This Beautiful Truth: Hope for Healing after Suffering

“The hands of a king are the hands of a healer.” ~J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

In the beautiful ending to Tolkien’s epic tale of Middle Earth, the king, Aragorn, returned after a long exile to claim his throne and rule a broken people. His right to the kingship is clear, and because others had stood before him as rivals, he was expected to enter the city in a parade of strength and victory. But instead of arriving as yet another warrior claiming his right, he snuck into the city by a back door to quietly visit those close to death. Making his way from room to room where the sick and dying lay, he healed his people, cleansing their wounds with an ancient herb, calling them back to life so that Faramir (a young lord who could be his rival) is brought back from the brink of darkness with a “light of knowledge and love kindled in his eyes to say ‘what does the King command?’”

Just so does God’s goodness come to us amidst the battle and dust of our own suffering, our own long defeat. God always arrives with healing. But like Aragorn, he is humble and meek: a king who comes in through the back door of our hearts not to conquer and raze our imperfections away but to hold and heal us by the intimacy of his touch, his presence here with us in the inmost rooms of our suffering. The power of God is radically gentle, never rough with our need or careless with our yearning. God is fixed upon the restoration of our whole selves and souls, not just the bits that everyone else can see. Yet the very tenderness of his power is something we sometimes treat as his weakness or cruelty because we crave a more visible result.

The healing kind of power is not the sort we’ve been taught to respect by existence in a fallen world where power just means brute force. We want the swift and the visible: illness zapped away, money in our hands, brilliant doctors, prosperous lives, and conversion stories by the thousands. We crave visibility and approbation and health and big crowds that make us feel important enough to forget the frail selves we used to be. When we pray for God to come in power to save us, we often picture a scenario in which God invades our lives as the ultimate mighty man to banish our frailty and make us something entirely other than we are, capable of the will and force whose lack we so deeply feel.

But God cradles and cherishes our frailty, and that is where the true power of his love is known. I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far more interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts—they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of our story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands.

So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep so that we too rise, like Faramir, to ask what this kind and precious King commands, and so often his command is simply to open our hands so that they may be filled with his goodness…The story he weaves for us, well, it may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives—and oh, good is always coming toward us—we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.

This excerpt was taken from This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness by Sarah Clarkson. © 2021 by Sarah Clarkson. Used by permission of Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group.

Sarah Clarkson is an author and blogger who writes regularly about literature, faith, and beauty at 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.

Photograph © conner bowe, used with permission