Hope In The Midst Of Suffering: The Kara Tippetts StoryНамуна

Hope Untouched by Sorrow

Written by Mary Kelso and Sofia J. Lyons.

There is no way to measure the value of a trial. Just as trees do not grow without a certain amount of wind and rain, our character will not grow without some pushing and pulling in our circumstances. 

In the film, The Long Goodbye, The Kara Tippetts Story, we see Kara, a young mother of four, pushing herself to be available, regardless of how sick and frail her body makes her feel. We see her standing in front of audiences, bald and brave after chemotherapy has stripped her of her beautiful hair. She speaks to her audience with no frills, nothing false, and nothing left out.

Kara describes the loss of her hair in encounters with others, noticing their inability to look her in the eye. Her hair did not represent her value, and yet without it, she saw her identity changing.

In our culture, we are often influenced by the pressures of performance and perfection. It’s important to present our lives well, but it isn’t everything.

We reveal ourselves in pieces on social media, in articles, blogs, and recipes we recommend. We show pictures of our lives and express our opinions, but we crop out what we believe is less appealing to others. What we lose, in this effort to edit our lives for others, is a sense of honesty and humility about ourselves. 

Kara said, “I think all of us struggle, so whether it be I didn’t expect marriage to be as hard as it was, or kids as hard as it is, in those edges that’s where we see our need for faith.”

Kara’s exposure of suffering is probably an extreme case. We are not all vloggers or the subject of documentaries, but in the practice of actively hiding our struggles, are we losing our own sense of need for God’s grace and goodness in our lives? Our struggles, our inadequacies, and our sorrows don’t go away simply because we aren’t giving them air. We must, in the safety of personal time with God, allow them to breathe so we can allow them to heal. His constant message is love, and He wants to be our protector, our healer, and our Father.