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Then She Found Me begins and ends with a joke about a father and a son. The father tells the boy to jump down the stairs; he will catch him. The boy jumps off the stairs and the father catches him. The father tells him to go higher. The boy goes higher, the boy jumps, and the father catches him. Until one time the father steps aside, the boy falls, and the father looks down at the boy and says, "There, that'll teach you."

At the beginning of the movie, the joke ends there and the story of April Epner (Helen Hunt) begins. But in many ways, the movie that follows is not unlike that very fall—tumbling quickly from April's new marriage to its failure, somersaulting into the death of her adopted mother and the discovery of her birth mother, running into the "perfect" man then running him back out, and tripping over the excitement and disappointment of trying to become a mother when you're thirty-nine, not quite divorced, not quite in your next relationship, and not quite sure of anything.

While Then She Found Me has some great lines and scenes that will make you laugh and leave you smiling, at its core it is a story about hard times. It is about the things we expect for ourselves, for our lives, and of the people with whom we share them. And it is about the disappointment that all of them will bring to us at one time or another.

The first disappointment April encounters is her husband Ben (Matthew Broderick). At the beginning of the movie, they are getting married. Five minutes later, he's telling April he made a mistake, he doesn't want this life. And every time he appears after that, it is as if he is wearing a shirt that says "clueless thirteen-year-old stuck inside a forty-five-year-old man's body."

Then, there's Bernice (Bette Midler), the woman who gave up April for adoption when she was a baby. She is currently the host of popular morning talk show. And until she contacts April, April has had no idea who she was. At the same time that April is trying to become a mother, Bernice goes through her own journey of trying to do the same. While April is trying to get pregnant, Bernice is trying to figure out what it means to be the mother she never was. Instead of telling April the truth of her past, Bernice tells her lies that sound better. "I thought it was ugly and ordinary," says Bernice of the truth. "I wanted to make it beautiful." But as both Bernice and April's best efforts keep falling flat, they show us that the ugly and the ordinary are a part of reality that we just cannot ignore.

Also along for the ride is the delightfully imperfect Frank (Colin Firth). The single parent of one of April's students, he is the character that embodies the honest reality that pain and beauty are often a packaged deal. As much as I hated Broderick's Ben, I loved Firth's Frank. From the get-go he is awkward and conflicted. He's the first to admit he has issues, but unlike Ben, he is a man who loves his family more than anything else, knows the value of connection, and has a hope that does not seems to rely on perfection. As he says to April when she first reveals a bit of herself to him, "It looks painful and beautiful. I hope you get everything you want."

And through it all, there is April, seeking to find the connection she so desires somewhere in the imperfect jumble of her long-lost mother, her ex-husband, her not-yet boyfriend, and her unborn child. Every time something goes right, another thing goes wrong. Every time a connection is made, another is broken. But as her story comes to a close, she, along with Bernice and Frank, are brought together by the very reality that just because life is full of hardship does not mean it isn't also a thing of beauty.

Far from an easy truth to accept, April's path to that conclusion is nothing short of a journey. Its point is driven home by her failures, the failures of others, as well as what she perceives as the failures of a greater hand above her. For April, to accept a flawed reality is to also come to terms with a God who allows that reality to exist. Toward the end of the movie, she ponders the opening lines of the Jewish prayer she says on a regular basis saying, "What does that mean? Hear O Israel, the Lord our God is one? Listen Israel, the God of love, the God of fear is one?" And as the movies closes, she returns to the joke she told at the beginning, and instead of delivering the same punch line, brings it to a close saying, "When his father caught him, he felt filled with love. And when he didn't, he was filled with something else: more, life."

At barely twenty five, I have to say that the harsh realities of this life are already difficult for me to accept. Recently, one of my friends lost her child. Every day on the news, I see headlines of people dying and being killed all over the world. Every other day, I hear of someone I know getting a divorce. Parents neglect and beat their children. And people even younger than me are told they have incurable diseases. If you do believe in God, it is impossible not wonder how he could let such things happen, why he can't just use his power to catch us before we trip and stumble and fall.

But as April hints in her final lines of the movie, the answer I almost always seem to come back to is that somehow life would not be life without its hardship. To ask God to stop every bad thing from happening would be to give up the free will that makes us more than robotic puppets. To never struggle through difficulty and ugliness would be to never truly appreciate the value of the love, connection, and beauty that are their opposites. And very often, to never fall would mean to never even find the path that will take us to exactly where we are trying to go.

As Paul says in Romans 8, "For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children. If we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, as we share in his sufferings that we may also share in his glory." And at the end of Then She Found Me's story of parents and children, adoption and birth, and suffering and joy, the message of that verse rings clearer than ever.