Her Mundane Faithfulness Was Anything But...

I was late to the party. I didn't even know who Kara Tippetts was until a few months ago. In all honesty, I didn't even start reading her blog with wild abandon once I knew that she was a 38 year old pastor's wife with four kids and terminal cancer. See, I read about her and then my daughter died. My world spun around in this weird and seemingly foreign universe and I wanted to simultaneously get off and hold on for dear life.

Living is disjointed. Hoping for the future and what God might have for us. Mourning the past and the loss of our girl. It's complicated. Some days I feel like any smile anyone sees is completely fake and I'll never be happy again. Some days I know that losing Kate does not define me and I am so thankful for what I do have and so completely overwhelmed by the joy I find in God's goodness. Some days I wonder why my pregnant friends aren't texting me their belly pictures and sometimes I wonder why people won't stop talking about babies in front of me. Thankfully, always, I recognize my own fickle grief and I understand that the only one being unfair is me. In all my own sadness, though, I nearly forgot about Kara.

And then, suddenly, two weeks ago, she crashed into my mind and I wondered if she'd gone to be the Lord. I sprinted over to her blog and found that she was still alive. I watched the trailer for her documentary and I wept. Something I've done entirely too much of in the past nine weeks.

 

At 2:43. That's the moment in this trailer that rips out my heart, throws it on the ground, jumps on it and makes me deeply grieve a woman I have never met in my life. "I don't want you to go," her eight year old son says to her.

How that must have seized her heart. How that must have hurt so badly. As mothers, we don't want anything to hurt our children. More than anything, watching my own children grieve the loss of their unborn sister has wrecked me because I cannot fix it for them. I can only imagine, with pain and horror, what it would be like to know I was dying and listen as my child told me that he didn't want me to go, knowing I had no say in the matter.

My son is eight.

Yesterday, Kara Tippetts went to be with the Lord. No one that she let into her life through her blog and her books should be sad for Kara. I believe that she is praising her Savior. She is free of pain. But her pastor husband and their four children, her parents, her siblings, and her friends and congregation, are deeply grieving the loss of a remarkable human being.

There is always someone hurting worse than we are. Those children--the ones who woke up this morning without their mommy--need our prayers. I simply cannot imagine their pain. I will pull my own children close to me and praise God that I can wrap them in my arms. Kara is rejoicing with her Savior, but I'm sure her children would give anything to feel her arms around them just one more time.