Blythe Hunt announces at Kara Tippets' blog Mundane Faithfulness that
Kara Tippetts went Home to Jesus on March 22, 2015, after a long battle with breast cancer.Please read the rest of Blythe's words about Kara. Here is an excerpt:
Hearing a message about forgiveness prompted her to seek a relationship with Jesus, where she found total acceptance, kindness, and Grace. While she didn’t experience instant change in her life, dramatic changes were softly, slowly occurring in her heart as she trusted Christ’s love for her and allowed it to alter how she viewed the world and the people around her. She saw the difference a gentle word could make in response to an ugly remark, how an outstretched hand could break barriers of a hardened heart. Kindness became Kara’s passion; it defined her relationship with Jason, and then her four children: Eleanor, Harper, Lake, and Story Jane.
Ann Voskamp has written many times about Kara, and she adds her thoughts:
The frame around life, the death boundary around life, makes us appreciate every life as art.Read more here.
We are in awe of breathing, of the gift of being, because it’s fleeting.
We love life more, the more we realize all this lovely life is transient.
...For the mortal, it feels impossible to understand the close distance of eternity.
...We must always have an imagination for the grace that will meet us.
...how to travel well, right through to the end…to the end that ushers us into the beginning forever.
...“When you come to the end of yourself, that’s when something else can begin.”
...What does it matter if we know how to live well — but not know how to die well? Especially when dying is our last act of living here?
...We needed someone to show us how and Kara taught us how to die.
...Because she’d recovered the art of living well —she had an imagination to trust that the love and beauty she had found in life would be the love and beauty that would meet her in the end.
...Sometimes the most painful chapters of our lives —- are the most meaningful chapters of our lives.
...Suffering asks us to ultimately bear under that which is ultimately not under our control — which proves we are ultimately not the ones in control.
...Suffering quietly begs us to surrender — so we can win a greater wisdom, a deeper strength, a closer intimacy.
If suffering is about bearing under — suffering is a call for us all to be a community to stand together and carry the weight of bearing under — only to find that we are all being carried by a Greater Love.
...Suffering is a call to come, to show up, to be there. Suffering can be a gift because it’s a call for presence; it’s a call for us to be present.
...Where there is suffering, there is God. And where there is God, there is redemption.
...It’s our living well that determines our dying well.
Kara sang with her babies and loved them large and relentlessly beyond the limits of herself, and was present and insisted that suffering didn’t mean the absence of goodness but rather the presence of God, and she fought to stay tender and keep a soft heart and let the echo of her laughter live long in all their souls….
...No one wants to die; life is a luminous gift that we get to take with unabashed joy instead of taking it for granted.
...While Kara escapes winter, and crosses our minds and hearts like that robin that’s a fluttering of wings just past the edge of our eyes: singing of lovely things coming, coming — just before it flies away, lovely and gone.
Just before we too will soon feel His warming Love directly on our faces —
soon, soon.
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