Janet Ray Memorial Series: On A Life Spent

My Grandma was born as the second oldest of 7 kids on a farm in Springfield, Ohio. She was a child of the depression and World War II. She worked hard on the farm and helped out a lot with her 5 younger siblings. She was a good student and got a scholarship to nursing school and did well there. She got married and had 3 kids really quick and stayed home to raise them. Her husband was not good to her and as much as she hated divorce, she realized that it was what was healthiest for her and her kids who were all in high school at the time. High School kids aren’t cheap and college was looming, though back then it wasn’t as much of an expectation for parents to pay for college. She worked a lot the hospital.

I don’t want this to sound bad, but my point is not that my Grandma had any extraordinary circumstances. She had a pretty normal life. But she lived this normal life of hers in a way that when she died we sobbed tears of sorrow and celebration, in a way that during her calling hours, I stood for 5 hours in the line of grandkids and greeted a steady stream of people who had been touched by grandma in such a way that  they wanted to come pay their respects. During her funeral, we reveled and rejoiced in her life. It was a Tuesday afternoon and the service was full of people coming to celebrate her life. The gospel was preached and glorious hymns were sung.

My Grandpa died last May and the experience was very different. I have massive respect for my grandpa. He came from a really tough background. He was orphaned at a young age, raised by an aunt that struggled to raise him, his sisters and her own kids. He joined the navy and did that for a while, then worked for Boeing. He had a pool that he kept up so that we could swim in it all summer long. He gave my dad good examples of both what to do and what not to do. He improved his situation a lot and the foundation he set for my dad was solid and my dad jumped off of that to give me the incredible foundation I have.

However, for the last 25 years of his life he essentially quit living. Mowed his lawn, he waxed his car, and he sat at the kitchen table, looking out the window smoking or in his chair watching the news. Then he moved to Florida and golfed a little the first few years, and quit doing much of anything. He literally watched TV 6-9 hours a day. He ate poorly and smoked a lot. He spent the last year or so in a nursing home getting his diaper changed and trying to figure out if it was morning or night.

When he passed away the calling hours were brief, mostly people from my parents church coming to support us or my Dad’s coworkers. Not a lot of people came to the funeral, not a lot of people knew him.

We are all given a life to spend. There is no way to not spend your life. It is being spent now – the only thing we can control is how it is spent. My grandma spent her life serving and loving God and other people. She worked tireless as a nurse, loving her patients and her coworkers well. She loved her church deeply and served in their inner city outreach and women’s bible studies. Grandma’s spiritual gifts were encouragement and intercession. She had a letter writing ministry that had more effects than any of us know. She endlessly wrote letters of encouragement to whoever God placed on her heart. Every time my Uncle Mike (her son-in-law’s sister’s husband) was overseas with the Army she sent letters and cookies to him and his men. When I was in China she spent $20 to ship a box of her famous homemade party mix from North Hampton, Ohio all the way to Shanghai.

Grandma walking like a champ on a trip to DC after her knee replacement.

Grandma dealt with her family in truth and love. She loved us all so deeply, it’s hard to describe. But she was also very honest with us. She didn’t always tell us what we wanted to hear, she just gave us advice that seemed to me to be almost alway spot on. We listened to her because we knew how much she loved us, because we knew how much fun she was and how much she wanted our best. And even when we didn’t listen to her and our decisions made things hard for us, she was patiently right there with us through the consequences. It wasn’t easy. It’s hard to see people you love do things that hurt them because it hurts you. But no matter what we did, she was there with truth and love.

I was only there for the last 3rd of her life. I am not doing justice to all the ways she served and loved people. She didn’t have a lot, she will not go down in history, but she spent her life so that it touched hundreds, if not thousands of people.

We can either spend or hoard out lives. The thing with hoarding is that it is really just spending it on yourself. You can spend your life for your comfort, for your money and financial security and things, cars, gadgets, you can spend it on hotter, cooler companions. All of these things are spending your life on yourself.

The goal is of course not to have a ballin’ funeral, though that is a perk. The point is your funeral will reflect what you spent your life on.

I’m not making this up. This isn’t my idea!  Jesus said exactly this in Mark 8:35

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s sake will save it.”

This means that the point of life is to lose it. Your deepest joy will be in spending it for Jesus. This is not going to be on any commercials during football games. Literally everyone else will say that your deepest joy will be in stuff, career success, sex, comfort and financial security. None of these things are bad, they are just not the source of True Joy.

My grandma spent her life Jesus’ sake and the gospel’s sake. She loved her family by pointing us to Christ, True Joy. She loved her friends by encouraging them and pointing them to Christ. She loved on people and sent all those countless letters because that is the love of Jesus. How are you spending your life? What would people say about you? Are you giving yourself to something bigger than yourself?

~ by jfoor on January 17, 2012.