Todd Jones updated his status. 11:28pm I originally posted this back in December of last year. Months prior to discovering that she had cancer, I thought it time to pay homage to the most wonderful person Ive ever known. Since then, Laura has lost her father and overseen the marriage of our oldest child. She was told that she has stage 4 cancer, been through chemo and radiation and is facing surgery next week. Through it all, her faith remains strong as does her work ethic and love of life. Please keep us in your prayers as we head to Houston for the next several weeks. Pray for the surgeons, nurses and others involved in her care. Keep my children safe and mindful of their mothers situation with the knowledge that she is saved. I am hopeful and yet, still ask for your continued support for all of us. The weeks ahead are going to be difficult. The separation from loved ones. The ups and downs.... The hotels and hospitals.... Thanks for your cards, your prayers and financial support. Im not surprised and yet still overwhelmed by the number of cards and prayers that arrive daily. She really is one of a kind. I only wish that I deserved such an amazing gift from God. Post from December... Let me tell you about my wife. My wife is the middle child of 5 girls. Try, try, try, try and try again, her father finally gave up on having a son after having produced a entire basketball team of females that he adored and does to this day. My wife grew up on a farm. A real farm. Unlike the way that we define a farm today, she didn’t live in some upscale house with a mud-room and automatic dog watering dishes. It wasn’t 2 minutes to town and there was no lawn service to care for the property. Her life was one of rural existence. There was no air conditioning and the heat came from the fireplace combined with the warmth of blankets quilted by her mother, handed down from her grandmother or purchased at the local Goodwill. When “city water” arrived in the area, the pipe crossed the creek before reaching the home. I still recall standing waste deep in frigid water holding one end of the line while her father held the other as we attempted to repair the breakage caused by a late winter flood. In the spring and summer, the girls were responsible for 40 acres of squash. They planted, hoed, watered and picked squash from sunup to sundown. Ever spent a day bent over picking squash, loading it into buckets, carrying it to the truck and loading it? Probably not. Ever had to wake up the next morning and do it again? The labor was free for her father and helped to offset the one “luxury” that the girls had. All five girls attended a private Christian school. Now, before you go thinking “Private School?” her family must have been doing better than you’re letting on, hang on… They did attend a prestigious private school, but they were not your average students. As part of the farming operation, her father raised hogs and being an industrious type, he had made arrangements to haul off the waste from the cafeteria to feed the hogs. So, every few days he would hook up a trailer to the back of his Ford Escort and grab the trash barrels when he picked up the girls from school. If you think that kids can be cruel enough. Private school kids are worse. While the girls excelled in academics and sports, they just never quite clicked with the social elite that predominated the student body. When I first met my wife, she was 15 years old. I was a freshman in college. Her father was one of my professors and her mother worked the snack bar in the student center. During the fall, the family offered hayrides and cookouts for the collegiate clubs to make some extra money to cover the farm payments. A great cook, my wife usually worked kitchen duty for the events and made the best rice crispy treats that you have ever eaten. At 15, she wasn’t able to get a “real job”, so she took on the job of ironing the clothes of a local family on Saturdays. Her mother would drop her off in the morning and swing by to pick her up later in the day. When she turned 16, she held jobs working alongside of her mother in the student center while continuing with the hayrides. She then moved on to the local Dairy Queen allowing me to get some half priced food every so often. We got married during my senior year of college. She was 18. I was 21 and the luckiest man in the World! At that time, we were both college students. We lived in the married students apartments on campus. They were more like prison cells than apartments. Block walls, drab colors, metal stairs… You get the picture. I was carrying a bunch of hours at school in an effort to graduate while in the management trainee program at Wal-mart. She was carrying the same amount of hours and working at Shoney’s as a waitress. We can joke about it now, but times were tough. Our honeymoon consisted of a couple nights in Hot Springs, Arkansas. It seemed that we were just passing each other in the hall each day for the next few years. Her tips are what kept us afloat during those first few years. Tips. Tips are given in reward for quality service. As I look back on those years, one event seems to have shaped the financial future of our marriage. Just as it is today, college campuses are flooded with credit card offers. Get a free t-shirt, key chain, or other trinket for signing up. As a newly married man looking towards the future, it seemed that a credit card would be a good idea. Not too much credit. Just enough to cover the gaps would be fine. My single friends were applying using the credit history from their parents as collateral. Long story short, my friends were approved due to their co-signers. We were declined. Thank God! Again, Thank God! I believe that this one event shaped our financial future more than any other. Thanks to her, it was years later that we ever attempted to get a credit card. Years have passed and I could go on and on about my wife. I could tell you all about what an amazing mother she has been to our three children. I could tell you what a great example she has set. I could tell you about the impact that she has had in the lives of others and how much she truly cares for people. I could tell you how much that I wish I could be more like her. The fact is that if you know her, you love her. She’s a shining example of a woman that any man would be proud to call his wife. Love you Babe!
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 06:03:01 +0000
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