On March 3,1997, a beautiful little girl was born to Jennifer and Jody Scharfenstein. She was the second little girl to bless this family and two more were to follow. Savannah was a sweet child with a very compassionate heart. She was funny too. She made us laugh with her words and with the faces she made. She loved to play dress up then dance or put on a show for us. One of her favorite things to do was make movies with her sisters using our home video camera. She really did love life. She loved playing outside, riding her bike and swimming. We used to have a zip cord over our pool and she would strike a pose dramatically while gliding. She was the silly one. She loved her friends and being with them and she loved being with her family too. She gave the longest hugs. She was very animated and full of personality.
Savannah liked music and wrote a few songs on the piano. She especially loved to sing. Just one week before her accident she sang a solo in church for the first time.
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She loved her cousins and loved to watch TV. The only thing she didn’t like was doing her school work. She was homeschooled and our routine was two subjects and a ten minute break. Before the ink was dry on her paper she was up and out the door for her break. She loved to swing her two younger sisters on the tire swing in our back yard.
Savannah grew up in a family where Jesus and His love for her was spoken of often. She loved Him and at a very young age realized she needed Him as her Savior. She was six years old and during a rather routine day was taking her vitamins. She went into the bathroom with her vitamins and came out without them. I (her mom) didn’t pay much attention to this, but after a week her older sister Kayla said to me, “You do know she is throwing her vitamins in toilet?” So the next day I gave her vitamins to her as usual then watched what she was going to do. Sure enough off to the bathroom she went. When she came back I asked her if she had taken her vitamin. She said yes. Then I confronted her with what Kayla had told me. When she realized she had been caught she cried and confessed. Here was the teaching moment, I explained to her that although she thought she was getting away with lying to me, God knew the whole time and she was never hiding from Him. That upset her more that lying to me. It was that day that she, at six years old realized she was a sinner. She wanted to be forgiven by God. She crawled up onto her dad’s chair and prayed for God to forgive her and for Jesus to come into her heart and be in control. Some time later she began to ask us if she could be baptized. She was so young we wanted to make sure that her decision to give her life over to Jesus was indeed genuine. We didn’t want her to grow up believing that just because she was baptized then she was ‘saved’. (Jesus says “I am the Way the Truth and the Life, no man can come to the Father except through Me.” John 14:6) Just after her seventh birthday she was baptized at FBC New Orleans where we were members at the time.
I tell you this story of Savannah’s decision to give her little life to Jesus because on December 10, 2006, her life here came to a sudden and tragic end.
