UPDATE MARCH 27-Kara Tippett’s memorial service 1:30 p.m. March 28 will be streamed and available for viewing at www.mundanefaithfulness.com beginning at 1:15 p.m.
Kara Tippetts, a 38-year-old Colorado Springs woman who advocated against physician-assisted suicide, died March 22 after a long battle with breast cancer.
“My pain is gone, my fears are calmed, I’m in the sovereignly good hands of Jesus” was part of a message shared on her blog March 25 in a post titled “Letter to my readers upon my death.”
Tippetts, wife of Westside Church pastor Jason Tippetts, and the mother of four young children, gained widespread attention last October after reaching out to Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman who publicly announced her move to Oregon to take advantage of the state’s law allowing physician-assisted suicide. In an Oct. 8 letter, Tippetts pleaded with Maynard, who died Nov. 1, not to take her life and expressed sympathy and understanding in being asked to “walk a road that feels simply impossible to walk.”
“Brittany, your life matters, your story matters, and your suffering matters,” she wrote in the letter shared more than a million times on social media. “I think the telling of your story is important.”
“That last kiss, that last warm touch, that last breath matters,” she continued, “but it was never intended for us to decide when that last breath is breathed.”
Her blog, www.mundanefaithfulness.com, originally a site where she posted about motherhood, became a place where she documented her journey through chemotherapy and surgery, joy-filled moments with her family throughout her treatment, the experience of hospice care, and how she saw God’s grace “even in the hardest, messiest, ugliest places.”
“My little body has grown tired of battle, and treatment is no longer helping,” she wrote Dec. 29. “But what I see, what I know, what I have is Jesus. He has still given me breath, and with it I pray I would live well and fade well.
“By degrees doing both, living and dying, as I have moments left to live. I get to draw my people close, kiss them and tenderly speak love over their lives … I get to laugh and cry and wonder over heaven. I do not feel like I have the courage for this journey, but I have Jesus—and He will provide.”
Tippetts continued posting until 12 days before her death, and expressed gratitude in her letter published after her death.
“I cannot begin to use this simple language to express the heart of what I feel for this community,” she wrote. “There is so much love in this community I can barely take it all in at times. I have been prayed for, cried over, my story shared over and over. You all can’t know the love I have felt from each of you.”
She requested prayers for her family that they know “the nearness and comfort of God.”
A fund benefitting the children has been established and donations may be sent to Jason Tippetts, P.O. Box 49727, Colorado Springs, CO 80949.
> BOOK
“The Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life’s Hard” (David C. Cook, 2014)
By Kara Tippetts
Available at bookstores and www.amazon.com
