Although this may be hard to write, it has been on my mind since I started this thing and is probably the biggest delayer of other posts on the board, so here we go…

 On December 5 (2007) my mom passed away after a 26 month fight against lung cancer that had metastasized into her bones.  She was diagnosed in September of 2005 after having a pain in the back of her neck that would not go away.  Like many stories you will hear she was given around six months to live and with each month that passed continued to amaze doctors, family and friends.  To me she always seemed very passive and submissive, and to tell you the truth I thought that she would just let the sickness overtake her without any signs of a struggle, but the fight she displayed over that time was nothing short of remarkable.  Since I can barely see the keyboard right now I will get to the real reason I wanted to write this post, but, I will always remember the Saturday morning trips to Hardee’s where we would order Cinnamon and Raisin Biscuits and sit and talk, watching The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer  on days we would stay home “sick”, and those trips to Burger King on our way home because she liked the taste of their fountain Coca-cola even though we had two cases of the can version at home and how these memories and so many others will constantly remind me, as a new parent, that all of my vein worries of how much I think I need to provide for my son and how many things we think we need as a family will all fade away someday and he will be left with the times we spent as father and son and any faith and wisdom that will come from that as it did from my mom to me.

It hit me around the end of January and I have been thinking about it ever since.  After her death I started really looking back at her life and how she lived it, after all a life well-lived should be a life well-remembered, and I kept thinking about an ideal that she exhibited and passed along to me, but never through any verbal explanation.  Before her fight with cancer I had always thought that it was just the way she was, but the more I saw her through the sickness and the more I look at her well-marked Bible the more I think that it was an intentional effort and was one of her ways of being set apart, and it comes from one of my interpretations of John 15:13, which says, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.”  There is the obvious reference to Jesus laying down his life for us, his friends and the first pictures that go through my head when I read this verse or hear it read usually resemble a scene from a movie where the very noble character jumps in front of a friend who is about to be shot or finds themselves in a situation where the villian is about to kill someone and you stop everything and say something like ”no, take me instead” but, I think there is another way to look at this verse (after all, how many of us find ourselves in some dark alley late at night presented with the choice of giving our lives for another), one that my mom lived on a daily basis.  When you think of laying down your life for your friends, think of laying down (what you think your life should be) for your friends.  I think it means putting aside your agenda for the; day, week, month, year.  All of the things you think you need to do or get done or accomplish, and use that time as an investment into someone else.  Find out what they like to do, what they are interested in, what their hopes for life are and spend that time doing it with them (even, and especially, if that is not what you like to do, are interested in, hope for…).  I think Janis Cooper lived this.  She was always interested in what you wanted to do and was always eager to go along with whatever it was as long as she could share something that you loved with you. 

Out of all the things that Janis Cooper was to me, this is the one thing that has stood out in my mind during the last three months.  I hope to honor the example she set by continually adding more of this to my life, and in doing so; truly love my family and friends.