Just Show Up By Kara TippettsSample

"The Highs and Lows Together"

JILL:

While there have been many lows on this journey, there have also been many highs. Birthdays celebrated. Concerts, dinners, breakfasts, and coffee dates enjoyed. Friendships grew from seeds into beautiful flowers. A community formed and flourished.

There are many moments of laughter and friendship to be consumed together while walking through hard. Kara and Jason have kept their sense of humor, and it’s made many days bearable to be able to laugh.

This feels like a small normal.

There are times I question whether we should be laughing. Things feel so dire, Kara’s prognosis so heavy, that laughter feels misplaced. But we have to embrace the glimpses of joy—and laughter—when we can. Don’t let these slip away in the face of hard.

Tears will come easily, and they won’t ask for permission. But the pockets of friendship we still get to have with Kara are part of the beauty in suffering.

When good moments come, cherish them. When there’s something to celebrate, turn up the music and dance. Suffering gives us all the more reason to find the smallest good and expand on it.

And when the lows come, as they inevitably will, cry and weep and mourn. The sadness is just as important as the celebrating. Just as important.

KARA:

The long good-bye. Cancer has afforded me that, and I have tried to live faithfully in light of that dark gift. Never, at the age of thirty-eight, did I expect to be living under such fearsome blow after fearsome blow with each new diagnosis flattening us out. It is hard to recover to intentional living after each painful reminder of the limit on my days.

For my children, I have written blog posts, made videos, taped events, smiled and smiled into the camera to say, “I was here with you, and it was beautiful.” The kids will one day see it as the long good-bye that it is. But right now they are simply the receivers of all the big love I have to give.

Each day I fight the limitations this disease has placed upon me to love my children. It should not have taken cancer to cause me to abound in more and more love, but that is what Jesus chose to use to prompt my heart to extend the borders of me to love my people with more love than I could have otherwise known. I would have likely protected myself, lived safe, comfortable. But the long good-bye brings an amazing and seemingly senseless sharing of love.

But with the long good-bye also comes the fear that something will be forgotten. Perhaps something left unsaid, undone, unresolved, and you fight to live your next moments well, hoping that grace will be present to help us all through the coming hard steps. The steps ahead, like those behind, that leave us uncertain.

In all this long good-bye, there is endless imagination that is taking place about what is, what will become, what might be. The long good-bye leaves me with the ability to bless Jason with the freedom to love again. He doesn’t like that conversation. But it must happen. The long good-bye is filled with highs and lows, celebration and sadness. They are both equally important.

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