Church family hosts 'I love you' parade for beloved member

On April 17 Shawn Cochran wanted to say hi to his church family and friends. Having been couped up for weeks, being kept safe by his parents because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he missed everybody.

Starting at 9 a.m., he and his mom, Cindi Hewlett Cochran, drove past house after house, and Shawn would hold up his “I miss you” sign and wave. His friends waved back from their porches as Shawn sent them kisses and air hugs from a distance. This went on all morning. After a break for lunch, Shawn’s dad, Ricky Cochran, joined the one-car parade and they kept driving into the night, stopping around 8:30 p.m., nearly 12 hours later.

“It made him feel like he was connecting because he was not getting to see anybody,” Cindi said.

Amazed by the gesture, his Palace of Praise church family quickly organized a parade of their own, with permission from Shawn’s parents, and made a Facebook event calling for everyone to meet up and drive past Shawn’s house on Sunday.

“Shawn is involved with a lot of different aspects there and has a very sweet spirit,” said Sierra Henson, who created the event on Facebook and was one of the people Shawn visited. “We were really surprised. We live about 15 minutes outside of Poplar Bluff ... We couldn’t believe he drove all the way out to our house.”

On the following Sunday, those who wanted to participate lined up their cars in the church parking lot and were led out by the Poplar Bluff Police Department, which has made Shawn a reserve officer complete with a uniform and lets him ride with the department in parades.

“The police department has adopted him,” Cindi said. “For them to be able to show up out in the county, that made Shawn’s day.”

She told Shawn a couple of cars were coming. It was a white lie.

Down the 2-mile long, dead-end county road they came. Police in the front, an ice cream truck in the back, and about 75 cars in between.

Many with their own homemade signs.

They leaned out windows and stood through moonroofs, sending air hugs and kisses, signs, shouts, honked horns, blared sirens, and even played a trumpet. They turned around at the end of the dead-end road, waved at each other for the first time in weeks as the cars passed one another like a postgame handshake, and drove by Shawn again as he smiled, standing next to his mailbox and holding up his “I miss you” sign.

“The thing about it is, just about everybody made homemade signs. He loved that. You’d have thought those signs were $1 million,” Cochran said. “They made Shawn’s dream possible, that he could get to say hi to all his friends, his church. We were just beyond ourselves that this happened. We were just shocked.”

Since then, Shawn, who never forgets a name, has watched the video of the parade over and over, spotting who is in each car. He is now busy trying to write thank you cards to everyone involved.

“We hope this event is a testimony to other people that church doesn’t have to be on Sunday morning. It can be anything ... It’s just showing the love of Jesus and Shawn does that better than anyone I know,” Henson said.

Shawn turned 35 on April 1. With the coronavirus having shut down any elaborate birthday plans, Shawn had a simple request. He wanted to go to the church and talk to Jesus.

And so he sat down on the church steps, alone on a Wednesday, an empty building behind him, and celebrated his birthday in prayer.

“I thought, ‘Wow’. How could I deny him,” Cindi said. “I just sat in my car and cried.”