God's purpose, Nancy lived

Today I will "officiate" at the memorial service for Nancy Fisher. Here is a link for her obituary. Nancy died at age 58 from cancer that began with breast cancer. Of anyone I know, she used the transforming life of Fairlawn-West as a vessel for her own life transformation. That is, she focused on dying to herself so that she would live in Christ. That was even before she knew she had cancer. For Nancy this "journey" was seamless. Her impending "death" was not an end. Two weeks before she died she told me, "David, I'm excited about this next part of my life." She continued to read over and over even in the last two weeks of her life Max Lucado's book "It's Not About Me: Rescue from the Life We Thought Would Make Us Happy" Over these past five years through our mall food court Bible study and through our cell groups using "Companions in Christ" to develop her spiritual discipline and life, Nancy came to say that the God she had come to know in these most recent years (but who had been revelaed to her in her life all along, and especially planted in her by her parents and her home church of Grace UCC in Stone Creek, OH) was who she would know more fully as her death approached. There was no sense of a break for her. She would meet with me over the last 2-3 years weekly at my hang out of Coco's Coffee Bar to talk about spiritual life and servanthood. Even after the ravages of chemo, she was back at her favorite place of the Williard UCC Food Pantry. And then with her "sisters" of my wife Martha and Linda Seibert, as they led two different small groups in the past three years, they would meet an hour before each group at Starbucks. As Nancy would arrive often early with her shaved head (she wouldn't wear a wig), she found that her appearance somehow drew people in to conversation with her and it was often about life's journey, her faith, and where her conversants were headed in their living. She loved it! She wasn't out to "save" people. Rather, she wanted to share life and the giver of life, her Father in heaven, as part of conversation rather than a sermon or lecture on salvation.