The Hardest Peace

Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life's Hard

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Pub Date 01 Oct 2014 | Archive Date 02 Nov 2015
David C Cook | David C. Cook

Description

Kara Tippetts knows the ordinary days of mothering four kids, the joy of watching her children grow ... and the devestating reality of stage-four cancer. In The Hardest Peace, Kara 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.

Kara Tippetts knows the ordinary days of mothering four kids, the joy of watching her children grow ... and the devestating reality of stage-four cancer. In The Hardest Peace, Kara doesn't offer...


Available Editions

EDITION Paperback
ISBN 9780781412155
PRICE $15.99 (USD)

Average rating from 29 members


Featured Reviews

I first heard about Kara Tippetts's book THE HARDEST PEACE through Facebook. A former student, a young mother herself, wrote of weeping while alternating between reading the book and hugging her own children. Still she mentioned gaining such strength from Kara's words and her whole story.
I was fortunate enough to be able to ask David C. Cook Publishing for a review copy of the book for review purposes, and I am so glad they allowed me the chance to learn about Kara's journey and her message for us all.

Kara and her husband believed they were living the dream God had planned for them. Four healthy children that they loved to the moon and back, the chance to start a new church in Colorado, and a personal love that grew with each new year of marriage. Then within weeks of moving, Kara found a lump and a new story began -- a story of cancer that spread from her breasts, to her ovaries, to her brain and to the nodes. Rounds of chemo stole her hair, her energy, and her "pretty." Radiation and surgery left a myriad of scars. As the disease progressed, morphed, and became the center of their lives, the question "How will my children live without me?" shouted at her daily, but then her faith allowed her focus to shift. As Kara says, there was no "pretty" left in her life, but everywhere she looked she sees beauty. It may be the visit from a congregation member, or a late night embrace from her husband, or the profound love and selflessness she's felt from even her youngest child. In each tiny moment or grand pronouncement she has chosen to see God. It is his strength she has chosen to feel and acknowledge, both in the book and at her blog MUNDANE FAITHFULNESS. When I checked the blog this week, I see guest posts from dear friends she's made along this journey. Her last posting, just a few days ago, indicate she is weakening. Her thoughts remind me so much of a brother in law who passed away from leukemia 8 years ago. She is eloquent in naming and describing the moments of grace and beauty that flicker even in the harshest moments of destructive disease; she's given words to feelings that I am sure my brother in law, his wife, and his daughters felt. I witnesses moments of that God given strength and grace, but cannot begin to share the impact it had on me and my husband. I will leave you to read Kara Tippett's THE HARDEST PEACE.

Note that this is not the typical "disease" memoir. Kara does not take us through a chronological journey of diagnosis, treatment, and family chaos. From the beginning of the book and continuing throughout she focuses on how living in her weakness she has been able to see and experience life as it should be lived. Of everything in the book what affected me most was her conscious effort to continue to parent her children, not in the physical realm of everyday care, but in the greater picture of effecting their hearts and their understanding of love, sharing, and caring for others. She also has prepared her children for her eventual death and helped them to remain to see a loving God in their life story. Thank you to David C, Cook for allowing me to review this book.

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What would it be like to have lost all that you know because of illness, loss of a job, loss of a spouse and be able to say “All I have is but you Lord”? Does all our striving put in us in the presence of Jesus with our good reputations, our drive for success, our need to be accepted? With all that we do, do we manufacture our faith? I knew that when I read the first few pages of this special testimony, I knew that my heart would be captured for something greater.

You may relate to Kara as she shares her life. How children learn to seek the approval of their parents. How an angry father whose very words cut to the soul of his children. How a grandmother that had the unique gift of a child being able to claim that they are the favorite.

To be alive is to be broken. And to be broken is to stand in need of grace in the words of Brennan Manning, Kara was introduced to Jesus and how his grace changed everything.

I love her line in meeting her husband- Jesus was the life change and Jason was the game changer. His love for others was a deep attraction. He had the gift of making others feel known. I think we all desire that. To be known. Her husband set the standard for her in loving Jesus. In their marriage they learned the art of fighting fair and fighting with kindness. Marriage is the gospel. Where sanctification is the life of the marriage along with repentance, without it, a marriage will die. Repentance gives life to relationships. It is in marriage we can create a golden calf idol in how marriage is to fix us. What other golden calf idol are we making to fix us and maybe others? The Cross is our only fix.

How are we testing our boundaries of the depth of love in our relationships?

In Kara’s story, she had a plot change in her life and an understanding that we are not the authors of our lives, but the characters who respond to the author. While the cancer was taking the life out of Kara, their new community and church were giving life by loving her and her family well. You read something like this and you realize that only a few experience this kind of love. In your suffering, you can respond by giving your children the wisdom that you are learning in your suffering. With Kara it was the beauty of the heart and seeing your own worth, your own beauty of who God created you. Our pain can lead to beauty but it is rarely pretty. It can bring the ugliness out of us that we have in our dream world when we are faced in the reality of our own weakness. In learning to live a life courageously broken you realize that brokenness is not to be feared but humbly received. To learn the joy of sharing life with the imperfect is where we are transparent.

The question that we need to ask ourselves in all the ugliness in the world and in our own hurts pain, suffering, Is God good? In a bad marriage, is God Good? In an untimely death of a loved one, is God Good? In the news of bad health, is God Good? In financial ruin, is God Good? In the face of our brokenness, is God Good?

Kara writes her story that we would see the bigger picture in our own story. You can follow her blog http://www.mundanefaithfulness.com/home/2015/3/2/a-room-of-her-own

Behold I am making all things new. Revelation 21:5 God is good indeed. Know him! Behold Him.

My huge thanks to the publisher David C Cook and NetGalley for a ebook to read and review.

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This book hits close to home in many ways for me! In a lot of the chapters, change a few details, and it could very well be me writing the words.

I am learning we each have our own battle, challenge, or hard places to walk in life. Just because one is noticeable and dramatic does not make it any more or less impacting on my life than yours is on you.
God uses whatever HE alone sees each heart needs.

"...some through the fire, some through the flood, some through the water but all through the Blood! Some through great sorrow but God gives a song, in the night season and all the day long."

This is not a book you read but one you absorb into your very being praying it becomes a part of who you are as a person, wife and mother.

My, very mistaken, early review of this book within the first couple of chapters was amazement at how closely her "story" mirrored mine. I soon had to eat my words mixed with bitter tears of repentance for my cocky self absorption! MY pitiful tale is nothing next to what She and her family live each and every day.

I am thankful I found this book. I will be getting a hard copy asap as well as each of her other two books.

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The Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life's Hard, By Kara Tippetts Publisher: David C. Cook Publication date: October 1, 2014 Category: Biographies & Memoirs, Religion & Spirituality Source: I received this book from NetGalley in consideration for review.

What can anyone say about this book? I took it at the suggestion of the publisher because the title reminded me of Ann Voskamp's One Thousand Gifts, which I love. However, I hadn't made the connection between a more recent blog post of Voskamp's I was saving to read and the author of The Hardest Peace, Kara Tippets. Once I started the book it clicked: Voskamp's post titled How to Recover the Lost Art of Dying Well was about the death of Kara Tippetts on March 22, 2015.

The Hardest Peace, published by Tippetts in October 2014 before her death, is about having grace and dignity in death. As a pastor's family, the Tippetts (with four kids) had moved and were living in a new community when Kara discovered she had relapsed into cancer. Regardless the amount of treatment, the cancer continued to pop up, sometimes in new places. Although the book mentions the cancer, cancer is not the focus of the book. The timeline seems to lapse as you read and you become caught up in Kara's thoughts on dying and what that really meant to the here and now.

She essentially asks, "Is Jesus really good in the awful of cancer, fire, heartbreak, and devastation? In the face of all that is broken, is God good?" And with numerous examples of her experience she answers, "I see through the lives of so many facing brokenness they never dreamed and learning again that maybe, just maybe, brokenness is not to be feared but humbly received. Maybe it is our culture that is wrong. No, not maybe. I know it is wrong."

Kara Tippetts fully takes on the idea that "everything happens for a reason" and shows how thinking that presents Christianity as a way to only see the good and only be joyful in the good is false. She found God present in the hardest of times and Jesus her source of grace and peace where no one would ever think such things could be found.

I found her insights amazing...you want to experience what she speaks of and yet, if something like cancer is what it takes, do you? Kara Tippetts leaves us with the idea that it doesn't take cancer to experience peace and grace. We find ourselves up against struggles in many ways and her insights apply to all of it.

My connection to Kara Tippetts's words come through my own mother, who received a clean bill of health from her year long fight with breast cancer the very month Kara Tippetts passed away. I remember the night before my mom went in for her first chemo. She expected to be nervous, upset, etc., especially after a tough session placing her port. Instead she found herself inexplicably at peace and remained so despite the hardness chemo brought to every minute of every day.

Rest in peace Kara Tippetts. Thank you for sharing your wisdom of grace, peace, and dignity. If you are interested in more of Kara's journey, she blogged throughout at Mundane Faithfulness.

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