for my friend

Today I write for a friend.

I write for a friend who, in dying, taught me much about living.

He was never one to pretend to be anyone but who he was.

Straight forward and honest, that is what he wanted and that is what he gave.

It should have come as no surprise that he dealt with his last 78 days in much the same way.

After he was diagnosed with stage four cancer he never asked, “Why? Why me?”
In fact he said, “Why not me? I’m no better than anyone.”

Instead of wallowing in misery my friend took the opportunity of dying to reflect on life.
From what he saw and what he learned he taught others.

In his own words:

Satan came into my life in such a way that I never saw it.
I never saw it.
I worked in a position where I worked my way up through the ranks and became a manager of people. During that time it started to consume more and more of my time. And it started to consume more of my time that should have been with my family and should have been with my church.
He (Satan) was in there. He was in there and I just never realized it.

One of the things that I realized when I found out about this was how much time I had lost to my family, to my friends for allowing Satan to come in and take over my life.
I would always be on the phone.
I would always take phone calls.
I took those calls and I dealt with those problems.
So my own family had problems.
They became second.
I lost that time.

I ask you to really look deep into your lives and see if perhaps he’s not doing that to you.


These are the things that I want to leave you with.
When I got the news about the cancer, you know, you can choose to look at this a hundred different ways.
The way I looked at is was that God gave me blessing, a blessing I can never repay.”

People say, “How in the world can you have a blessing when you have cancer and you’re going to die?”

I say, “Well because He gave the time with the people that I may not have got to say things to that I wanted to. He gave me the time to make amends to people that I had grudges towards that were petty. He gave me time to embrace my family and be with them.”

For me, I’ve had nothing but blessings throughout this whole thing, from the very start to the very end.”


And in the end, my friend, you have been God’s blessing to us all.
Thank you.