Hope In The Midst Of Suffering: The Kara Tippetts StoryНамуна

Hope Leads Us to Love

There is no greater offering of the human spirit than to love another.  We cannot measure that offering by its volume. Instead, we tend to measure the love we’re given by our own need for it.  On the contrary, when we give love to others, we measure it by how much it cost us.  

In the film, The Long Goodbye, The Kara Tippetts Story, we hear a message of sacrificial love.  Even when it’s painful, even when there are multiple, legitimate, reasons to withhold love, it should be offered.  As long as there is hope of love having its effect on hearts and lives it should lead us to love.  Kara believed in that kind of powerful love. She believed that even long after her death, the love she gave her children would hold a powerful influence in them the rest of their lives.

“Knowing my own mortality, knowing that I’m dying, the sense that the love that I give will live beyond me, especially the love that comes from God.”

We know and believe that angry words, abuses, abandonments, and rejections leave scars on the human heart  that are capable of causing brokenness, addictions, and mental illness later in life.  Why would we believe love to be any less powerful than these things? Love is what heals these painful realities.  Love can overpower the logic of longstanding bitterness and cause us to forgive.   

How can we become capable of loving well?  How do we offer powerful, life giving, and unending love to others?

Kara voiced her commitment to love, saying, “As cancer finds new corners every day in my body, I realize that’s all I’ve got, Jesus is all I’ve got.  Not only is He all I have, He’s all I have to give. So that’s my question to you, how today can you move past your own comfort, your own expectation of what today is to be, or this week is to be, and let Jesus love you enough that, that love spills onto somebody else?”

Our own ability to love others is refined and matured by our ability to receive love from God.  Our hope in His love and affection drives us to spend time with Him, to hear Him speak, and to allow Him to have leadership in our lives.  He wants to have a relationship with us, and in that we find an unending abundance of love.

His love for us caused Him to send us His only Son as a sacrifice for all our sins and failures.  His love is defined by His sacrifice. That kind of love is what will last, and we are privileged to share it with others.

In the film, Ann Voskamp related the way Kara Tippetts loved by concluding, “You love as well as you’re willing to be inconvenienced.”  Kara was determined to give that kind of love, and urged others to join her in loving well.

“I know that I love today, and I have today to go love another.”

Below is a short video sharing Kara's heart to give hope and encouragement, even while she was enduring a terminal cancer diagnosis. To view the entire film "The Long Goodbye: The Kara Tippetts Story," please see http://karatippettsdocumentary.com/