I Hope You Dance to Heaven

My sister was diagnosed with cancer in the year 2000. She was not expected to live over one year, but God gave us seven years to watch her journey through this cancer and her spiritual journey to Heaven. The last Thanksgiving that my sister was on this Earth, she was wheelchair-bound and I was asked by her to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for her and her family.

I went with my husband to Heber Springs, Arkansas. In a small trailer I prepared a beautiful delicious Thanksgiving meal. During the process of preparing the meal, she rolled up behind me and her wheelchair and asked me if I wanted to dance to the song "I Hope You Dance" by Lee Ann Womack. I turned on the CD player and helped my sister get out of her wheelchair and we danced around her kitchen as if we were children again. At the end of this song, I sat her back down in the wheelchair and she rolled back into the living room to finish watching the Food Network show that she was enjoying. My sister and I loved to dance together when we were children and this was a special treasured memory I will always have.

She wrote in her journal on a daily basis of her feelings, her physical needs, but above all she wrote a love letter to Jesus. Two days before she died, my older sister and I visited with her for the last time. I held her hand and squeezed her hand and looked into her beautiful angelic eyes. I told her I loved her and I read her the scriptures, Psalms 91. She told me that Jesus was in the room but he was not saying anything, he was just being quiet.

Two days later, the angels came to that bedroom and escorted my sister to Heaven. The song "I Hope You Can Dance" by Lee Ann Womack was played at her funeral. Her children have boxes of journals that she wrote during her seven-year journey to Heaven and the fact that she will be dancing with Jesus.