My Dad's brother

Below is my homily from my uncle's funeral. I have taken out some details to protect their identity.I really don't know what else to say other than, it took a lot more out of me than I expected and I truly felt I was "carried along".

Mrs. CC and I are headed out tomorrow morning for our fifteenth aniversary weeekend extravagnza. Will retyrn to post Tuesday.

Mesage:
To some of us, he was known as “Dickie”. Some of us called him L.R. Some called him “Rich”, some called him “Pop”, some called him “Dick”, some called him “Brother. Some called him “boss” and he called some of you “boss”. My Dad used to call him “Junebug” or “Jumpin’ Junie from Junee High”. I called him Uncle Dick. But for most of us here, we simply called him “friend”. However he was known to you, you have come here this morning because of who Dick was: a man of great character and integrity; a man of fairness and equity and a man who was as competitive as anyone I have ever known. Most of you know that golf was one of Dick’s great passions. When he stepped up to the first tee during a round of golf, you could count on one thing: Dick would leave nothing in the bag, as it were. The same could be said about the way in which he lived his life: he left nothing in the bag. May we all come to the end of our time with such resolve.

So we come together this morning with Jane and Mark and the family, more out of our understanding that gatherings like this are for the living, …And,…Because we wish to give witness to the one whose words and promises are the ground of the life we believe Dick now knows, and the life we hope for.

Like most of us here this morning, Dick experienced life’s peaks and valleys. He was shaped by his losses and his mistakes as much as his successes. I believe that one of the things that made him most proud was his fifty-one year marriage to my Aunt Jane. He was proud of Mark and Cathy and their two daughters, Abby and Lilly, Dick and Jane’s granddaughters. He was proud of his accomplishments both personal and as a part of a team, most notably, his contribution to the 1953 basketball team that went all the way to the semi-state and whose remaining members will serve as pall bearers today. Such loyalty among is rarely found in today’s world.

Dick exemplified what most of us call a self-made man. His many years of hard work in the insurance business and as a builder and entrepreneur, and like most men from his generation, brought him much success and a feeling of great personal satisfaction. Dick also knew what it was like in the valleys of life.

I think it’s safe to say that Dick may have reached his lowest point on December 2, 1979 when Dick and Jane’s twenty-one year old daughter Pam was tragically killed in an automobile accident. While it may be true that a parent may never recover from the loss of a child, Dick and Jane were sustained during their time of loss by many of you here today.

Dick fought his share of personal battles, too. There’s a quote that says: “If at first you don’t succeed, well then, you’re running about average.” Those words rang true for Dick. But in true Dick fashion, he’d pull himself up by his proverbial bootstraps and take another run at beating his worthy opponent. In the end, the victory was his. In the later years of his life, he lived with a freedom and a peace that I believe he would want for all of us here today and he would tell us that it came by the grace of God.

Through these peaks and valleys of life, Dick got right with God. He had a spiritual awakening and found that, only by the grace of God, an inner peace- the peace that passes all understanding. My friends, today Dick is at peace.

BUT WHAT ABOUT US WHO ARE STILL ON A JOURNEY? Are there promises for us? Yes, there are. We can be assured that we too will be led to victory if we trust fully in Christ and in him alone. Death may seem to hide his face temporarily, but his promise is to be with us always, even to the end of the world.

Corrie Ten Boom, who suffered horribly in the Nazi concentration camps and lost her sister and family to them, said, "When a train goes through a tunnel and it gets dark, you don't throw away your ticket and jump off. You sit still and trust the engineer." Our lives have an engineer. We can trust Him who said, "Peace I leave with you. My peace I give unto you; let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid."

You and I can find that the same faith which led my Uncle Dick home can also bring comfort to us.

Someone has observed that life is like an oriental decorative rug—it has two sides. One side—the underside— is full of dark mangles, threads that make no sense to us, full of knots with no pattern to its reasons why. But when you look at the rug from the top side, you see the beautiful patterns, designer work- the full picture. The way we see life, so often, is from the underside, full of confusion, knotted lives, no patterns to why things happen the way they do…but God, sees life from the top side. He sees the full picture.


If we could open up Heaven just for a few minutes, we would all stand in awe of the beauty, the happiness, the joy, the excitement of it all. This is what I believe. If I could ask Uncle Dick, what you want to tell your family, I believe it might be something like this:

1. Tell them, I LOVE THEM with all my heart
2. I want to see them again.
3. Please tell them about God and His saving grace.
4. Remind them where I found my peace- through God- and that peace can be found by all of us.

This is the gospel of Jesus Christ; this is the promise of God. Thanks be to God. AMEN.