Reflections at a Funeral

Last night, I attended the funeral for the wife of our senior pastor, Carol Bugh. It was a very moving service and a fitting celebration of a life well lived. It was held in Edman Chapel on the campus of Wheaton College, and the entire main floor was full. The stories of her life and the testimony of her children were incredible. Her death was truly a deep loss for our community.

This was the first funeral where I was struck by the brevity of life. Part of it was because of how young Carol was. She was only 50. Her children are all under 25, including a son who is in 6th grade. We all expect someone that young to have plenty of life yet to live. Part of it was also the fact that I am now married, and I feel a little bit more like an adult then I did at any of the other funerals I have been to. It dawned on me that I didn’t know how much time I had left to be with my wife, to be with my family, or to be with my friends. Life is unexpected, and it goes faster than we know. All life-long relationships end some time. It is a hard thing to think that one day, either Michelle or I will die. It was in our vows. To be married means that one of you will face the loss of a spouse. I know I took the vow a year ago, but I didn’t realize what it meant until this week. Michelle pointed out that it is interesting that we use so many flowers in funerals. Although they are beautiful, they don’t last long. In a few days, most of them will be withered away. They are the image that the Bible uses to show how quickly our lives pass.

Funerals are very self-conscious events. They happen rarely enough and they are sensitive enough that most people are unsure of what to do when they are at one. Maybe it is just because I am young and haven’t been to enough, it seems like most people are unsure of how to act at a funeral, and so they are very self-conscious. Even though we know we are supposed to wear black, many people are still unsure about whether or not their clothes are appropriate, and they feel self-conscious about that. I, for one, never know what to say at funerals, and I think most people don’t either. I suspect that most people don’t know how to act, how to stand, where to look, or how loud to talk. For an event where we are supposed to be thinking about the life of someone else, at least for me, a lot of time is spent thinking about myself.

They are self-conscious events, though, for another reason, and I think this one is an appropriate self-consciousness. Funerals naturally make us think about our own death, as well as our own funeral. As we contempate the legacy of another person, we wonder what kind of legacy we will leave ourselves. As long as we don’t get too obsessed with this, I think it an appropriate reflection that we need to go through every now and then. We need to ask ourselves, “What will my funeral say about my life?”

Carol’s funeral said that she lived a good kind of life, full of meaning, love, and frienships. She invested in people. She learned. She trained up a godly family. She drew people to Christ. She supported the church. She prayed. She laughed and played and savored life. She did it right. It was obvious to everyone there that this was a life we should emmulate. I couldn’t help but hope that my life would turn out so well. I have been thinking about what I need to do now in order to become the kind of person who ends life well, whose life is a testimony to the goodness and glory of God.

This morning, I met with my boss, who is also a friend and a long-time mentor to me. He told me that the funeral made him think about how he was living his own life. He pointed out that Carol was not an actvity-driven person. She was not highly involved in every program of the church. She did not fill her life up with lots of things to do just to do them. But, she did fill her life with relationships. Hers was a relationship-based life, not an activity based life. Story after story from friends and family showed that what drove Carol were people, connections and relationships were the heart of her existence.

So many of us spend our days doing things. We are focused on tasks. We are driven by our projects, our meetings, and our activities. We are shaped and defined by the things we are officially involved in. We get connected to ministries at church so that we can officially be “doing ministry.” We see our purpose in the things we accomplish. But, what if our lives were driven by relationships? What if loving people defined what we did? What if our relationships were not defined by what we were involved in, but what we were involved in flowed out of our relationships? I am so task-driven and project-focused some times. I define my world by what needs to be done and what I am responsible for. What if I defined my world by who I loved? Seriously.

I want to live in such a way that at my funeral, there will be stories, not of what I did in life, but of my friendships, my family-life, and my relationship with God.