Brave Is The New BeautifulSýnishorn

Faith

“I just keep saying, this world is messed up,” Heather Jo tells me. “I longed for adoption to be part of my story, and with all that happened, it broke my heart. But I trust there is a much bigger story than my own being told in all of this, that good will come out of it. That’s what gives me hope.”

Hope. Heather’s trust in God in the face of pain is her brave. Because she trusts, she also can hope, and hope is her supreme beauty.

This kind of faith astonishes me. Her heart senses what her mind can’t yet grasp: “It is in and through the travail of the pains of suffering that God creates something new,” philosopher James Olthuis wrote in The Beautiful Risk. “God weeps for us. God mourns with those who mourn—and ‘where God is at work, mourning is not the end.’ Then comes the promise of something new, the dawn of a morning of hope, the promise that God will turn mourning into joy and replace sorrow with gladness.”

None of this—stepping out in faith, following our dreams, or even letting dreams die—is without pain. That is why it is so difficult. It takes courage to take the beautiful risk of following a dream without a guaranteed outcome; it takes even more boldness to follow the dream without knowing whether you can accept the outcome. True bravery recognizes the need to release our vision and even our desire to control as much as possible, so our dreams can be fulfilled as God sees fit. It takes real trust to believe God is the author of the dreams even if they don’t play out the way we hope they will, even if our stories this side of heaven fall short of happily ever after. “

You will grieve,” Jesus told his disciples, predicting the response they’d have when they realized that it was not God’s plan for him to seize political power, “but your grief will suddenly turn to wonderful joy… I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world” (John 16:20, 33). Because we serve a great God, we can find the strength to trust that his goodness will win out, somehow, someway, sometime.