Our little "Beauty" Kaelee Grace:
Our past and Gods hands all formed you and I. Me with my life and you with yours. It has brought me to this day. It hasn't been very long since we sat beside Kaelee Grace and held her hand as she passed into her Eternal Life with Jesus. It still seems like it didn't really happen at times. A brain tumor? I thought that only happens in other peoples families. But every time I turn around, Kaelee isn't here, so it must have happened to us.
Even though the peace of God which I mentioned before was such a presence here in our home, we still had to deal with our humanness over and over again. For a year, our lives would bounce between a living hell or evidences of tremendous faith in God. There was more grief and agony than we knew what to do with. Prayers for strength, prayers for healing, prayers for sanity, you name it, we prayed it , and most of you prayed it.
We had lost loved ones before, but this was a child. It was a roller coaster ride we had never experienced in our lives. I think we held our breath for an entire year. The only thing that held us together was God's loving, calm hand, the overwhelming support of our community, and never without the GIGANTIC faith of our beautiful 11 year old Granddaughter, who passed through this world never flinching, never, ever giving up on her faith. One who had the most peaceful calm assurance that whatever would happen to her was o.k. She was going to Heaven, to be with Jesus, and own a horse ranch. She just plain accepted it all, never complained, right up to the moment she died. She only mentioned a couple of times over the course of her last year, how hard it was and that she was sick of it. Never in my life have I seen that kind of faith from a human being let alone a child. It was miraculous and it was living in my home. For the rest of us, it was never easy, it was a nightmare and yet the ironic goodness of it all, filled our home with frequent peace and our hearts with awe. Our hearts were broken, but filled with the hope of Eternity with Christ all at the same time. There were weekly sometimes daily visits to the Hospital and all kinds of medical ups and downs. Any family going through cancer can tell you that it is a physical, mental and spiritual ride on a roller coaster that doesn't seem to end. Yet we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Holy Spirit was revealing himself to us daily, and the power of Heaven was leading us along the way.
I will never forget this miraculous time we spent with God's gift of Kaelee to us. I also know full well what her testimony was to the community we live in. How could I not share it with all and try putting into words everything she wanted and believed would happen to the people around her in her short life. She loved very hard, she forgave everything that was ever done to her in an instant. Even being the one with Cancer was accepted by her and she never wished it on anyone else. She loved her family, her friends at school, her teachers, her principles, her Doctors and nurses, even her enemies. She believed everyone she loved would be with her in Heaven and she just had to go there first. She never judged anyone, never held one person up higher than the other. She just threw her sassy little impish self out there no matter what.
She gently slipped into Eternity in my living room, with her family holding her. With the Pink and Purple sunset that shone so brightly in the sky and on her face, announcing that she had arrived safely home.
What she didn't know was that all the people she loved didn't necessarily know how they could get to Heaven. She just trusted they would be there, and if she thought someone wasn't going to Heaven, she prayed for them, knowing God would answer her prayer.
So to honor our little beauty and help fulfill her desires for all that she knew and loved, Please do her honor of reading what I will write next. Then consider it sincerely for your life.
God has always had a plan for mankind that started way back in the Garden of Eden. God created us to have fellowship with Him and gave us Paradise to live in with only one rule.
Genesis 2:9 & Gen. 3:3-In the middle of the garden was the tree of the knowledge, good and evil.... and God said to Adam and Eve, "You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the Garden, you must not touch it or you will die." O.K....Lets think this out a minute. Adam and Eve were living in PARADISE!!! They were walking and talking with God and living out the life that you and I can only dream about. Who in the world would want to eat of the only tree in the garden that would allow them to know evil and give up all of that?
Well, there was that ancient serpent "the devil" who had already been kicked out of Heaven because he wanted to be like God, then cast down to earth. He wanted God's creation to be just as self-seeking as he was so he tempted the woman Eve, who in turn tempted the man Adam and together they made the choice to listen to the devil instead of God. That is how sin entered into a perfect world and scarred all of mankind from Adam on down to you and me. It's embedded into us, passed on to us from generation to generation. Mankind is now doomed, there is no hope. Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, their perfect Paradise is lost.
Now what? How can this be fixed? God is HOLY, so what does that mean? One of my favorite authors is Donald Grey Barnhouse, who is now with the Lord. In his book, "Teaching the Word of Truth" he tells us this. " Holiness is perfection--absolute freedom from sin or wrong of any kind. God is Perfect. God is Holy. In Psalms 145:17 we can see what God say's about Himself. He says He is righteous in all His ways and holy in all His works. He has never done anything or thought anything that could be even the least bit wrong. Habakkuk 1:13 it say's that God cannot look on sin. He is so pure that when He sees sin, He turns away from it. Makes even our goodness look a little filthy doesn't it? For God, everything that is not absolutely perfect, is sin."
Well that's it then, I've broken His commandments umpteenbedillion times in my life, I sin every single day, and this tells me God has turned His back on me because of it. I'm doomed.
He also writes....."If I take a book in my hand and want to lay it down I cannot lay it nowhere. I must lay it on a table, or a chair, or on the floor, or on something. I cannot just let it drop to nowhere. The same thing is true about sins. They are either on you or on someone else. You cannot just wish them away to nowhere as you might like to."
He continues " We know, because God's Word says so, that all are sinners (Romans 3:23). We know , too, that every sin must be punished, because God is perfectly Holy, and cannot just forget about all these sins. BUT...God did not want to separate us from Himself forever. He LOVED us, even when we were sinners (Romans 5:8). So He made a way to take our sins from us, and yet remain perfectly just (in his judgement of sin). He found a place to put our sins. It was on the Lord Jesus Christ. Gods son, who was the perfect sacrifice, was willing to take on a human form and a human nature in order to die for our sins."
Jesus took all of the sin of all mankind from beginning to end, placed it on the cross and it was killed when he died there. Did we get that?....SIN WAS KILLED!!! He became our sin for us so we could be saved. Saved from what? Saved from eternal punishment, separation from God completely. I don't know about you but I think of Eternity without God, it makes my skin crawl and an unexplained fear like never before comes over me.
He gave Himself as a "Ransom" for us. Someone needed to pay so we could be reunited with a Holy God as it once was, in the beginning. Jesus paid that price with his blood. His blood covers us from judgement. The Bible says Jesus is our advocate, our lawyer, when the great day of judgement comes, and it will come, we will have our turn to stand in front of a Holy God and Jesus will step in and say "she's mine" " he's mine" and judgement will not come to us. IF we belong to Him. It is a miraculous, beautiful truth we can believe in, and receive for our own. That word "receive" is the very key, we can't just believe, even the devil and his demons believe, we have to claim it for our own and we do so by recognizing who we have become and then asking Jesus to forgive us and claim a new life, now with Christ. He doesn't MAKE us do this. If He had decided to make us come to him, we would be like puppets wouldn't we. He draws us to himself but ultimately gives us a "freewill" to love Him or not, to believe Him or not, and to claim it as our own. We can't make anyone love us, they have to do that on their own, but we can receive it. That's how it is with God.
Please check yourself, please make sure you will be apart of this incredible reunion we will have with Christ when we pass on one day. We all do pass one day. What would it hurt as you sit quietly by yourself, just to make sure not only for yourselves but for your children and grandchildren. I heard a very true saying once that said "The only thing you can take to Heaven with you are your kids". We made sure Kaelee knew the truth, and because of this remarkable truth she was able to have that peace that passes all understanding that the Bible talks about. Now we are driving these truths home to Kara, she will have to make her own decisions about this through life. She has a pretty good start.
This is going to end the story portion of my blog. I wanted to get our story out and show you Kaelee's faith along with it. This family is always going to mess things up in life, we are still going to sin and hurt each other at times. It's part of the human condition. But now we know the way to escape that so we are going to keep on running the race and at the end of it our prize will be Eternity with Christ, and Kaelee of course. She's going to have to teach me how to ride one of her horses though, she will get the biggest kick out of that.
I've made some other commitments in my life that I have to focus on for awhile. But I plan on keeping this open just to pop in now and then.
I can't thank you enough for taking time out to read my thoughts and listen to my story. I am so grateful to those of you who send me messages and those who stop me on the street to encourage me to continue.
It's my most sincere prayer that God's truth, His Word will take root in everyone's life who has read this if it hasn't already.
I"ll close this out by adding a prayer that you can pray if you never have, so that you can also be free and become one of those in Heaven with Kaelee and her family and millions of others. For those of you who are already a part of The Kingdom of Heaven, let's pray for each other, that we will lose all fear and begin to share the truth of Jesus Christ more openly than ever before.
"Dear Jesus, I recognize that I am a sinner, I believe that you came to die and rise again to free me from that sin and without you I will never enter in to Heaven. Please forgive me for all my sins, come into my heart and take over my life, I commit myself to you".
It's just that simple...
If you do this, believe it, then study it, read God's word and if you don't understand it, ask God to open up your understanding, go to church, fellowship with other Christians. Learn and grow.
God Bless