Can we still grasp the goodness of God while living in a broken world? Sarah Clarkson is on the show today sharing her decade-long struggle with mental illness, depression, and doubt. However, amid the daily realities of sickness and isolation, disappointment and pain, she has discovered “This Beautiful Truth.” We pray that after this episode you too can recognize and trust God’s gift of pain.
Topics of Conversation:
- Encountering God’s beauty in our daily life
- The value of love in our healing
- Holding onto hope
- How God uses the kindness of people to break into our pain
Quotes:
“I battled OCD and my mind was often filled with disturbing and graphic images with no idea what to do with it. I lived with a disaster reel in my head and have learned a lot of techniques to deal with it. Whatever you fear is what OCD loves to wrap itself around.”
“My sense that God was good was decimated by those images.”
“I had to figure out who God was again and figure out how to cope with this. I had to figure out how to grasp His goodness and become a creator of goodness myself.”
“Researchers believe there’s a higher prevalence of OCD than is actually reported because it is invisible and often shameful.”
“In a broken world I think we are all going to have a story of loss at some point but that is where we discover the God who calls Himself the God who is with us.”
“God can contain your doubt and He can hold you while you search for Him. Having that assurance gives me the permission to wrestle.”
“God met me again and again by the love of people around me and through my encounters with beauty.”
“Whether it was art, music, or nature I began to encounter a beauty that I could not explain. It kept me arguing and believing that there was a God.”
“God is incarnational. There’s an incarnational way that Hd interacts with us.”
“What does it look like for me to push away the darkness and engage with the goodness of God? It was a daily choice.”
“It was a cultivation of wonder to be open to receive it.”
“God is consistently reaching out to us but often we are distracted and frenzied.”
“These things are not tiny but yet we treat them as much.”
“My mom just sat with me and let me pour out the darkness in my heart. This is what we can offer. To listen and hold the pain the other is offering.”
“How could anyone else beyond my mom and dad ever really love me for who I was?”
“The patience of my husband is an image of our loving God.”
“Beauty gives us something tangible to hold onto. We are constantly choosing which story of the world we will engage with.”
“We often struggle in isolation but when companioned with imagination that’s the road toward hope.”
“He takes what we never thought could be healed and crafts goodness.”
“I may live with this for the rest of my life but God is with me and He holds me and He heals me.”
“What evil and suffering intended to steal from me He defies.”
“Theodicy is reconciling our belief that God is powerful and good but the fact that we live in a broken and sinful world that has been clearly corrupted by evil.”
“How could God create this kind of a world?”
“God’s theodicy is a theodicy of encounter.”
“Can I have an argued theodicy or a theodicy of beauty?”
“There is a fierceness to the discipline of beauty.”
“We have the word of God and we have the world of God. I try to spend a lot of time out in nature.”
“Poetry can startle us awake.”
“There are things that constantly speak of goodness if we have the ears and the eyes to see, listen, and to treasure.”
“That’s what we are created from and what we are summoned back to. God’s expression of power is love. To pour oneself out for another.”
“The sorrows of your heart are cradled in God’s hands. There is nothing secret or dark that is beyond His healing touch. I needed to know that my pain was not invisible to God. It was on some level important to Him.”
“God is the initiator. It’s not dependent on you; it’s dependent on His goodness.”
This week’s love offering is to “bring beauty into the world. Summon others out from the darkness, not just to the light, but to be creators of light.”
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