The Goodness, Faithfulness, and Grace of God
A Christian Memoir of God's Faithfulness Through Waiting, Motherhood, and Unexpected Grace
In The Goodness, Faithfulness, and Grace of God, Keely invites readers into an honest journey through fear, disappointment, motherhood, ministry, unanswered questions, unexpected provision, and life-changing encounters with the Father's heart. Through seasons of sickness, waiting, loss, healing, and hope, she discovers that God's goodness is not measured by comfort, His faithfulness is not limited by human understanding, and His grace is present even when we cannot see the full picture.
With vulnerability, humor, and deep trust in Scripture, this memoir reminds readers that God is working long before we recognize it, and that His promises often unfold in ways more beautiful than we could have imagined.
Perfect for readers who enjoy Christian memoirs, inspiring testimonies, motherhood stories, and faith-filled reflections on God's providence, redemption, and unwavering love.
PROLOGUE
The bathroom light was dim. I was annoyed that I could not sleep. I had to keep getting up to go to the bathroom, but never finding relief. The rest of the house was wrapped in the stillness of sleep. It was Friday, June 13th, and midnight was approaching.
I had been in and out of the bathroom for hours, driven by a nagging, persistent discomfort that I was absolutely convinced was just another postpartum tummy issue. My boys, Caleb and Lucas, were tucked into bed just feet away. The only sound in the house was the soft, melodic loop of the Dwell app on my phone.
“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”
For weeks leading up to this night, insomnia had been my constant companion. I had attributed the inability to sleep to the usual postpartum hormonal shifts, but it felt different. It felt more restless and more urgent. Night after night, when sleep refused to come, I would find myself drawn to my piano in the dark. I would sit there and worship, my fingers finding the keys as I sang Psalm 23 over myself like a lifeline.
I did not realize why I was so drawn to it or why I felt this desperate need to get that specific Psalm deep within my spirit, but I could not stop.
On this night, that urge became a mandate. I felt the Lord telling me to just soak in the Word, to let it saturate my mind. I opened my Dwell Bible app and did something I had never done before. I put Psalm 23 on repeat. I did not know why I had the urge to hear it over and over, but I obeyed.
As I sat there in the bathroom, trying to find some relief from the pressure, the words of Psalm 23 continued to loop God’s promises in my ear.
I was not in the labor I recognized. I had been in labor twice before. I knew what it felt like to be unable to function and to be overwhelmed by agony.
But this night, there was no screaming. There was no crying. There was no pain. After not being able to go to the bathroom for hours, the baby finally began to crown unbeknownst to my husband and me.
As the pressure intensified, my mind, which was anchored in the absolute certainty that pregnancy was impossible, went to the darkest place. I felt like my organs were coming out. I was convinced that something was terribly and fundamentally wrong with my body.
But the moment that terrifying thought surfaced, the words looping in my ear surged forward to meet it.
“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
A supernatural peace, thick and tangible, settled over me. I was confused, and I was scared, but more than anything, I felt protected.
I called for Chase, and together we lived through the most confusing minutes of our lives. We were both convinced this was a life-threatening medical crisis until a contraction I could not stop forced a tiny hand into view.
In an instant, my world fractured and put itself back together. I had not been sick. I had been carrying a promise. Without a single push, she arrived. I pulled her to my chest, and the silence of the midnight room was suddenly filled with the name of the little girl we had been waiting on for 5 years.
Isabella Grace.
Back in 2019, before I got pregnant with our firstborn, we were so sure we would have Isabella in 2020. We felt the Lord give us that name, and we were convinced. We were so confident that when we found out we were having a boy, the sting was not about the baby. We loved Caleb instantly. He was wonderful, amazing, and the perfect firstborn for us. The sting was the silence of God. We felt like we could not hear Him anymore.
My husband had even been having recurring dreams about this little girl, and when she did not arrive, we were left with a crushing tension. We were not upset about our son. We were upset because we felt like we did not know the Lord’s voice like we thought we did.
We lived in that confusion for years. Before I got pregnant again, we wrote a children’s book called The ABCs of God’s Love. Every page had a letter of the alphabet with a scripture to declare over children and an illustrated picture of children. We asked the illustrator, who knew nothing of our dreams, to create all different types of children and be free to illustrate what she felt for each verse. We just asked that one of the children in the book would look like Caleb.
When we got the book back, on the page for the letter P, the word was Planned, and the verse was “I know what I’m doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for.” (Jeremiah 29:11, MSG) Chase looked at the illustration and said, "This is the little girl I have been having dreams about." It felt like confirmation.
But then, in 2023, I got pregnant again, and we thought, surely, this is Isabella. When we saw Lucas on the ultrasound, we were excited and blessed to have another boy and for Caleb and Lucas to be able to play together one day. But the doubt returned even stronger. We felt like we were just making things up. We had decided that Isabella Grace was a lovely idea, but one we had clearly misunderstood.
Yet here she was. She had arrived in the middle of my ignorance, a sovereign gift that did not require my awareness to be fulfilled.
In those first frantic moments of realization, Chase called our close friend, Dana. She rushed to our home, arriving with a speed that felt like another small miracle, getting there even before the sirens began to wail in the distance. She walked right into the middle of our chaos and sat with me on the floor. As I sat in the bathtub, skin-to-skin with this tiny life I had only just met, she prayed. She covered us both in prayer, her voice a steady anchor of peace while we waited for the world to catch up to what had just happened.
Her presence showed us another level of God’s grace. It was because He knew we needed a level of support and encouragement we had never needed before. Not just in the moment, but long term. So He sent a sister to carry that weight with us. She did not just show up for the moment; she stayed by our side all the way through the hospital stay and beyond. She has definitely earned her official title as auntie to all three of our children. She was a witness to the miracle when I was still too stunned to find my own words.
A few minutes later, the house was full of uniforms. Firemen and paramedics filled the small space, eventually taking her a few feet away with my husband to check her over. I stayed in the bathtub, listening to them ask the question that had defined my last five years. Is it a boy or a girl?
In the quiet, before they could even look, I whispered it to the empty air.
It’s Isabella Grace.
It’s a girl! They called out from the other room.
The tears finally broke then, warm and heavy, as I sat in the silence of the bathroom. I had not been deaf to His voice. I just had not seen the whole picture. But even as the joy fell, a heavy shadow of shame and guilt began to creep in. How could you not know? What kind of mother is that disconnected from her own body?
To this day, I am still flooded by questions from those I love, well-meaning people who cannot wrap their minds around the mystery. They ask how I could not know, telling me that they knew something was different, and they cannot believe I did not see it. Their disbelief often feels like an indictment, a recurring reminder of the months I spent missing her. I still struggle with those thoughts, battling the guilt of not realizing she was there.
But the more I try to answer their questions, the more I realize that my lack of knowing was the very canvas God chose for His masterpiece. Their disbelief cannot change the quiet, stubborn reality of His timing. It is in that very gap of my own awareness where I finally found the true meaning of the name I had carried for five years.
I had spent years mourning a misheard promise, only for Him to hand it to me in the middle of the night, covered in the kind of grace that takes care of everything, even the things we are not awake enough to see.
I thought I had been waiting for a baby. I didn’t realize the baby was the one waiting for me, biding her time until the goodness, the faithfulness, and the grace were all finally in place.
To understand the miracle of that Friday night, I have to go back to 2019, when I first heard a whisper I was certain I understood, but was only just beginning to learn.