I want to thank you all for coming. Kay, Andrew and I are truly blessed to have so many caring family and friends.
It’s impossible to say everything I want to say about Kay. She was a loving mother, daughter, sister, friend, coworker and wife. She loved her family and friends.
When we got married it is an understatement to say I was not as spiritually grounded as she was. I thought I was. But I soon found out the she was in the pros. And I had apparently been stuck in the developmental leagues for many years, because I certainly didn’t have the skills she had.
She wanted to find a church home right away, and to me it was a matter of much less urgency, frankly. So she guided me, shepherded me, sometimes gently and sometimes needing the staff, visiting many churches in the area. And then one Sunday morning we came to Providence Baptist Church.
I parked and we got out and I remember saying that the place looked like a hotel, and that if there was a cult inside, they weren’t doing a very good job of disguising it. I REALLY thought attending even one service in this church was something that I DID NOT want to do. But we attended the service, and I escaped successfully. The next week we didn’t discuss where we were going to attend church, we just got in the car on Sunday morning and started driving. And she wanted to GO BACK to Providence. And I explained that I was from a small town, and grew up in a comparatively small Methodist church, and knew for sure that I didn’t want to go to Providence again, and potentially be asked to drink anything that looked like Kool-Aid, punch or juice. But she asked me to come for one month, and then we would reconsider. Being a reasonable man I agreed to her bargain. And during the next two services I started looking for all the reasons why we could mark Providence off the list. By the end of the month, all I could really come up with was, it’s too big. But the last week, we were spoken to by members who made us feel like we were welcome, and that made me less apprehensive to come back. It took me a while, but Kay led me to the point where I agreed to join Providence. But to join, I had to be baptized by full immersion. By David Horner (and by the way, he wears fishing waders under the robe).
I also had to give my testimony. And I remember being uncomfortable about it, but I knew it was the right thing to do, and I did it one Sunday night. And Kay told me how proud she was of me. But SHE was the real reason that it happened. She did me the greatest service anyone could do.
A few months later Kay and Dottie Haynes signed Bob and me up for Johnny Evans and Charles George’s Monday Night Bible Study, and then told us what time we needed to be at church. Kay and I had heard Johnny speak here, and she knew I needed to hear more of what he had to say. So she took the initiative and signed me up. That was 10 years ago and now Bob has been a huddle leader for 8 years I guess. And I have been blessed by her foresight and leadership in helping me find God through that ministry over that same time.
So she really was instrumental in my spiritual well-being. For that I will be forever indebted to her.
But I want my part of this celebration of her life to emphasize what both Kay and I realized over a year and a half ago was an important calling she received from the Lord. And that calling is about you guys out there.
Let me begin by saying that Kay was a person who held herself accountable to high standards. She expected a great deal from herself. She wanted the best for those she loved, she wanted us to have her best.
It is also true that she was quite self-conscious and she placed a high value on her privacy. So when she was diagnosed with cancer, a never-ending struggle was introduced into her life, in addition to the physical ailments. And it was a very personal conflict of having to deal with her self-consciousness and personal need for privacy, and the need to address the ever-present concern and desire of others to know about how things were going with her.
For several weeks it was something that I tried to help her with as much as I could, without a great deal of success. I tried to answer the phone as much as possible and many times we just let it ring until voicemail picked up, because we were exhausted.
Then one day, she wrote an email to a list of people she had compiled. In it was information on what had been happening and what we knew about procedures to come. And she asked me to proof read it before she sent it out. And at the end was a sincere thank you to all for their concern and prayers and a bible verse she had picked out.
That message represented a huge effort on her part, with chemo and radiation treatments in full swing, to not only let loved ones know how things were going but to begin to share her faith with those who read her messages. Some of those people were not believers in God, and she wanted them to know how much the Lord meant to her in her time of need.
In all she was going through, she was thanking those who were praying for her, and trying to convey to many how precious her faith was. I realized she was doing for all those who were reading those emails what she had done for me.
The distribution of those emails and the responses to them snowballed rapidly. I was amazed and humbled by both her strength of commitment to this calling she felt, and to the surprising responses of people who were reading her messages and marveling at her faith. There were responses from people who her messages had been forwarded to. People I didn’t even know.
I want to read an email she sent out on January 31, 2009. It’s a snapshot in her journey that helps make the point I want all to leave here with, a point I know Kay wants me to make.
It reads-
Thanks be to God for His indescribable gift! -- 2 Corinthians 9:15
So many times and under so many circumstances we keep coming back to this verse that it truly has become our heritage – our family’s life verse. Often our family relies upon this verse to describe so many situations in our lives. Our miracle child, our church, school, neighborhood, and friends.
How do we thank all of you who have been with us through all these treatments? There simply is no way, other than to say “Thank You” and hope that you somehow get a tiny glimpse into our hearts to see how truly grateful we are for each of you and your role in this process.
This treatment plan has not been easy and we knew that going in. At times it has seemed insurmountable. But we have seen God’s hand at many turns and He has seen us through many, many times of difficulty. We still have lots of work ahead of us in terms of recovery – weight issues, strength issues, and medication issues – but we know where to go each and every time we need assistance. Please continue to keep us in your prayers as we go forward in this ongoing process. There is much work to do and many prayers to be answered!
Thank you for helping us arrive at this place. And of course, the ultimate thanks always goes to God. What a truly indescribable gift!
It is unmistakably clear to me that the suffering that was so real to Kay was being used by the Lord to mold the content of those messages and to make them a powerful tool for His purposes.
She continued to write them until the last of her days here with us. She didn’t ever, ever shrink from that very difficult task for her personally, and she did it out of love. Love for God and love for all of us who read them. She was a wonderful wife, daughter, sister, aunt, friend and servant of her Lord. She loved God and she loved others, and she went to great personal sacrifice to try and convey the importance of faith in God. And that is the thing I hope everybody gets. Andrew and I are so very proud of her and very fortunate to have had her in our lives. I hope that those of you here, who were like me before I met Kay, hear her message to you. God Bless You All. I thank you for coming.