The Impact Of One Life

I'm not very good at funerals or at hospitals.

Which isn't a very good thing, considering I'm a minister.

The hospital thing, I guess, stems from when I had two brain surgeries for benign tumors when I was 23. I had to spend a week in the hospital the first time, five days the second time. Hospitals are good places to be sure - I just get this feeling when I get near one that I'm heading back in there to have something done to me.

One hospital experience to share - after my first surgery, I was in the I.C.U. and I had an IV drip of dylantin, a medicine to keep seizures at bay. Dylantin in the pill form was not painful, but the IV drip sure was, it felt like my arm was on fire. Well, I made a mistake. I asked the nurse if there was any way she could figure out how to lessen the pain. She decided to add saline solution to the dylantin IV bag, making it diluted and not as painful. The problem is that it didn't make it less painful, it just made it twice as long. When the IV bag was finally gone, and after my screaming had subsided, I looked down at my arms, and my veins had turned a blackish color. Not a fun experience.

Anyway, I also have a thing about funerals. This probably stems from the past as well, my mother died from lymphoma when I was eighteen. I had the unusual experience of officiating a funeral for my real father's wife, who he married after my parents got a divorce. I also had a very strange encounter playing music at a funeral in Arizona - I won't elaborate too much, but a funeral home that was actually a renovated convenience store, a strange masonic funeral ceremony, an extremely "out of it" widow who encouraged me to preach to her dog as well to help him get over his owner's death were all involved.

Today, I went to a funeral. I was late, so I slipped in the back and sat in the last pew. I came with trepidation, but I wanted to be there as a support and encouragement to the family. I'm glad I went. I heard story after story of how this person who had died had impacted lives, touched hearts, and it encouraged me. I know I'm only in my mid thirties, but I think about death a lot. Maybe it's because I've stared it in the face with my surgeries, or that I've experienced a loss of someone close. I always wonder during these "death thoughts" what my funeral would be like if I died right now. What would people say? Who would come? Who have I had an influence on? It reminds me of a great song called "When All Is Said And Done" by Geoff Moore and the Distance:

When the music fades into the past
When my days of life are through
What will be remembered of where I've come
When all is said and done

Will they say I loved my family
That I was a faithful friend
That I lived to tell of God's own Son
When all is said and done

How I long to see the hour
When I would hear that trumpet sound
Rise to see my Savior's face
See Him smile and say "Well done."

You can forget my name and the songs I've sung
Every rhyme and every tune
But remember the truth of Jesus' love
When all is said and done
When all is said and done

That is what I want to have happen.