A Confession

June 7, 2017

I have been struggling with sharing this part of our story because I don’t know how it’s going to be received. But today something happened that made me think it’s time to share it. So, here goes…

About 2 weeks before the accident, Jesse opened up to me about some bad decisions he had been making at school with his friends. I didn’t press him for details but he told me he was being a follower instead of a leader and asked me to start praying for him about it. Around the same time I witnessed Leah not making a very good choice with some of her friends. So I began to pray. I asked God to do whatever it takes to get my kids to heaven with Him. I’ve prayed these kinds of prayers before, asking God to intervene in certain ways and He always pulled through, most of the time not the way I intended or wanted. Our car wreck last July, for example. But I didn’t think anything else about this prayer until we were sitting in the hospital on day 2 with Phoebe. Just Jesse and I were in her room and he looked at me and said, “I’m going to do whatever I need to do to get to heaven.” My broken heart stopped. I remembered the prayer I had said and as soon as I got alone with Joel I broke down and told him it was my fault that Keren was dead. I told him about my prayer and the guilt I then felt over her death. The wise man that he is said, “Kelly, you got our little girl saved! Don’t feel guilty, we know that she is taken care of.” That made a world of difference to me and I’ve been holding on to that thought since then. Sometimes I question if she was destined for hell and we would have failed her. Other times I think God was saving me from all the worry I had over her. And if you knew her and what she was really like, you know I worried about her A LOT. We called her our “little monster” for a reason! But why I bring this up now is because today as I was going through some medical bills we are already receiving, I found the EMS bill for the ambulance service that day. Up to this point I didn’t know what time the accident had occurred, I just knew when I received the call. But on this bill it gave the time the EMS was called. I’d been doing ok today until then and, of course, I started crying. I kept saying in my head, this is the time my baby girl died. I was moving around the house trying to get things done but this just kept playing over and over in my head until I looked at her picture hanging on our wall and God spoke to me and said, “No, that’s the time she was made perfect.” Wow, my tears dried up and I felt renewed. God answers our prayers. Not always the way want or expect, but He takes care of us. I’m not saying He made this happen. I fully believe and envision demons driving that truck straight at their car that day. It was a full-on attack. But, like Carl said at the funeral, the enemy overplayed his hand that day. And what Satan meant for evil, God made good.