Some people told Sarah Clarkson her book on beauty and suffering seemed “very American.” How is beauty supposed to work in a war zone?

It’s a fair question. Especially now. With tragic suffering continuing to spread like wildfire around the world — including and especially in the Middle East — what good is beauty in a time like this?

On this week’s podcast conversation (recorded in September), Sarah responds to the idea that beauty is a luxury for the affluent:

“Well, [it is] if beauty is about having a perfect house. But beauty is healing those who have been hurt in a war zone. It’s creating shelters where children can have refuge. It’s rebuilding what has been destroyed… Beauty is a defiance of the forces of evil and disorder and destruction because it is [their] opposite: where evil tears down, beauty creates; where there is absence, beauty fills.”

One of the Enemy’s most reasonable temptations in distressing times is to flip the instructions of Philippians 4. He invites us to dwell on that which is unlovely, evil, base, and dishonorable — that doing so is somehow an act of holy solidarity.

But dark hours are not illuminated by dark thoughts. Christ himself was sustained in his suffering by meditating on joy, not evil (Heb. 12:2).

To be clear, I’m not advocating for Pollyanna platitudes. We weep with those who weep. We pray. We give. We grieve. We offer presence and support. But we do all this with a heart inclined toward what is beautiful and true.

Here I sense it is time to hand the mic to someone who can speak to these matters with more experiential authority.

Two weeks ago, when the war began, Tiffany Clark was in the Golan Heights. Two months ago, she led a retreat for pastors in Ukraine. In a new essay written for Renovaré, she offers six practical lessons for how to fruitfully engage extreme situations in the world. Here are two of them:

“Recognize when you need to step back and recenter around God’s goodness in your own life. Empathy can be both a gift and a curse. The grace God gives to the ones undergoing the trial is rarely given to those outside it. Empathetic engagement in a situation not our own can lead to virtual drowning. Remember to live in your own skin and the set of circumstances God has assigned to you before attempting to connect with what someone else is going through. Feeling guilty that you have it better than they do doesn’t help anyone; it simply denies the sufficiency of God’s grace for each of us.”

“Pray in faith, not in despair. This does not mean that the situation will go away or be immediately resolved. Engaging in global suffering requires getting over our need for everything to be tidy, secure, and ‘OK.’ But it offers us the opportunity to meet Christ in the mess, which is exactly where He already is.”

Along with the link to her full essay, you’ll find below other resources to help set our minds on the lovely, excellent, and true.

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CURATED BY GRACE POUCH

In a new episode of Life with God: A Renovaré Podcast, Sarah Clarkson spoke with Nathan Foster from her home in the UK about her experiences with grief and fear and the way God has been restoring faith, hope, and love in her life through the gift of beauty. Listen on Apple, Spotify, or the Renovaré website.

Tiffany Clark, an alumna of the Renovaré Institute, shares poignant reflections in her essay “Peace in the Face of War.”

Richard Foster invites us into a “life of prayer and holy obedience in a war-wracked world.”

The pattern of the world presses on us to pay attention to what is wrong and ugly. This essay offers counter-patterns to attract us to the goodness of God and all that he has embedded in the Creation and in his image bearers — which he called “good.”

Deep-dive into the theology of beauty through the syllabus of David Taylor’s Fuller Seminary course.

Douglas McKelvey’s “A Liturgy for Widespread Suffering” offers us words to pray in challenging times.

Grace Pouch
Content Manager

What Good is Beauty in a Time Like This?

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