Kara Tippetts knows what hard is... but wants to live each moment God has given her.
An interview with Kara Tippetts,
Author of The Hardest Peace
Kara Tippetts knows the ordinary days of mothering four
kids, the joy of watching her children grow . . . and the devastating reality
of stage-four cancer. In The Hardest
Peace, Tippetts doesn’t offer answers for when living is hard, but she asks
us to join her in moving away from fear and control and toward peace and grace.
Most of all, she draws us back to the God who is with us, in the mundane and
the suffering, and who shapes even our pain into beauty.
Q: The Hardest Peace
tells much of your personal story: You were diagnosed in 2012 with cancer, and
to say it has not been an easy road is a gross understatement. How has having a
terminal illness impacted the way you view life?
I never expected to be planning my
funeral, counting my moments and fighting for my next breath in my 30s. I never
expected to be sitting on my daughter’s bed with the sinking feeling her mama
was going to die of cancer and not of old age, and not knowing the right words
to love her well. Never. But those places, those raw, broken places are the
heart of life. The brokenness of today causes us to look at tomorrow, hope for
tomorrow.
God has walked me through the valley of
the shadow and showed me what true beauty really is. He showed me what love
really looks like, and He built a depth of beauty into my story that a life
without suffering would never have known.
Q: Who did you write The
Hardest Peace for?
This
is a book for all of us who face the hard edges of life: marriage, children,
pain, grief, singleness, brokenness of all shapes and sizes are warmly welcome
to the pages of this book. This is my story, but I hope it helps the readers to
look honestly at their story. I do not believe you need to face cancer to see
the value of looking for and naming the graces in your own moments, days,
weeks, lifetime. To capture this beauty in your weariness, even if your story
doesn’t look like mine, will enrich your moments and give you a new perspective
and help you lift your head in the impossibility and pain in living. Hard is
hard.
Q: What is the
hardest peace?
The
veil between here and heaven is very thin. But it’s a dreadfully painful one.
We struggle to see beyond these days and look upon eternity with gladness. God
gives us morsels of eternity over here, crumbs really — and we beg for them to
remain when there is a feast awaiting us. I look at the beautiful creations of
my loved ones and say, Jesus, you did so well, so wondrously well, can’t I
stay a minute longer? But his peace answers my heart that it’s exactly
decided and it’s beautiful. It’s nothing to be feared. That it is amazing, the
story that remains on this side of the veil and the one that awaits on the
other. But I need reminding — constant reminding. This, for me, is the hardest
peace. I need truth-tellers all around me to speak the goodness of grace that
will meet me on both sides of the tender veil.
Q: Since your diagnosis, you’ve gone through chemotherapy
and radiation. How have you dealt with some of the side effects of the
treatments — like losing your hair for example?
When
I started treatment, I had no idea how bald would meet me. Bald. The
word itself has no elegance; it’s a blunt, matter-of-fact four letters that can
refer to a scalp, an animal, even a tire. And that’s how I met myself in the
mirror exactly sixteen days after the first dose of the healing poison. Early
September found my littlest, Story Jane, and I pulling out handfuls of my blond
hair and scattering it to the wind. It was the day my sister Jonna flew in and
the day a friend met me in my bathroom to shave my head — bald. Without
my hair then there were the gaunt, deep-set black eyes, completely void of any
glimmer, and I was deeply grieved. My weakness showed, no hiding, no faking —
just weakness. I would love to say I screamed, cried, wept in sorrow. No, chemo
brings silence. A deafening silence to just get through each moment.
I
remember hearing a young woman say she would be fine if she lost her hair. I
quietly sighed, hoping she would never know the pain of the ugly I was facing.
I did not admonish her ignorance, only silently prayed she would never have to
look for the grace at the end of her day to meet herself in the mirror utterly
changed by chemicals. It’s a bottom I don’t want another to know, but even at
that bottom, there was love. Unbelievable love.
Q: Being ill has
caused you to have to reevaluate your priorities, even in housekeeping. What
has that looked like for you?
My
cooking now is nutritious, simple, hearty and simple to clean up or leave until
the morning. I had to let go of the perfect home, the matching plates, the
perfectly timed dinner where everything came out perfectly hot and lovely. When
I let go of having it perfect, I learned the joy of sharing life with the
imperfect. When I untied the knots Pinterest and Martha Stewart tied me into, I
began to see the joy of together. The meeting of the edges of life around our
table. Broken marriages, desperate addiction, unkindness, hard issues with
parenting, love, life. Those were the flavors of the meals I remember most, the
honest heart-sharing, not the perfect roast beef with perfectly appointed root
vegetables. No, when all the trying is put aside, the heart has room to share.
Q: How has your
journey affected your marriage and your relationships with your family members?
As
our story continues to struggle and the plot of my cancer thickens, God has
deepened our love, helped us in our weakness to begin to have an imagination
for heaven and met us in such gentle grace where we cling. I picture God’s
gentle countenance as I beg for more time, more loving, more enjoying the
crumbs as I can’t see the next season in all its fullness. I don’t struggle with
dying, but I struggle and lose my breath when I think of my family watching me
suffer through finding my way to heaven. I struggle as I will see my pain
reflected in their faces. I will see their fears in letting me go and knowing
the graces that will follow.
My
husband, Jason, looks upon me with gentleness and longing as I’m offered a new
drug, a new treatment, a new short remedy to extend my days. I agree to the
pills, the hot flashes, the cutting, the pain, the discomfort and the struggle
to live in the small moment that is now. I struggle for the conclusion, I
wrestle with the brokenness, and I pray, oh how I pray for more days.
Q: You say in The Hardest Peace that you actually pray
for the woman your husband might marry after you’re gone. How do you find the
grace to do that?
Jason
asked me the other day why I talked to him so much about this next season of
his life. He always sits with me in this conversation, uncomfortable at best. I
looked at him gently and told him I want him to have the courage to love again.
I want him to hear me say: You are excellent as a husband. Be a
husband again. I also want him to hear me say, Be discerning, be
cautious, be patient, but don’t close your heart to the possibility of love.
Go for it, dearest — we met the best of life in the gift of marriage.
Certainly,
I have fears, concerns and anxieties over those future days. Another voice will
be entering the house I love with different ideas, opinions and preferences. So
in those edges, those anxieties, I pray. I pray for her heart; I pray for the
hearts of my kids. I pray they would uniquely love this woman and not struggle
with a sense of disloyalty to me. I want my children to know I see their dad’s
great gift at love, and that I want it to continue. But the edges they will
face in those moments, I cannot know. So I pray quiet prayers into those
moments for everyone.
Q: Your children are
still so young. How do you talk to them about your illness?
It
has been a balancing act that has kept us utterly dependent on God for
direction. Facing illness and disease with young children is difficult at best.
(Eleanor is 13, Harper Joy is 9, Lake Edward is 7, and Story Jane is 5.) It
feels foggy, and there is no perfect way to walk alongside your children
through such grievous hard. But we believe the key is to come alongside them or
they will become angry in the unknown and fearful. Children are bright and are
keenly aware of stress and changes within the home. We have walked transparent
before our children with the hard of our story, and we have trusted the Holy
Spirit to guide our words and our silence. We want to give the kids truth, not
our fears.
Two
things that have guided our parenting direction: The first is that we treat
each child as an individual with unique understanding. Our age range is large.
We have older children who understand the weightiness of cancer, and others who
don’t understand the implications of cancer, or death even. Secondly, we recognize
we have children with differing abilities to communicate and process struggles,
fears and heartbreak. We have children who will share every emotion and
children who want to process alone quietly. We’ve worked and prayed to find
opportunities to allow them to share their fears, their quiet worries and the
pain in the journey. We have also intentionally surrounded our children with a
safe community of friends and families.
Q: How have
friendships played a role in helping you and your family in this journey?
My
dear friend Mickey decided to stay with us for several weeks in the middle of
my treatment to carry us through some very dark days. With each new treatment,
I hit a lower low, a weaker weak, the bottom grew deeper and deeper. She loved
us gently in our exhausted state.
I
remember the first outing Mickey and I braved bald. We went to Costco and
lunch. Mickey has a gift for conversation, so we entered the warehouse store
talking, and we left talking. I barely noticed the glances and felt utterly
free from the uncomfortable wigs and hot scarfs. We went to a nearby hamburger
place for lunch. In my middle bite, I found a hair in my burger. Mickey looked
at me and frankly said, “Well, we know it isn’t yours.” We laughed harder than
I had laughed in months. It was laughter we needed, exactly when we needed it.
Mickey’s timing with that one-liner, and also her presence in our home, was
right on target.
Q: You talk in The Hardest Peace about making an idol
out of time. What did you mean by that?
In the midst of my cancer, I made an idol of time. It was my
greatest prayer, my begging pleadings to Jesus — let me remain. In many
ways, it is still my prayer, but God has rooted in me a gratitude for my now,
my hard, my story and even my cancer. I still have a long journey of seeking
grace that I may never understand, but this journey has taught me so much.
Perhaps the humbling, the prying open of my hand to time and the growing
imaginings for my forever tomorrows have become the balm to help me see truth
in the midst of pain. The lessons have come, but they haven’t come easily.
Q: You grew up in a very performance-based household, with a
father who was prone to anger. How have you come to peace in your relationship with
your parents?
The
truth is my siblings and I enjoyed pleasing our parents. We excelled at it,
worked at it and lived to impress and please them. But I believe this is the
story of most young children — the seeking of approval, love and acceptance in
the first place you know life. As I
learned the power of story and began to look deeper into my parents’ own story,
I realized I could not change the past, but the future could look different. My
spirit could meet the two of them with love where only my own bitterness and unforgiveness
had existed before.
Q: The Hardest Peace shares your story, but
so many people are walking difficult paths of their own. Do you think people
can identify with what you’ve written?
Each week I receive emails from people seeking grace in very
troubling situations. These broken followers of my story limp along with me,
trying to give credit to the generous giver of peace while walking in the
struggle of today. There are beautiful stories of courageous humility as they
receive suffering and seek grace in the midst of it. I know, I know, I know I’m not the only one facing these hard moments. I’m just writing about them.
When
I read the countless stories that are sent for only my eyes to see, I learn the
power of living courageously broken. Through the lives of so many facing
brokenness and through my own story, I’ve learned that maybe, just maybe,
brokenness is not to be feared but humbly received.
For more information about Kara Tippetts, visit her online
home at www.mundanefaithfulness.com, become a fan on Facebook (mundanefaithfulness) or follow her
on Twitter (@mother_to_many).
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