Prayer list prompts woman to donate kidney to stranger
Published: September 27, 2005
Jacqueline Lackney didn’t know Jude Cooper, but she noticed the woman’s name on the Glad Tidings Tabernacle bulletin prayer list.
Something drew Lackney to the Flushing woman’s aid. Now, she is going to give Cooper a kidney.
“One day in service, I felt God say to me to go” to Cooper’s parents, said Lackney, 44, a custodial employee at Kettering University.
Cooper’s parents told Lackney that their daughter, weak from being on dialysis four times a day, badly needed a transplant. Lackney found she had the same blood type (A-positive) as Cooper, 45.
“I said, `OK, I want to be tested,’” said Lackney of Genesee County’s Flint Township.
The women found they were perfect matches, and the transplant is set for Oct. 4.
Cooper is a commercial photographer who was forced to quit as manager of a local photo store in 1993 because of diabetes and other ailments. She initially was cautious about the offer. Earlier, a friend had offered a kidney but backed out.
“To be honest, at first I was flabbergasted that she would even want to give me a kidney because I was a stranger,” said Cooper, a diabetic since age 22. “We discussed it — my family and I — we wanted it to be her decision.”
Church member Debbie McManus of Mundy Township isn’t surprised by Lackney’s offer.
“I think she is a God-oriented person,” McManus said. “God is directing her on ways of doing this.”
Lackney, who has been regularly attending Glad Tidings Tabernacle since January 2003, said she wanted to give something back to the people who had helped her family through a couple of crises with cancer.
In April, her son, Brandon, now 16, had a mass on his brain first thought to be a tumor. She immediately called people in the church, asking for their prayers.
The mass turned out to be an abscess and was removed.
“I thought it doesn’t make any difference who it is, they are all my family here,” she said of the church.
Cooper’s mother, Patricia Cooper Campbell, is impressed by Lackney’s willingness to have the transplant.
“If she backs out on the last day, I will understand because I know what she is going through,” said Cooper Campbell, 68, whose late first husband had a transplant.
“It’s not about money because you can’t put a price on what Jackie is doing. It’s got to be from the love of God.”
Church members are planning a fund-raiser for Lackney to help her with the loss of income while she recovers from the kidney removal. The recovery normally takes six to eight weeks.
“God has just been awesome through all this,” Lackney said. “And this church has been awesome for taking me in and loving me.”
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