And It Was Beautiful

I’m not sure I can begin to express how deeply I was affected by this book. Many people reading it will likely be familiar with Kara Tippetts from either her blog or her previously published books;, I was not. But by the end of this book I felt as though I had lost a cherished friend, and I wept. I wept for both the heartache and the beauty that can be found amidst the heartache. I wept for the abundant love that carried this family through such a testing time – love for and of one another and their Saviour. And I wept because as a nearly-thirty-seven-year-old mother of five, it was all too easy to imagine myself in Kara’s situation.

Kara’s attitude towards life and faith as cancer ravaged her body is truly inspirational, but there are lessons here for all of us:
“Blessing the Lord is not clean, it’s not just when things are easy and good and healthy. It’s thanking Him at ALL times and in ALL circumstances, not for the painful things but for His presence. Jason [Kara’s husband] says that’s what peace is, and I believe him.”
“The truth is none of us know the length of our lives. So we pray for daily bread and say thank you when it comes...A bucket list? No, I don’t need one. I’m so rich. It’s relationships that matter. And for me, paying attention to the precious gift of today is the only thing on my list.”
“It takes all my will to choose to meet the joy of each moment and not linger in the fear of when these moments will end.”
“That’s one of the lessons cancer has taught me, that today is all I have, and I must keep my eyes focused on what’s in front of me, and do the next thing in love.”

How much richer would our own lives be if we lived this way? As Kara says, “Joy in the mundane feels so much more real when sadness has been walked through and tasted.”

What more can I say? Read this book. You will cry, but you will be blessed.

Kara Tippets was a young mother who battled cancer and shared her journey on her blog Mundane Faith fullness. I had found her blog just a few months before her death and felt right away drawn in. After her death I longed to read her previous entries to understand her journey even more. This book is a collection of her blog posts from the time of her diagnosis until her death. Kara was very honest in her writing and gave me a glimpse into what it means to battle cancer, yet keep a strong faith and trust in God till the last breath. Since I am a mother of seven, I could completely relate to her biggest struggle - which was not fear of pain or death, but leaving her precious children and not being there to raise them. Kara showed me how precious time is and how important it is to not waste any of it. How important people and relationships are. and that we shouldn't waste any opportunity to build them. She showed me how to feel with people and care about them. I have learned so much through this book and I will be rereading it several times. I pray that if I ever have to go through trials like Kara, I will keep a strong faith, be able to find gratefulness and grace like she did.

Jesus help me see you. That has been Kara Tippets only hope in her fight and loss to cancer. It should be ours as well. It is in this fight that Christianity is more about life lived instead of Christianity as an event.

These short words of Kara’s during her battle with cancer many times left me in tears, admiring her heroism and her weakness. She does bare the “I don’t have it all together”. I think that is why so many can relate to her story. She does not make her story the story but she makes I want Jesus real because ultimately that is all she has and ultimately that is all we have. She is reminding us to pursue life, love and Jesus. We forget. We get distracted. We get busy. We get discouraged. But it is in those times, we strive to know Jesus. To rest in him.

My favorite and the times that broke my heart is her cry for her children. She loved being a mamma. She saw each of her children and knew them. What encouraged them and what discouraged them and she took that job in and saw joy in it. She saw joy in her community of people that we can miss because we think we have all the time in the world. In her life that is broken because of cancer, she is reminding others what really matters. So if you are tired of the events of Christianity and want life, I would encourage you to encounter the life that Kara fought for.

Some of the quotes that encouraged and inspired me are as follows….

Every moment seems so special. The truth is, it is. That is the gift of cancer. The struggle is the fear. The fear of this amazing world of people I love more than anything marching forward without me in it. There is a lot of pride and arrogance in that thinking. A friend and I were talking about the control that comes with thinking life is as it should be with us in it. But the truth is, life is exactly planned. Exactly numbered. My job in this day is live near to Jesus. To seek faithfulness in this day. I want to have a peaceful heart that embraces each gift of joy as it comes.

Someone surrendered to God; not resigned by surrendered. And there is a difference. And that difference was persuasive in the most naturally wooing of ways.

I have lived in the reflection of the Gospel as my husband has loved me in my sin, ugly and unlovely. Acceptance with Jason has nothing to do with performance but everything to do with his understanding of how loved he is by God in his own weakness and sin.

We are all desperately afraid of what’s hard, but once we face it, it’s possible we find a new joy we hadn’t known before.

Each breath is an Amen.

Getting honest with ourselves does not make us unacceptable to God. It does not distance us from God, but draws us to him as nothing else can and opens us anew to the flow of grace. While Jesus calls each of us to a more perfect life, we cannot achieve it on our own. To be alive is to be broken; to be broken is to stand in need of grace. It is only through grace that any of us could dare to hope that we could become more like Christ. Brennan Manning I am needy and that drives me to grace.

Her words communicate a the great love and grace of God thru suffering.

A Special Thank You to David C Cook and Netgalley for the ARC and the opportunity to post an honest review.

“I was here. I saw beauty. I embraced it.”

With these words, the late Kara Tippetts boldly faced an uncertain future with emotional certainty. In 2014, at the age of 38, the author entered hospice care to prepare for her looming death. She died on March 22nd, 2015, in Colorado Springs, leaving behind a pastor-husband Jason, and four young children. Less than three years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. After her death, the editors of David C. Cook decided to compile her writings from her blog (Mundane Faithfulness) about her journey through the valley of the shadow of dying. Published posthumously, their aim is to let the words of Tippetts encourage the living, especially those who may be going through a difficult period.

The book comprises Four Acts of her life. Act One is filled with stories about mundane moments of life, Tippetts was able to capture her emotional ups and downs in what is uniquely Tippetts-style. It was a style that believed she was not facing cancer alone. She believed that her family would be taken care of even after her death. She pondered about the perfect peace God had promised, amid the pain she was going through. She encountered what it means to be sufficient by God’s grace. She got frustrated with constant attention for her to get well. She appreciated her husband for constantly pointing her attention to God, and in the process less focused on her own self. With moments of fear come peace. With feelings of ugliness come the awareness of the beauty around her. With existing pain comes anticipated relief. She even felt a special connection with the victims of the Sandy Hook tragedy. She was poetic when remembering the birthday of her husband.

Act Two described the many difficult times at the place of neither here nor there: The middle. The journey through cancer was made more difficult with the certainty of death but the uncertainty of when. This was not helped with worry and exhaustion. Thankfully, she found joy in mentors and being a mentor to others. Out of the pits of physical despair came moments where she appreciated life, growth, and adventure. She found herself waking up in the mornings praying for her family. She called the cancer diagnosis as “the grace fog” in which her family was the recipient of much grace. Without the pressure of trying to fulfill some bucket list of things to do, she tried to live as normally as possible. She continued to write. She continued to love her family and friends. She continued to have fun. She continued with daily reflections on God’s Word. She found comfort in expressing her struggles in a thoughtful poem called “Time.”

Act Three began with a recognition that peace can be very hard for a cancer-strickened person she was. She shared about that in her first book, “The Hardest Peace.” Why hard? She shed tears for her children as they watched her having to suffer through endless rounds of chemotherapy. She confessed her fears over the heavy burdens the family had to bore over her medical bills. She shared her difficult but authentic peace in a graduation speech given to the Evangelical Christian Academy Class of 2014. With increasing pain came rising hopes in seeing God finally. She even wrote a letter addressed to CANCER that even though physically she felt weak, her inner self continued to grow stronger each day. Her “Five Thoughts on Dying Well” is an excellent piece of writing that inspires.

Act Four seemed to be last, but is actually the beginning of the end. All in all, the chapters are short and to the point. There are ups and downs described throughout the book. Readers ebb back and forth with the thoughts of Tippetts. I believe these would resonate very much with people who understood what she was going through.

If you are needing some encouragement while going through a tough patch in life, this book will provide a needed perspective to remind us that if Tippetts in her weakness and her despair can do it, so could we. Even though the book was not put together by Tippetts herself, the book emanated everything that Tippetts stood for, that life is difficult but ultimately beautiful.

Rating: 4 stars of 5.

conrade This book is provided to me courtesy of David C. Cook Publishers and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All opinions offered above are mine unless otherwise stated or implied.