Guest Blogger from boggsblogs.com

Wow! What a privilege it is to be a guest blogger standing in for Ashlee, Kari and Malachi! I am Davy from boggsblogs. Our family Davy, Kelly and Odie Boggs has known Ashlee since she was a very young girl. She has always been a fine Christian lady but her true Christian character is shining even more brightly through the severe ups and downs, twists and turns and hills and curves that life has brought to her. We are so proud of her!

Ashlee text some pictures of the kids to me and Kelly Jo yesterday and they are absolutely gorgeous. We told her that she better post them soon or I would post them myself on our blog. I guess she took me seriously and asked me to post the pictures for her here since her computer is down. I consider it an honor to do as she has asked.

I only have six pictures of Kari and Malachi but I know that Ashlee's millions of regular readers are going to love them. Get ready to smile and cry at the same time. Below these pictures I will post little Kari's prayer during devotions the other night. When I read it I was blown away and took a while to have myself a good cry....

Here are the pictures.

Does that hurt your eyes with preciousness or what!?!

Now for the prayer that Kari prayed.....

Lord we thank you for this day and all you've done for us.

But tomorrow is a new day that I have never been in before Lord and I ask that u would help me and help me to keep fighting this old cancer dragon.

Help Caitlyn and Michael and all of our other cancer friends.

And help all of our regular friends and family Lord. Lord we ask you to help our blessings and our requests in Jesus name, Amen.

Whew! Praise God! I know that God has promised to hear the prayers of His people and I know that He keeps His Word....But I can not help but believe that prayers like that receive some special attention!

Keep right on praying, Kari! God hears you when you pray! There is no doubt about it.

Friends, let's continue to hold this beautiful family up in prayer. Life goes on for all of us and we have our own "dragons" to fight but I know that many of you hold this family very close to your hearts. Let's continue to make a special effort to be a blessing to Ashlee, Kari and Malachi. Keep praying, keep believing God, keep leaving comments, emailing, texting and calling with encouragement and kind words and consider helping financially as well. (This may end my career as a guest blogger before it even gets started, but I am too far away for Ashlee to shoot me right now.) There is no doubt in my mind that Ashlee could use every dollar that we could send her.

In fact, it would be incredible if you would forward this to friends, post the link in other blogs or spread it by word of mouth. I would love for readers right here to flood Ashlee with more than enough for her needs. Wouldn't that be awesome? What do you think?

I went back into the archives of this blog and found the following information from Sis. Karen Noe that tells how we can help...

Donations made out to "Kari Kontributions" may be sent straight to the bank at:

Farmers National Bank

P.O. Box 28

Danville, KY 40422

or

Karen Noe

229 Highland Court

Danville, KY 40422

God bless you all.

Davy

boggsblogs

Personal: Thanks Kari for allowing me to guest blog on your and Malachi's page. Our family loves you very much. We think you are very brave, courageous and beautiful. I can't wait to see you again and sit down and have some ice cream together! Keep your head up and keep singing!

Your BIG Buddy

MIL

Just a quick update from the Mother in law again. Lol!
Ashlee's computer is down so she asked me to give you a quick update.
Kari went for counts at EMRMC yesterday and we were thrilled with the results!
They were up from 1600 to 5500 (ANC) and all the other counts were really good! We are Praising the Lord! She is definately back to her little spunky self! She had a few problems when she first went on maintenance adjusting but all seems fine now. PTL! Her hair is growing so fast! She is thrilled! Hopefully Ash will be up and running and be able to put some recent pictures of her soon.
Kari sang at her Great Aunt Ellies funeral and from what they told me it was unbelievable how strong her little voice was and she never missed a word. Memaw said she done us proud!!!! She is definately our little singer. It just thrills me and Pappy when we are going down the road and she is just sitting back there in her own little world singing, singing, singing! Tears are in our eyes as we realize just how God has blessed us.
I do Children's Church at our church and every Sunday, Kari says "Pray for my Mommy and my Daddy, all my family and friends and all my friends at Clinic!" She is always praying for and thinking about you. If we had time, she would call every one of you by name. Lol. One more thing, when she was having some problems a few weeks ago, she had a really sore throat. Ash had texted for us to pray. When she came in to Sunday School, she jumped into my arms and I said, "Baby, How are you feeling?" She got this little awestruck look on her face and said excitedly, "Gammy, I don't know how God did it but somehow before I had to take my medicine, He healed my throat!!!!! Gammy, I just don't know how He did it, but He did!" Thank God for her faith and her Mommy who guides her spiritually.
Malachi is growing so fast. He is definately going to be Pappys helper. Anything Pappy does, he has his hands in it. Lol. I really think he just loves having some male attention. I watched him helping Pappy put their new lawn mower together and he was bent over it just like Pappy and was talking every breath and fiddling with every part on it. He run over to me with Pappys big gloves on and said, "Numni, DoTi help,help,help Pappy fix lawnmower!" He has always called me Numni cause he couldn't say Gammy and he calls himself DoTi cause he can't say Malachi or at least he couldn't. The other day I was explaining that to someone and he looked at me matter of factly and said, "Numni, DuTi can say Gimmy and Mawacki." So its just a matter of time before our nicknames are obsolete. :( They grow up soooo fast!

As always, thanks for your continuing love, prayers and support! We love you!

Aunt Ellie & Papaw Lewis

Well, I knew the day would come when I would have to do this post. And I've dreaded it.

My Aunt Ellie passed away about an hour ago. Many of you have kept up with her and prayed for her through her battle with cancer. She was diagnosed in May of 2010 with pancreatic cancer and has battled so hard for the past two years. Thank you for your prayers for her and please hold our family up to God over the next little bit. If you could go back to this post or this post you can see how much fun we had with Ellie and Greg when they lived in Florida. She was diagnosed shortly after we visited them in 2010. My aunt was a wonderful person, inside and out. I loved her so much and I will miss her even more!

Last week, we also had another death in our family. Papaw Lewis, who is my children's great grandfather on Matthew's side, passed away (also from cancer) and his funeral was Saturday. He loved my kids so very much and he earned a nickname from Kari before she learned to talk plain. "Papaw Lewless" will be missed greatly!

Please keep our family in your prayers as we travel to Ohio for the funeral. Kari has been asked to sing but she's on steroids right now. So, who knows what mood she will be in??? I will do my best to update on Kari (with pictures) tomorrow.

Thanks for your continued support for our family!

Praise

Monday, the kids and I decided it was a beautiful day to go to the park and have a picnic, feed the ducks, and fly kites! I wasn't really sure I remembered how to fly a kite but decided surely it couldn't be that hard! We went to Kroger first and got picnic supplies. The kids (and mommy) are loving these buggies with the car on the front of them. Grocery shopping is getting a mite easier these days.



Then on to feed the obviously starving ducks. They absolutely about pecked our hands when we didn't give them bread fast enough. Stingy critters.





Then it was off to fly our kites. It was so much fun, y'all! We played with those kites for almost two hours! Loved it!






So, what does my post title have to do with flying kites? Absolutely nothing but I wanted to share our fun day with everyone before getting to my more serious side of this post.


Tonight at church, a visiting preacher preached about praising God through our storms and through our battles and through our valleys. Because God doesn't want our praise only in the good times. He is faithful through the good and the bad and He expects us to trust and praise Him through it all.

I'll be honest (I usually am). I have STRUGGLED with this for the past month. I have struggled with doubt and unbelief and definitely with praising God through this storm. Up to this point, I don't think I've questioned God in many of the things that have happened to us in the past 8 months. The month of February was truly ROUGH and, quite frankly, confusing. But why did that make me doubt God? I mean, God has been so faithful to me through every storm that we've weathered. He's proven Himself to me time and time again. You know how it is when you have been so faithful and true to a friend or family member but as soon as a rumor of some kind gets started....they doubt you? Even though you have proven your character over and over, they doubt you? It's such an awful feeling of betrayal.

And I must say that when the preacher preached tonight, I felt rebuked. I felt like such a terrible soldier for the Lord. I felt like I betrayed Him because I doubted so much. Instead of remembering what God had done for me in the past, I wondered if He would let me down this time? If you haven't been following my blog through our whole journey or if you have been following since the beginning, I encourage you to read or reread last July's posts. I read them again tonight and cried! God kept me when I couldn't keep myself. God was the One who dried my tears and calmed my fears. God was there every single step of the way and He still is. Why in the world would I doubt him???


And I'm not even sure how to end this post. I have so many thoughts and emotions running through my mind...thoughts of rebuke to myself for not trusting and thoughts of thankfulness from remembering all that God has brought us through. Not only that, but He is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He will continue to lead us through if we'll only TRUST.

I guess I'll leave it at that for tonight. :)