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Rebecca Orrico wasn't planning on going anywhere, no matter what the doctors said. She was just 10 years old. She loved to laugh. She loved to dance. And boy, could she light up the room with that radiant smile.

It didn't matter that she was bald and skinny and growing weaker every day. Didn't matter that she'd been battling leukemia since infancy. Didn't matter that her calendar was defined by chemo treatments and radiation therapy and bone marrow transplants. And it certainly didn't matter that, just a week after her 10th birthday, doctors told Rebecca's family she probably wouldn't make it through the night.

As far as Rebecca was concerned, she still had a life to live. And a job to do.

So, that night, Rebecca called her 15-year-old cousin, Christian singer Stacie Orrico, and made some big plans.

"Did they tell you?" Rebecca asked Stacie on the phone.

"Tell me what?" said Stacie, pretending not to know.

"I know the doctors think I'm about to die, but I'm not going to."

Stacie swallowed, holding back the tears.

"You better save a spot for me on your next tour," Rebecca continued, "because I'm going to come out and dance with you."

It was more than Stacie could bear. The tears came. She knew Rebecca would never dance again.

Moments later, the conversation ended. And the next day, Stacie was making plans to attend a funeral—not just for a sweet, brown-eyed 10-year-old who never lost her zest for life, but for her favorite cousin.

"Out of all my cousins, Rebecca and I were definitely the closest," says Stacie, now 16. "I just loved that little girl."

Stacie was devastated by Rebecca's death.

"It was just too much," she says. "I asked God, 'Why did you choose to take a child who impacted every person she met?' The only conclusion I could come to was that Rebecca was so special that God just wanted her to be with him."

Stacie says she never got angry at God.

"No," she says, "but that's because Rebecca had been so joyful through it all, even though she was really sick. She was definitely in pain most of her life, and I think God wanted to get her out of that. If we had to choose between Rebecca living a long life of pain, or going home to be with God when she was 10, I think we all would say she deserved not to suffer anymore. I think overall everybody felt peace about it."

That's partly because of how Rebecca lived.

"She loved to make people happy," Stacie remembers. "She never would've said her life was hard. She lived better than any person I've ever seen."

Especially when it came to dancing.

"She loved to dance," Stacie says. "She was determined that as soon as she got a little older, she was going to come out on the road with me and be one of my dancers. Every time I saw her, she had made up dances to all my songs."

And she had a way of dancing right into your heart, Stacie says.

"The moment anybody met her, they knew she was special. Not because she was sick or because they felt sorry for her. But because she was so full of life. And she wasn't going to let anything get in her way."

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