You may recall that she and I worked together for the last nine and a half years, and that she served as one of the most respected leaders in our San Francisco office and the eight western states. She was diagnosed with cancer about two and half years ago, and eventually decided to give up her fight for life here and fight for life hereafter. She passed on April 7th.
I was asked by her husband to speak at the memorial service, which I of course considered an honor. So I prepared the following remarks and delivered to them to a packed house with standing-room only (clear evidence of her impact upon so many). (I was not the only one to speak, but was specifically asked to do so given the nature of her relationship to Jesus and her husband's knowledge of mine. In fact, he specifically asked that I address the nature of suffering and why this happens to good people.) Here's what I said:
______ called me last week and asked if I, as a representative of Hines, would be willing to give a few remarks about ______. I didn’t have to think twice about saying “yes”.
Many of you know that ______ worked for Hines for the last nine (9) and a half (½) years. And in fact, her ten (10) year anniversary with the firm is October 30th. We have a tradition in our family of Hines, and we do genuinely refer to those of us that work at Hines as “family”, we have a tradition of giving family members gifts when they hit milestone hurdles, like ten (10) years. For ______, her gift is a set of binoculars. In fact ______, I have ______’s ten year anniversary gift here for you and would like to give it to you today, after the service, on behalf of Hines.
From a distance, this may seem like an odd gift, binoculars. But it actually has profound significance. Binoculars help us see things from afar with more clarity. And while we would all agree, I’m sure, that ______’s life had the rarest of clarity, like a perfectly cut and priceless diamond, there were some things toward the end of her life that seem foggy, blurry, confusing. Things like, “Why, why did ______, of all people – one of the nicest and kindest of spirit to have ever walked this earth, have to suffer so?” Things like, “It’s just not fair, it’s just not right.”
I’m not sure there are any lenses out there powerful enough to bring total focus and understanding to these things. There is One, God Himself, but even He has said that “The secret things belong to the Lord our God,” (Deuteronomy 29:29a).
I, like you, have tried to unpack these “secret things” and make sense of ______’s life and suffering. But it’s still unclear. There are a few things, however, that are very clear to me. ______ always had this remarkable gift of thinking and giving outside of herself. Aside from being nice and kind, which hardly even begin to describe the depth of her soul, she was always so tender, so gentle, so compassionate, so patient, so faithful, and so full of grace and love. And these things that define the essence of who ______ is did not diminish, but were even bigger and brighter toward the end of her life. And it was that constitution and perseverance, her drive and fight to never give up, and to never lose hope, and most of all to remain true to who you are even through the greatest pains of life, those serve as the best gifts she could have ever given us.
Inside this box contains the binoculars, and with them is the following inscription on a card, and I quote,
“Seeing clearly begins not in the eye, but in the mind.
And those who have vision see more than what is, they also see what can be.”
I, we, still have many unanswered questions, the “secret things” if you will. But because of ______’s life perhaps one thing that seems to be a little clearer than before is that we can now see what can be. Look around you. I’m sure this is only a fraction of the people that God used ______ to bring grace to. And without her life, and sadly even perhaps her passing, we would not be who we are today.
“______, we love you, we always will, and we thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping us to see what can be.”
I've been to more than my fair share of these mournful services, but this one was also uplifting, and so eternal. The visual I cannot shake from my mind was seeing her husband over my left shoulder, weeping with shaking body at the loss of the love of his life. Just a few weeks earlier he also lost his mother. This is a heartache I cannot fathom, nor have I ever in my life.
Afterward, when everyone started to leave the reception that followed, I took a long walk among the tombs in the cemetery and did what Solomon suggested in Ecclesiastes 7:2 - "
It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, because that is the end of every man and the living takes it to heart." I took the end to heart that day, as I'm sure all did who were in attendance. And I also remembered that faith is all I have in this life, because it "
... is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) That day I saw what can be.
Yesterday Victoria sent our previous pastor from Southern California (who first opened our eyes to truth as we never knew) the following e-mail update on our family. While simple, I thought her closing statement was profound, so I post the e-mail content here to help remind my family and me that the hour and minute hands on our clock here are ticking, but there are no hands on the clock of eternity.
