Wednesday Night Memorial

Our Wednesday Bible service last night was a memorial service for Vickie Ericksen who passed away suddenly October 31 at the age of 49. Vickie and her family had just moved from Denbigh to Bowling Green, KY, and her funeral will be there on Saturday. Vickie was such a special part of our church, especially to our children, that we thought we needed a time to remember and honor her.

I thought the memorial service went wonderfully. The songs were meaningful and helped point us to both God's comfort and Vickie's victory in Jesus-- singing “Arms of Love” with the words on the screen superimposed over pictures of Vickie teaching our children was powerful. Both Dan and Bob did great jobs with their pastoral prayers. And Roger reading all of those notes from our children was touching. But the largest part (about 30 minutes) of the service was reserved for people to share personal memories of Vickie. And what great stories they were! I wish Greg, Jasen and Jessika could have been here, but we are taking the video of the service to them Saturday.

After the service, I had an idea (usually a dangerous proposition). The elders have been talking for some time about re-evaluating our use of Wednesday nights that can augment our Bible Study time. They aren’t moving toward a single idea; the problem is that they have lots of ideas— Ministry Night, Prayer Meeting, Peak-of-the-Week, etc. At some point, they will talk with each of the Body Life Groups to get yet more ideas.

So here’s my idea. Let’s do what we did last night every week— make Wednesday night a memorial service for people who are still with us. The idea is to take one or two people (or families) each week to honor. We can sing, read scriptures, pray (maybe have a sermonette just so I earn my keep), and then we "eulogize" and say all kinds of nice things about the person or people of the week who are very much alive and sitting there with us. Where is it written that we need to wait until someone is dead until we are free to express our love, admiration and appreciation for them? What hit me last night as I as telling my Vickie stories was, “So why didn’t I tell Vickie that I thought she was a wonderful, whacky and wise sister while she was still around?”

Most of aren’t very good about saying nice and complimentary things about people (Fred White could give us all lessons-- he is good at it). But most of us are even worse at hearing nice things about ourselves from others. I think we need more practice at both of these.