Over the years I have preached many funerals for friends and
family. None stands out more in my
memory than the funeral I preached for my niece. By the time she ended her long battle with
breast cancer she was in her fifties.
I still remember her innocent blue eyes as a child. I watched her grow through childhood and into
her teen years. When she was a young
adult, she was lured down painful and destructive paths refusing to heed the
warnings of those who loved her. I prayed for her, along with others and she
fell deeper into addiction to drugs and alcohol. She gave her first born up for
adoption and eventually served a sentence in prison.
But somewhere along the way, whether in prison or afterward,
she came to faith in Jesus Christ. Just as He said to the woman who pressed
through the crowd and touched the hem of His garment, Jesus said to her,
“Daughter, your faith has made you whole.”
In the last decade of her life, I saw her reunited with her
first-born whom she gave up in her youth. She was reconciled with her family
who surrounded her with love. God brought
a good man into her life who, like herself, was a recovering alcoholic.
She often shared with me her testimony of faith and what God
had done in her life. She still wasn’t
perfect. She still had issues. But she was different. God was healing her on
the inside.
The week before she died, we visited. Family and friends gathered around her,
comforting her, praying for her and loving her.
On Wednesday of that week, she drew her last breath.
Once again, I thought of her as that innocent blue-eyed girl
I first knew. It reminded me of Jesus’ visit to the home of a mother and father
whose twelve-year-old daughter had died.
The house was surrounded by people who were weeping. But Jesus entered
the child’s bedroom with her parents and spoke these gentle words to her. “Little girl, I say to you, get up!” She
immediately breathed, opened her eyes and got up.
This is the faith we believe as followers of Christ. We make mistakes. We may wander far from God. We may cause pain to ourselves and
others. But He seeks us out. He never lets us go. He reconciles, redeems and, in the day of our
death, He raises us up!
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