Recently I read the following quotation. “Imitation is the highest compliment you can pay another person.”  Well today’s program is amount someone I want to imitate:  Susan Cook.  I want to imitate her attitude and the choices she makes,  but not her circumstances.  Susan is an inspiration to all who know her.  I met her 11 years ago because she was seated at my mother’s dining table in Thurston Woods, a nursing home.

Susan always has a smile, a positive attitude, and some inspiring thoughts to share.  She is an interested and interesting person—always with several worthwhile projects going.  She organizes efforts to care for troops in Iraq, arranges simple bouquets and delivers them to individual rooms at the nursing home, visits other residents who are going through an especially difficult time, raises money for the CROP walk,–and the list goes on and on.

Susan is in her late sixties.  She has MS, and came to live at the nursing home 16 years ago when she could no longer walk because of a brain aneurysm.  Susan is paralyzed from the waist down and uses a motorized wheel chair to go wherever she wants to go.  The last time I talked to her, she was spending all but 2 hours a day in bed. Yet she greets everyone with a smile and ends up blessing the visitor.

I want to be like Susan, and choose to be positive and do positive things no matter what challenging circumstances I encounter.