Review: This Beautiful Truth by Sarah Clarkson

A message of courage and encouragement

What do strawberries, skylarks, and stars have to do with the love of God? In her new book This Beautiful Truth, Sarah Clarkson shares her story of encountering God through beauty in the midst of suffering. She explores the way ordinary glimpses of beauty—a night sky, a beloved painting, a summer meal with friends—become tangible reminders of God’s presence with her in grief, doubt, and illness and of God’s promise to renew a broken world.

Sarah writes of living with a mental illness, an experience which at times isolated her from loved ones and drove her to question her deeply held Christian faith. She found answers ranging from trite to systematic, but most simply made God seem distant or uncaring. Beauty offered her a different path back to trust in the God she had known and loved as a child. Beauty could not erase or even explain the brokenness she saw and felt, but it could affirm the goodness of God’s ultimate purpose for her and for the world around her. Her family’s embraces and affectionate words could reflect God’s tender love. A friend’s invitation, drawing her from a lonely room to join a festive farewell dinner, could image God’s abundant welcome. The brilliance of a star could calm her raging fears by showing her a beauty beyond their reach.

Sarah’s message is one of courage and encouragement. With quiet honesty she recounts her own struggles to believe in a good God. She relates those experiences to the Bible’s stories of Jacob and Job, emphasizing God’s presence with these men and with her in times of wrestling and questioning. By acknowledging her own confusion and pain, Sarah offers us, her readers, the freedom to pause in our search for explanations and solutions and to truly grieve our brokenness. But she also calls us to take hold of beauty—that evidence of God’s renewing work among us—and to delight in it and be shaped by it.

To illustrate beauty’s role in revealing God’s goodness, Sarah draws on the works of writers like J. R. R. Tolkein, Madeleine L’Engle, and Wendell Berry. She also uses her own richly detailed writing style to help us feel the pull of beauty on all five senses as she shares stories and describes simple practices—such as listening to wonderful music, sharing delicious food, and resting in the rhythms of communal worship—that can bring beauty into our daily lives.

This Beautiful Truth is a gift even as it is about a gift. In its vulnerability and hope, this book meets us in weariness and heartache and reminds us of God’s love. More than that, it encourages us to receive for ourselves what God offers us in beauty—a coming together of our present, broken world and a future when God will make all things new and beautiful.

I received a digital copy of This Beautiful Truth as part of the launch team for the book. The book is set to release June 8, 2021.