The phone rang just after Jeff Foley’s wife and young daughter left for Christmas in upstate New York on Dec. 22, 2022.

The house was quiet.

“My family’s just left and right before I picked up, I’m thinking, ‘Christmas is going to be lonely, but it is what it is,’” Jeff says. “In a very somber voice, my dermatologist says, ‘Sorry to tell you this, but it’s cancer.’”

“I did the cliche slamming of the steering wheel and the crying. I called my wife sobbing and we had our conversation. Not knowing what else to do, I turned to the Bible and to God literally that night.”

In that moment, Jeff learned something life would reinforce again and again.

You don’t control much. But you do control what you do with it.

The diagnosis traced back to a mole on his back his wife noticed nearly a year earlier. She’d commented on how the mole looked “suspicious” and suggested he have it looked at. But life was busy as they were moving from New York to Florida.

Jeff says he thought nothing of the mole and only got it biopsied when months later, he went to scratch his back against the wall and it started to bleed.

“Unfortunately for a little mole, it had caused a lot of damage,” Jeff says. 

The melanoma had already spread to his lymph nodes. Since then, Jeff has undergone five major surgeries, more than 20 treatments and hundreds of trips to Moffitt Cancer Center. He’s been diagnosed three separate times. Today, the cancer is in his brain and adrenal gland. He is stage 4.

“I had two choices,” he says. “I could either really lean into my relationship with God or walk away from it and be upset and hurt that this was happening. Fortunately, I leaned into it.”

That choice didn’t make life easier. It made it clearer.

“Even on our worst days, there is still joy to be had,” he says. “Joy, just like love, can be a choice.”

That mindset shows up everywhere in Jeff’s life.

He’s been the Communications Manager for Lake County for about a year, a role that keeps him busy informing residents about public safety, infrastructure projects and local government initiatives. His background as a journalist, nearly 15 years in newspapers, freelancing and photography, shapes how he tells those stories.

He still works full time.
Still goes to treatments.
Still coaches his daughter’s softball team.

“I do everything I can to live life,” he says.

Jeff’s approach to adversity isn’t new. Years before cancer entered the picture, he stepped onto an Arena Football League field surrounded by former NFL players, not as a seasoned player, but as a writer who talked his way into a preseason roster spot so he could tell the story from the inside.

That experience became the book War on the Floor, and today, Jeff sees a clear connection.

“Football taught me how to keep showing up when things hurt,” he says. “That mindset matters now more than ever.”

After the last diagnosis, during long, sleepless nights brought on by medication, Jeff started writing again. This time, not about sports, but about faith. Fear. Illness. Divorce. Parenting. The stuff people don’t always want to say out loud.

“I just really felt like I needed to make lemonade out of lemons,” Jeff says. “I needed to use this as an opportunity to help people think about turning their problems over to God and turning to God, period.”

He said one long night, he wrote an entire first draft of a 125-page manuscript.

“It was on my heart to get this out there,” he says.  

What came out of those nights is Faith Over Fear, the first book in an eight-book series. Since then, Jeff has published 11 books total, written in short, easy-to-digest chapters.

“There’s no book in the Bible that tells you exactly how to get through these things so I thought it might be helpful if I shared some real-world experiences of how my family and I have navigated them,” he says. “It can be very lonely dealing with anything that affects us so deeply.”

The response has been humbling.

Almost daily, Jeff hears from readers, some friends and family, some strangers, who say the books helped them return to church, rethink their faith or simply feel less alone.

His books are available for purchase on Amazon. 

“Though strangely enough in cancer,” he says, “it’s really cool to know that God gave me something I can share with people that helps enhance their lives a little bit.”