Yesterday I had to go to a funeral.
She was a vibrant young woman of just 32 years. The type of person that just made you say "wow" after meeting. You wanted to be near her. Folks hung on her words. Fun. Classy. A positive influence wherever she went.
Modern medicine couldn't save her though and the First Baptist Church of Podunk was filled to the rafters with family, distant relatives, friends, coworkers and damned near the whole county. As it should have been. Podunk is smack in the middle of gnat country here in the south: it was hot and it was buggy, even inside the church.
So there we were, sweating and swatting and swaying uncomfortably on our feet because it was standing room only in the back while, just to make things worse, were three ministers who spent more time talking about some dude named Jesus than they did about the life of the beautiful person we were there to mourn.
The phrase 'ad nauseum' applies here. We wanted stories about her youth. We wanted anecdotes from friends. We wanted remembrances from her family. We wanted to grieve and mourn and cry and feel just a bit better, if not a bit melancholy, when it was all through. Instead it was Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.
"I feel it would be an absolute SIN if everyone here today has not accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior," they preached and, in my opinion, missed the point entirely. Which is a damned shame. Bad enough we just lost a loved one.
Which made me think that perhaps we shouldn't leave the preaching up to the preacher. Folks make their own wedding vows. All of us have considered our epitaphs at one point or another (I'm going with "I'm With Stupid.") So why not write our own service script? Not just a eulogy but the whole entire service? I think I'm going to open mine with a joke - you know, that one about a bar.
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