After a number of years of reading for study and then reading to children and about parenting, life has come back around and I have books for myself on my bedside table. None though have given me a language that makes sense of my inner battles. None ever mirrored myself back to me, I was always looking on waiting for that person to show up and call me out, the person who would say that I wasn’t alone.
I had heard great reviews and comments about Sarah Clarkson’s book ‘This Beautiful Truth’ but those who know me well know I tend to avoid anything that gets lots of attention so I kept it on the wishlist but wasn’t rushing to get it. Thankfully someone else got it for me and I tentatively picked it up and read the forward by Michael Lloyd. He praised the quality of writing and my doubts were raised yet further. Could it really be that outstanding? I read on and how right he was. Sarah not only speaks of a beautiful truth but she writes beautifully.
There is no way I can do the book justice with my own words other than to commend that anyone who pastors others needs to not just read it for themselves but to have a stack ready to give others when we don’t have words or answers for people’s struggles and wrestling. To give it to people as an act of giving them God’s beautiful grace and to point them to the beauty of God in the depths of struggle. Sarah does not in any way belittle struggle and anguish. She doesn’t burden us with a heavy yoke, she comes alongside and lets the sunlight in. Not in an overwhelming sudden blinding glare, just gently and slowly she opens the curtains a little at a time. She reunites beauty with the source of all beauty, God. She speaks of how beauty can sit alongside our pain and brokenness and as we let them sit side by side by us we find God has come alongside us without the need to fill the silence with words, without advice, without theology, just Himself with all the time in the world for us.
Time and again I wept as I read and saw myself in her book. I realised for the first time I was not alone. That my inner struggle is not singular to me, it attempts to keep me from God’s grace and gospel though. For so long I thought my inner anguish and mental battle were solely unique to me and, in part because of the christian circles I have been part of, were my own doing and my own sin. In my eyes others I knew who battled with mental health had a reason, past experiences, events that had been triggers. I could trace nothing in my life and therefore my battle was sinful in a way it was not for others. That I was flawed to the point I could love the Bible, love the gospel, and believe it for others but had to also accept it was never something that I could fully know because of my thought life. So I knuckled down, worked hard, or gave up working altogether depending on the day and the level of effort required, longing for others to know for themselves what I could not part take in myself fully. God, I concluded, permitted me to share in His work on the understanding that eventually when my time was up I would need to stand aside.
Reading ‘This Beautiful Truth’ was an invitation to life. My mental gymnastics is not a sin that keeps me from God, it does not exclude me. It makes it hard, darn hard at times to believe deep down. This book doesn’t stop me planning funerals and working out how to handle the police showing up with the children all because Mark is 5 minutes later home than I was expecting. It doesn’t stop me fearing the worst when someone says they have a headache or whatever.
Sarah spoke into our longing for place, the pain of miscarriage. While Sarah battled to live away from home my story was one where I sought to do anything that made me look outwardly independent, capable, without fear. The very opposite of everything I was feeling on the inside but the longer I did it the more I heard echoed back that this was who I was, independent, capable and so I needed to strive ever harder to keep that appearance up because if anyone was to know this wasn’t who I was I wasn’t sure I was ready to handle their reactions. I had overheard enough conversations to know that wasn’t an option.
The book doesn’t take away the exhaustion some days hold as I try to keep in check the anguish and turmoil running riot through my head. What it does say to me is that I am not alone. It invites me to sit with the beauty and thank God for that beauty even while everything else is upside down. It invites me into the gospel in its fullness, that I won’t be asked to stand aside at the end. That God has all the time in the world I need to lift my head and notice the beauty He has placed before me and know that He is good.
Joshua's Tree Rooted 