I caught yet another documentary the other night.

It wasn’t planned. These things never are. You start folding laundry, or answering emails, or trying to quiet your brain, and suddenly you’re forty minutes into something that changes the temperature of the room.

This one did.

It was Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.

If you don’t know her story, Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her home at 14 years old by Brian David Mitchell. He was a street preacher her family had hired for odd jobs. She was sexually assaulted and held captive for nine months before strangers recognized her and police rescued her in Sandy, Utah.

Even typing that feels heavy.

The documentary shows unfathomable cruelty. The kind that makes your chest tighten. The kind that reminds you how vulnerable children are. The kind that makes you stare at the ceiling afterward and wonder how human beings can do such horrific things to one another.

It’s disturbing. It’s heartbreaking. It’s infuriating. And yet.

Elizabeth Smart says in the film, “There are happy endings.”

That sentence stayed with me.

Because how does someone who endured that level of trauma even find those words?

What struck me most wasn’t just the inhumanity. Though there is plenty of that. It was the resilience. The quiet, fierce survival. The way Elizabeth rebuilt her life. The way she refuses to let what happened define the entirety of who she is.

She went on to become an activist. A voice. A force. She took something unspeakable and transformed it into purpose.

That doesn’t erase what happened.
It doesn’t soften the horror. It doesn’t make it okay.

But it does remind us of something essential. Humans can get through really bad things. Truly terrible things.

Not everyone does. Not everyone emerges whole. Trauma leaves marks. Scars don’t disappear just because someone smiles again. Healing is not linear. Strength doesn’t mean untouched.

But still.

People survive. People adapt. People find meaning. People build lives after devastation.

Thank God.

Watching stories like Elizabeth’s makes me profoundly sad. Especially knowing that children, every day, are forced to endure experiences no human should ever have to carry. It reminds me how much responsibility we have to protect, to listen, to believe, to advocate.

It also reminds me how powerful support is. How much it matters when communities show up. When survivors are heard. When causes are funded. When awareness becomes action.

Elizabeth Smart is an amazing woman. What she went through is utterly horrid and deeply unjust. But her courage, her voice, her commitment to helping others that is something sacred.

I can only hope people continue to support her and the work she does.

Because documentaries like this don’t exist just to shock us.

They exist to wake us up.

To remind us that suffering is real. That resilience is real. And that what we choose to do with that knowledge matters.

So tonight, I’m holding two truths at once. That the world can be unbearably cruel. And, that the human spirit, somehow, keeps finding ways to rise.

Both are true.

And both deserve our attention.