An Identity No Affliction Can Take Away

It happens most subtly. There’s no date on the calendar. There’s no announcement. Life shifts quietly, almost shyly; the way leaves begin to change in early fall. At first nothing seems different. Then one morning you look up, and the trees are wearing new colors—reds, oranges, and fading greens that somehow appeared without asking for attention. 

That’s how it unfolded with my parents. First, it was the small hesitations from my mom—forgetting the names of lifelong friends, attempting to cook using plastic containers on the stovetop, becoming lost in the familiar turns of her own home. Something was shifting, and it was shifting in a way we could not stop. The day we made the decision to place her in a dementia care unit came faster than any of us wanted. Love can move quickly when it must. And later, it was watching my father—my ultimate hero, the strongest man I’ve ever known—fight an aggressive form of kidney cancer. Suddenly, the man who had always rescued me needed rescuing himself. We were changing places, and neither of us was ready. But life rarely waits for readiness. It simply unfolds, inviting us—sometimes demanding us—to adapt. 

We were living in the presence of affliction. 
Not a single affliction, but layers of them. 

Losing my mother as a fully present part of our family. 
Fear with my father as we awaited test results and prayed chemotherapy would do what only God could ultimately do. 
And my own experiences throughout all this — a son who feels in the quiet places of his heart — the loss, fear, shame, disappointment, and loneliness. 

Affliction has a way of cracking us. It doesn’t merely hurt — it pierces. It goes beneath the surface pain, carving a hollow space that exposes longing, wounds, and limits we didn’t know we carried. It is the kind of pain that makes us aware that life is far more fragile and far more sacred than we ever imagined. 

Simone Weil once said, “There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction.” 
She also wrote, “At the center of the human heart is a longing for an absolute good… a longing never appeased by anything in this world.” 

That longing is the secret chamber of the soul. It is the place where affliction breaks us open — and where God, in His kindness, sends beauty as His answer. 

God did not leave us without an antidote. He wove beauty into the fabric of our existence—not as decoration, but as medicine. Beauty does not merely soothe; it awakens. It interrupts the downward spiral. It arrests the heart mid-fall. It reminds us that the world is more than the darkness we are facing, that a greater Reality surrounds us. 

Beauty is God’s gentle way of whispering, “You are not alone. I am here.” 

It comes in countless forms. 
The slow glory of a sunrise. 
The stillness before a storm. 
The small hand of a child reaching for yours. 
A stranger’s unexpected kindness. 
The undeserved grace of forgiveness. 
A song or scene that brings tears you didn’t plan to shed. 
A quiet act of faith. 
The courage of someone facing mortality with dignity. 

Beauty is not a luxury; it is oxygen. We may survive without it, but we will not thrive. Beauty softens the hardened places. It slows our pace and teaches us wonder again. It offers hope precisely where affliction carved the deepest wounds. It leads us back to God — not the God of performance and striving, but the God of presence, compassion, and unfathomable love. 

It is beauty that reminds us of who we truly are, beloved sons and daughters, not performers trying to earn our worth. 

As my dad’s cancer continued to advance, his body weakened, but his spirit did not. His faith became a quiet defiance against despair. Dialysis took an enormous toll on him — the chills, exhaustion, blood pressure drops, swollen legs, and the invasive access ports. But the treatment bought him one priceless gift: more time to sit with my mother, to hold her hand, to love her through her fading memories. 

One day I arrived early to pick him up after dialysis. Normally, the nurses met me in the waiting room, but this time, one of them approached me with a softness in her eyes. 
“I think you should see what your dad does when he finishes treatment,” she said. 

She led me into the treatment room — the kind filled with patients in recliners, machines humming like distant engines. As I scanned the room, I heard his familiar voice. There he was, wrapped in a blanket, sitting in a wheelchair, slowly being pushed from one patient to the next. 

He wasn’t asking for help. 
He wasn’t complaining. 
He was offering something. 

One by one, he spoke to each person with encouragement. 
He asked if he could pray for them. 
Every single one said yes. 

And in that moment, I witnessed beauty so profound it pierced me. My father — dying, fragile, exhausted — was giving away what God had placed deep within him: a heart anchored in love, a spirit unbroken by affliction, an identity rooted in Christ. 

Affliction had fractured his body, but beauty — God’s beauty alive in him — filled the fracture with hope.  He passed away in November 2016. That memory still brings both a smile and tears. It is one of the clearest moments of beauty I have ever seen, and it still ministers to me years later. 

You, too, carry a God-given identity filled with beauty. 
Not earned. 
Not constructed. 
Given. Breathed into you by the One who calls you His own. 

And the world needs that beauty. 
People all around you are carrying their own afflictions — some visible, some hidden. 
Your beauty — your courage, your compassion, your presence — might be the very doorway to hope someone desperately needs. 

This is the mystery of the unshaken life: 
Affliction fractures. 
Beauty restores. 
And God uses both to awaken the heart.