Kara Tippetts started her blog as a simple diary about life as a mum. She called it Mundane Faithfulness — a title that captured exactly what she was writing about. The ordinary, beautiful, exhausting rhythm of raising small children and finding God in nappies, school runs, and bedtime prayers. Nothing spectacular. Just faithful. Just mundane.
Then in the summer of 2012, everything changed. Breast cancer. Kara was young. She had four small children. The mundane faithfulness she had been writing about was about to be tested in ways she never imagined.
The Fear
Kara was honest about the terror. She did not dress it up in spiritual language. She did not pretend that faith made the diagnosis painless. She wrote about the fear with the same raw honesty she had used to write about motherhood — because pretending would have been a betrayal of everything her blog stood for.
The fear of leaving her children. The fear of treatment. The fear of what her body was doing. The fear of the word "terminal" which would eventually be spoken. All of it was real, and Kara refused to pretend otherwise.
The Encounter
But alongside the fear, something else appeared. Grace. Not the dramatic, lightning-bolt kind. The mundane kind. The kind that showed up in a friend's text message at exactly the right moment. The kind that settled over her during a quiet morning when the children were at school and the house was still.
Kara described the movement not as fear disappearing but as peace arriving alongside it. She wrote: "I am asking us to move away from fear and toward peace." Not a leap. A movement. Step by step. Day by day. Fear in one hand, peace in the other — and gradually, slowly, choosing to hold tighter to the peace.
Her blog transformed from a parenting diary into a lighthouse. Mundane Faithfulness became one of the most-read faith blogs in the English-speaking world. Her book, The Hardest Peace, was published in 2014 and became an instant touchstone for anyone walking through suffering. It reached readers across the United States and the United Kingdom, crossing denominational and cultural lines because the honesty was universal.
The Grace
What made Kara extraordinary was not superhuman faith. It was human faith — fragile, honest, sometimes barely holding on — directed at a God she trusted to be faithful even when faithfulness looked like walking through the fire rather than being pulled out of it.
She said: "Cancer does not define me. Neither does being a wife or a mother. All these things are part of who I am but they do not define me. What defines me is my relationship with Jesus."
Kara Tippetts went home to Jesus on 22 March 2015. She was thirty-eight.
What This Means for You
If you are terrified right now — if the diagnosis is in and the fear is everywhere — Kara Tippetts is not going to tell you to be brave. She is going to tell you to be honest. Write it down. Say it out loud. Let the fear have a voice so that it does not get to have the last word.
And then move. Not a giant leap. A small step. Toward peace. Toward the God who does not promise to remove the storm but promises to be in it with you.
The hardest peace is the one you choose when everything is falling apart. It is also the most real. Kara found it. And she left a trail of breadcrumbs — in her blog, her book, her words — so that you could find it too.
Grace does not wait for you to be ready. It meets you in the mundane. In the fear. In the ordinary Monday morning when the diagnosis is still real and the children still need feeding and God is still there, holding it all together.