For my whole life, a big part of my identity has been the very special blessing of being the youngest of four living generations of Hutcherson/Moore/Barrett/Horton women. My great-grandmother, Ina Rea Moore, was one of the strongest women I know.
She was fiercely loyal to her family, and more importantly to her Lord. She’s been a prayer warrior, someone who has never been afraid to tell me that she loves me or is proud of me. She was married for 55 years before Granddaddy passed away.
She moved to Corpus Christi when she was 80 years old to be closer to my grandparents and the rest of our family. That’s a big adjustment, but she met the challenge head on, joining the “joy choir” here and making friends so quickly that we had to use the church hall to host her 95th birthday party.
Grandmother loved to travel, and she’s always been great at knowing how to laugh. One of my favorite ways to spend time with Grandmother was when she was with her baby sister, Aunt Bea. They could giggle like school girls, and it’s the most wonderful sound in the world!
Grandmother and I talked on the phone regularly. I don’t remember a time that I called that she didn’t pick up the phone and know exactly who was calling. I never had to tell her. She was just that good. She was strong and stubborn and wonderful. My Grandmother liked to dress up. She got up every morning and found a clean, pressed skirt and a blouse with buttons. She insisted on making her own bed each morning – even after her stroke last summer! Oh! And, she made honeyballs every Christmas for my mom and my uncles, dozens of them wrapped up and placed under the tree – because that’s what they wanted!
Grandmother loved us all – faithfully. She supported our mission trips, remembered our birthdays, and shopped for us each Christmas. In face, about a week after she went into the hospital, I spoke with her over the phone. She joked that she was glad the hospital had QVC so she could still do her Christmas shopping!
A great-grandmother sounds like a distant relative, doesn’t it? Not this one. She is a piece of our hearts, and permanent part of who we are. I miss her terribly. I cried when I heard she was gone, but nothing prepared me for walking into her room and seeing her things just as she left them and knowing she wouldn’t be coming back to them – or to us. I sat in her chair to think the night we got here, to pray, and figure out what she would want me to say to you today. I knew two things for sure.
One, this is a time to honor and celebrate her life. She wouldn’t have wanted us to be too sad or cry too long. And, two, this is a time to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ who she served so faithfully with all of her life.
Grandmother told my dad a few years ago when he asked her about heaven that heaven was more real to her than earth sometimes because so many of her family and dear friends were already there I thought that was an interesting statement at the time, but I don’t think I truly understood it until this week, until Grandmother went there, to be with our Lord, to reunite with her family, and suddenly, my own longing to be there grew and my concept of the reality of a life beyond this world became more concrete.
When he heard about Grandmother’s passing, a close friend reminded me of I Thessalonians 4:13-18, which says:
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord Therefore comfort one another with these words.
I took my Bible and my journal with me into Grandmother’s room the night we got here. As I read over these words of hope sitting in Grandmother’s chair that night, I began to look around me. There was her walker, her medicine bottles, her magnifying glass sitting beside her Bible. That’s when it hit me.
Grandmother doesn’t need any of those things anymore. She is more alive this morning than she has ever been, and she is in the presence of the living Word of God. If there is anything that I think Grandmother would want me to tell you this morning, that’s it. That all of the things that she lived for, that the legacy of faith that she passed on to each of us is real, it’s truth, and it’s more glorious than we can imagine!
I Corinthians 13:12 says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.”
Today isn’t the end of our tears, I know that. I will miss her and we will all feel the loss of her presence here on earth, but I know that those tears are not really for her but for me. I cannot be sorry for her, for where she is now, for all that she no longer needs here.
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