An Ode to Mike Cope

As I sat in church this morning, I saw Mike Cope walk past me down the aisle pushing his youngest, Chris, now in a wheelchair after the accident. It was their first Sunday back, and though Chris went to class, the family didn't stay through the entire service. I couldn't help but think of the time I interviewed Mike last fall. We talked about Megan, since it was the 10th anniversary of her death, and he discussed the wheelchair he would push her in as he went running, training for various marathons and achieving things she would never be able to. And I was just struck seeing him today.

I have so much respect for him and his wife, Diane, and I really consider him my preacher, not the ones I grew up with back home. When he stops preaching I don't know what I'll do. I have learned a lot from him through his teachings on grief and what he learned from Megan's death.

But now I wanted to publish on here excerpts from the feature I wrote on him. It probably won't run because it will have to be rewritten now to consider the accident. Yes it's long; get over it. Here is the beginning and the end of it anyways:

In his office at Highland Church of Christ, Mike Cope sits staring up at a picture of himself and his smiling daughter, Megan, on the top of his bookcase. Concentrating on the young girl’s face, he tells of the last days of her life and the influence she had on everyone who met her.

He remembers one man who snuck into Megan’s deathbed and whispered the deepest secret of his life he'd never shared with anyone. Cope's throat tightens and his eyes fill with tears. He takes a sip of water from a Styrofoam cup and says a barely audible "I'm sorry. You asked. I haven’t thought about that one in a while."

A missionary in Uganda, once a student of Cope’s, sent him a fax after her death saying she had changed his life.

“He was amazed at the way a child could grab his heart and teach him so much about Jesus without even being able to speak,” Cope said.

Another letter came from a lawyer in Arkansas.

“‘You taught me, you baptized me, but Megan is really the one that brought me to the Gospel because when I met her, I thought ‘Why am I trying to kill myself to be a partner by the age of 30, when here’s a child who is fully alive and full of love who doesn’t have any of these kinds of goals and aspirations in life?’’’

Nov. 21 was the 10th anniversary of 10-year-old Megan’s death. Megan was mentally handicapped but led a healthy and energetic life until the age of six when she had chicken pox and almost died from encephalitis, recovering but becoming more feeble. She died of aspiration pneumonia, which she had struggled with for several years.

Cope, in his 14th year preaching at Highland, wrote an article for Christian Standard magazine about her life, death and how his life was completely changed by them.

“In it I talked about how Megan is the most influential minister of the Gospel in my life, and when I say that I’m not exaggerating,” Cope said. “That frail little child for 10 years taught me more about the Gospel than any seminary professor I’ve ever had. She welcomed love even though she could never really speak much. She drew people in.”

Cope spoke at a Christian conference several weeks ago and afterward, he said a woman came up to him unable to speak. Eventually she hugged him and whispered “Megan changed my life.” She had been a speech therapist for Megan in Searcy, Ark., when Cope preached at the College church at Harding University for seven years. She said to him “I pray often that God will put in my kids something of what Megan had.”

“It’s so hard for us to remember that we’re jars of clay,” Cope said. “We want to pretend that we’re these wonderful vases that have been uniquely made and worth millions of dollars, but the truth is we are broken vessels, and with Megan there was never any doubt. She was mentally handicapped, and then when she got older, physically ill. But to this day, people tell me that she changed their life, which is funny for a little child who couldn’t even speak.”
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Cope said he has spoken many times about what he learned about the Gospel through Megan’s life in that our culture places so much emphasis on external qualities, what he calls accidents of birth. He said society values what one’s IQ is, what they look like in a bikini and how fast they run the 40-yard dash.

“I’ve just tried to imagine ‘What would a culture be like that really values things of the heart, things you’re not just born with but things you’re developing?’” Cope said. “Christian character, what happens when you decide to follow the way of Christ. If culture valued things like compassion, forgiveness, unconditional love, then we wouldn’t have thought of Megan as retarded. We’d think of a lot of us as retarded. But, because we focus on the external things, we think she was the one with the problem.”