Whether it is hearing an old familiar song on the radio, being dazzled by the fading light of another sunset, or relishing time spent with a good friend, our lives are often touched by a longing for the good and the beautiful. We grasp for it, longing to hold on, and yet we all know the daily reality of loss and disappointment. We cannot hold on to the things we love and cherish, and inevitably lose the people and things we most love.

The human experience is full of both beauty and disappointment, and throughout history we have tried to make sense of the world that we inhabit and how we can navigate through the tension of all that is good and broken in the world. Yet most of our attempts to avoid loss simply lead to greater anxiety—an unresolved fear that we will eventually lose what we most love and need. Sadly, even our attempts at avoiding loss lead to more anxious lives.

In Beautiful, Disappointing, Hopeful, Drew Hyun offers a way of understanding the human experience through the Scriptures while offering practices of Gratitude, Grieving, and Grace as ways of centering our lives more fully into a holistic spirituality, showing us why our avoiding loss is not the biblical pathway to experiencing beauty. Because we cannot avoid loss, we must learn to go through it—but we do not do this alone. The good news we desperately need is that the promise of Jesus and his Resurrection gives us hope that helps us to navigate ordinary loss every day. Hyun encourages us to engage with three simple practices—gratitude, grieving, and grace—that can build lasting spiritual resilience as we learn to grow through our loss and disappointment.