Cheryl was born into a poor family in Centralia, Illinois on October 20, 1956. She was the oldest of what would eventually be a family of 12 children. Her mother died when she was 12 and she became something of a surrogate mother to her siblings. This is where she developed her life-long love of children.

Thanks to the kind, generous, and godly leadership of people in a neighborhood church, Cheryl went on Asbury College where she met her husband Steve. They loved each other and he proposed in January of 1976. They married May 29 ^th of that year.

Cheryl and Steve lived in a number of places out west—in Arizona Mesa, Tempe, Tucson, Patagonia and in San Diego, California for one brief year. Cheryl used her strong vocal talents in ministry in many churches and exercised her great love of children everywhere. While in Tucson she earned a degree as an executive secretary and served in a number of companies with her final service at Intel in Chandler, Arizona.

Cheryl's life was marked with great health struggles beginning just a year and a half into her marriage battling Hodgkin's disease. Little did she know at that time that the life-saving treatment of radiation would, 41 years later, cause or contribute to all the lung, heart, breast cancer, and kidney failures that would eventually take her life.

"So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal."

2Cor 4:16-18