
Publisher:	Baker Publishing Group
Publication date:	06/08/2021
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	197,580
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah Clarkson is an author and blogger who writes regularly about literature, faith, and beauty at www.sarahclarkson.com. She studied theology (BTh, MSt) at Oxford and is the author or coauthor of six books, including the recent Book Girl, a guide to the reading life. She has an active following on Instagram (@sarahwanders) where she hosts regular live read-alouds from the poems, novels, or essays that bring her courage. She can often be found with a cup of good tea and a book in hand in her home on the English coast, where she lives with her Anglican vicar husband, Thomas, and their two children, Lilian and Samuel.

Table of Contents

Foreword Michael Lloyd 11

Beautiful or Broken: The Rival Stories of the World 15

Part 1 The Truth Beauty Tells

1 This Is the Broken Place: A Shattered and Beautiful Mind 27

2 To Wrestle Is Righteous: The Third Gallery 47

3 Beauty Is Truth: Love Sets Us a Feast 67

4 We Are Not Alone: Mapping the Night 87

5 Love Is at Work in Our Broken World: Expecting Good 101

Incarnational Interlude 121

Part 2 The World It Calls Us to Create

6 Refuge: Transformed by Belonging 127

7 Cadence and Celebration: Eternity in Time 143

8 Fellowship: Touching Love 159

9 Image: Listening for the Lark 173

10 Saint: A Hidden Life 191

Notes 209

Editorial Reviews

04/19/2021

Thoroughly Alive blogger Clarkson (Book Girl) shares stirring reflections on the power of beauty, goodness, and love amid suffering in this eloquent work. She describes healing encounters that she first experienced as a child struggling with obsessive compulsive disorder: “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.” Clarkson explains how she has found God’s goodness through the love of her parents, moments of natural beauty, and in the hospitality of others. She writes of how, despite once considering getting married and having children “an almost impossible dream” due to her mental illness, she met her future husband, expressing heartfelt gratitude for the fulfillment of her desires. With references to art, literature, and scriptures, she speaks of beauty “through all the great and changing grief” within the world and draws inspiration from Job’s refusal to curse God despite his pain and suffering. Ultimately, Clarkson encourages Christians to love in a manner that makes “the tenderness of Jesus tangible.” This affecting testimony will spark hope in any Christian in need of a lift. (June)

Publishers Weekly