“I was here. I saw beauty. I embraced it.”
—Kara Tippetts
How do you live out extravagant love in the everyday moments? How do you celebrate grace when your life turns out differently than the one you dreamed?
Kara Tippetts discovered how to find joy in the small moments of life. She learned how to hold tight to hope even while battling intense physical and emotional pain. And she lived out the truth that God can redeem any story.
In her final book, Kara offers gentle reflections on living and dying well. She invites us to cultivate soft hearts even when we face great disappointment. Her ideas for living are hard-won, wrestled with in the crucible of family, illness, and faith. And her constant reminder is that whether we are in the midst of dark days or mundane moments Jesus is always there, life is surprisingly beautiful, and God is forever good.
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Excerpt
Some have called me heroic, for the fight, for the journey. I’m no hero. I’m just one broken woman looking for grace. I’m one needy heart in need of forgiveness. I’m just like everyone else, fighting to see grace, to live gently to walk in integrity. It’s a daily battle, and some days it’s a war. And may days I blow it, bad. But there is always forgiveness. And this story, it is mine to share, I have to be a witness to the script I’ve been given. If there’s anything beautiful in it, it is because o the beautiful one – Jesus.
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My review
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, but 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.
Buy from: Amazon.com Amazon.com.au
Release date: 1 March 2016
Pages: 258
Publisher: David C. Cook
Website: http://www.mundanefaithfulness.com/
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