A Life Well Lived-My Grandpa's funeral sermon I got to share at his funeral last week.

My Aunt Noami undertook a great project recently. She assembled a collection of stories and memories about grandpa and grandma. Children, grandkids, cousins, uncles and aunts, and great grandchildren separated by great distances and seasons of life. She pulled in a collected work from people scattered all over the nation. It is quite the accomplishment. With family everywhere at great distances from each other and our grandparents it is amazing that the one grandchild who didn’t turn in their story lives the closest to them, me. Well, Aunt Naomi, here it is.

At Christmas this year we sat down as a family and read some of the stories. We passed around the book reading our stories as Grandpa nodded off time to time and Grandma wiped away her tears. It was there that I noticed something that was later confirmed to me a few weeks later when I sat in Denver in the living room of my Uncle John and Aunt Sheri with my cousins Jason and Marlow. The memories that I have come to cherish about grandpa and grandma were not unique to me, they were shared. All my family remembers private conversations about grandpa keeping his chair and falling asleep. We remember the clock in the living room, the one-piece jumpsuits, the squirrel hunting and feeds, the grandchildren vacations, and prayers around the dinner table before grandpa eventually wipes his plate completely clean with that one last piece of bread. We all remember the love, the acceptance, the forgiveness, the hugs and, at least for me, sometimes awkward kisses on the lips. As I listened to the stories and contemplated all the things that I received that I thought were unique to me I was surprised that I was not even the slightest bit jealous. To receive such an indiscriminant love does not make one envious, it makes one proud. Proud to have received something so special, so pure, that can only come from a truly unique person. It actually makes me feel sad for the one who has not known that kind of love.

A couple of years ago I performed a wedding for a young family. Several weeks after the wedding the father-in-law passed away and the husband promptly left his family. The marriage was to appease a dying man not for love and commitment. I met with the young man in Carthage to listen to his heart and plead the case of his family. He didn’t want to change the choice that he had made and left his wife and daughter. It broke my heart. After our appointment I decided to swing by grandpa and grandma’s house as I was already in Carthage. It didn’t take long for grandpa to pick up on my heart-ache and I told him the story. Up to this point I had respected grandpa as a grandparent, as a man, father, husband, and a good church-going Christian, but I learned to respect grandpa in a different way that day. He grabbed his Bible and said, “Josh let me share with you what lifts my spirits.” He opened the Bible and began to share one of his favorite passages with me. I had prayed with grandpa before, heard him read the devotionals at night, gone to church with him, helped him even mow the church grounds, but it was then that I saw my grandpa’s personal relationship with Jesus more clearly than I had ever seen it before. Ironically he opened his Bible to Hebrews 11, the chapter about the champions of faith. That chapter holds the stories of people who overcame great adversity and held true to right living. Great men like Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Moses are commended for their greatest achievement: they have become more like God. Grandpa believed in something that I cannot prove to you today. He believed that there is something greater than us and someplace greater than this place, and I believe he is there right now. I believe not because he was simply a good man who did good things, I believe because he had real and personal faith in Jesus. My grandpa too is a champion of faith and his greatest achievement is that he had become always increasingly like God. He loved so indiscriminately, had so much forgiveness, and we all share such equally great memories because that is a reflection of Jesus, grandpa’s Lord and Savior. I believe that I speak on behalf of the family when I say that we will miss him and we are honored to have known him and had him know us. My grandpa was truly a great man whose story cannot fit into an obituary or funeral sermon. But maybe, with the Lord’s help, his story lives on in us as I strive to be like him and who he chose to be like, Jesus.

Let me finish with the verse that my grandpa gave to encourage me that lonely day, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Thank you.