We Only Have Flowers After a Funeral.

We only have flowers after a funeral. A woman in my church lost her sister shortly after Kim and I moved here. We got two vases of flowers from that funeral. Today, I officiated my first funeral. The family gave us two baskets of flowers and two centerpieces that had flowers in them. We only have flowers after a funeral.

I never thought doing a funeral would be that hard. Jerry was well loved by the entire community. He had served in the town police force, the county police force, and was chief of police in the next town over from mine. Everyone knew this guy. Our sanctuary was packed. People even filled the extra chairs that were put up in the back.

I had a nice service put together. I wasn’t entirely sure how it would work out, this being my first service and all. The family had asked me to speak on Isaiah 40:30-31 and Isaiah 30:20-21. I felt they were fitting passages, even though I didn’t really know Jerry all that well. I knew that his life had been difficult. He suffered from alcoholism as a young man. His son died in a car accident at the age of 19. He had MS and had been confined to a wheelchair for the last five years because of it. Even though I thought the passages fitting, I had a difficult time putting together a message. How do I take passages and apply them to the life of a man I had only known for a short time? How do I honor his memory when my own memories of him are so brief? How do I say something that will comfort a family I’ve only known since October?

I ended up latching on to the fact that Jerry saw himself primarily as a child of God. Jerry knew his place was in the church. If you weren’t in church, he was the guy who wanted to know why and what you were doing that was more important. I even made the message slightly evangelistic, inviting others to see themselves as children of God. I don’t know if my words made it through the grief.

The service was hard to do. It brought up too many fresh memories of saying goodbye to my own grandpa. My heart broke as I watched Jerry’s grandchildren try to deal with the death of their grandpa. My voice broke a few times. In spite of that, the family was very appreciative. They told me I did a good job. That was nice.

I guess that my takeaway from this is that God really will give me strength. I’ve preached that enough times now that it almost borders on cliche. Today I got to feel it for myself. God gave me the strength to deliver words of comfort to a grieving family. It felt nice. Plus, now we have flowers for our dining room. That doesn’t really happen much. In fact it's kind of sad, because we only have flowers after a funeral.