Like many of us in the room, I spent the better part of thirty years seeing Grandma at every holiday we can spare. Learning card games and the art of the crossword puzzle. Eagerly anticipating the annual Eicher Christmas party, where everyone gathered for a great time. And after taking time to read memories written by all her children, I want to spend a few minutes remembering her with you today.

Let’s start with prayer…Pray with me, won’t you?
Father
Thank you for the gift you gave us in Helen Eicher
Help us to grieve her absence with us, to celebrate her life, and to emulate her example.
Send your comfort upon each person here today.
As we remember her as a wife, mother, grandmother, friend and Jesus-follower.
In Jesus name, Amen.

Grandma’s absence with us is all magnified by the fact that she was gifted as someone who loved everyone well—so well that she always had people gathered at her home. In fact, being here together is a good reminder of all the gatherings that took place because of how people loved her company. It’s as if all the wonderful parties she hosted at her home have been joined together to celebrate her! If we only had a deck of cards, a pack of White Castles, and the famed Eicher potato dish, this party would be truly complete! (jk)

Grandma truly did know how to love people well. (pause)
She was a great host—planning parties in a way that covered all the details, but left plenty of room for fun and conversation.
She was an expert card player—spoons, hand and foot, or rummy. You had to put your game face on if you were playing with her.
She was a great gift giver—she had a talent for remembering the things that meant the most to each person, and showing them love in the most meaningful way.
She always carried a joyful spirit around with her, and her laugh could light up a room. Her laugh was unforgettable.
And her words were always powerfully spoken. She was a great encourager and she had a tact in her approach to hard conversations that always showed he loved the person, even if she hated their behavior.

Grandma’s love and joy came from her unshakable faith.
Those that knew her well, knew that she read her Bible daily and knew that book better than anything else on this earth. And her diligence to consistently worship and learn every week at church rooted that love even deeper in her life.

A faith that created a safe, strong household that her children grew up in, and loved returning to long after launching into their own adult lives and a home that supported her husband as he built a business from the garage to the manufacturing floor.
A faith that gave her strength and peace that I cannot quite grasp to care for Kelly, her youngest, disabled daughter and to endure her untimely passing.
A faith that kept her attitude kind and joyful even when her mind could not remember the past, even when her body had to endure painful treatment over the course of twelve years.
A faith that even got her arrested and jailed once, for protesting to protect the lives of the unborn.

Grandma’s faith filled her with love, and compelled her to love people really well: as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, and a friend.
It’s because of her love that she touched so many people—you and me included. It’s because of that love that we grieve her. We don’t want to be without her company, we long for her words of encouragement, and we feel her absence.

As I close my time of sharing, I hope the things I have shared have brought back your own memories with her, and that you will take time later to share those with each other, as well as to write them down.

But in the midst of your grief, let me remind you that Helen is forever free from sadness and sickness. Because the faith she had in Jesus Christ, when her eyes closed in this life, they opened in the presence of her Savior. Jesus has not only welcomed her into heaven, and given her a body and a mind that is strong, whole, and free from pain or disease.

And I say all of that, so that I can say this. Helen was a gift to us—and we should be sad that she’s gone. At the same time, Helen is now whole and in heaven and those of us who share that faith with her to look forward to a joyful reunion with her one day. And if there’s a kitchen or shopping mall in heaven, I have a feeling she’ll have a gift, a cake, and a deck of cards awaiting our arrival. The final pages of the Bible promise us that because of our faith, we will see:

Revelation 21:3-4
Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth…(where) ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

Growing up as a kid, I remember countless times I woke on Saturday to my dad playing Charlie Daniels songs on his acoustic guitar, and anytime I go out to the garage to work I’m reminded of the hundreds of hours we spent working on projects together with CDB blaring in the background. Christmas drives to visit family almost always featured Charlie’s Christmas album…and it’s never Christmas season in my world until I’ve played that album myself.

When I struck out on my own in college, 9 hours from college, and my sense of country, loyalty, and belief were being solidified in the wake of 9-11, Charlie Daniels would regularly post on a blog his “soap box” comments regarding faith and culture, always with an eloquence, clarity, and brevity that was hard to match. (He posted his last thoughts publicly for independence day https://www.charliedaniels.com/soap-box) His song, The Last Fallen Hero, stands as emotional reminder of the time we lived in and the feelings I felt.

Charlie Daniels has written crude, controversial, and crazy songs, he’s by no means a neutral figure. But for all the criticism you can throw at songs, he’s been a man who’s lived a remarkably good life example. He’s been a faithfully committed husband to one wife. He’s not poured his money into lavish mansions or possessions. He’s never been in the headlines for an arrest or addiction to my knowledge. He’s politely and calmly represented his opinions. He’s remained an entertainer to the end, one who truly loved the concert and songwriting and stuck to it. The few times I met Charlie Daniels, backstage at one of his small concert venues, he was always relatable and sincere.

I am obviously biased in my views on Charlie, because I grew up in close proximity to the man and his music. That’s because he was my father’s hero. He’s the songwriter my dad often aspires to be when he puts pen to paper. He had a gift for writing songs that bring our minds to our best selves. He’s a good man, balancing a country heart, a Christian attitude, and a desire to make a difference in this world. And he was a good man to the end. Ever open, honest, and relatable. We need more men like him.

If you are reading this, my hope is that you aspire to be a lifelong example for others as well: of faith, of faithfulness, patriotism, gratitude, and resilience.

(Something I am working through is reading my kids stories of the behaviors I hope they will model someday. When I can’t find a good story book, I’ve started writing my own. This one is for and about my middle daughter, and although the details are fake–and there is never a gun in my home that the kids could reach–I wrote it in hopes that if a kid ever finds one at a friends house, they do the right thing)

Lizzy is the kind of girl who’s often very sweet and kind toward others. She will readily share just about any toy, aside from her pillow. She stops what she is doing and immediately seeks to comfort someone around her who is hurting or crying. And although her red hair always draws the attention of strangers everywhere she goes, she is content without a lot of special attention.

Lizzy also loves to have something nice to wear. She will gladly change clothes twice or even three times in a day, to ensure she has one of her favorite outfits on, one that fits the occasion. She loves to play her own games, in her own way. She can role play with animals or simply dig in the dirt contently for hours.

She has a lot of her dad in her heart and mind, and he cherishes the way God gave her such great qualities.

But…

On this day, Elizabeth Grace Fowler showed something fierce and strong that God put in her for special occasions.

On this day, Lizzy was at a special party, and she was playing there with her favorite cousins: Levi, Joel, and her most favorite of all, Lilly. Lilly and Lizzy were just finishing the best tea party ever, when a bunch of boys burst into the room and broke up the party with their guns. Lizzy and her siblings didn’t have many toy guns at home, so everyone was excited to get to do a battle with new toys, and Lilly and her quickly forgot about their tea party and joined the battle.

They ducked behind a nearby table and began to shoot the soft darts across the room at the boys. Lilly was an especially good shot and had all the boys hiding low behind their chair. Lizzy ran around the chair with her gun and chased the boys from the room. The girls won! They high-fived and began to reset their tea party in victory.

But their victory was only temporary, it wasn’t long before the boys regrouped and came up with a new plan. Cutting shields from an old box, the boys gathered up their guns and charged back into the room with extra protection. But just as the battle began again, Lizzy noticed that the new boy in the group had a gun that looked different than the rest. It only took a moment for her to realize, it wasn’t a toy gun, it was a real gun!

With shouts of “No, no no” that stopped everyone in the room, Lizzy ran to the little boy and confronted him. She told him to put the gun down on the ground. When he did, everyone gathered around and marveled at the sight. None of them had ever seen a gun up close before! One little boy asked if he could hold it, and another said that he had shot a gun before–and he was the only one who should be allowed to hold it.

Lizzy bravely chose to do what she knew was right. To stop anyone from playing with it, she crossed her arms and sat over top if it. When someone threatened to move her, she cried at the top of her lungs, “Mom, Dad, come quick!” The urgency of her voice got a lot of adults in the room quickly. Only when her parents were standing over her, did she move and tell them that someone had found a real gun.

Dad quickly picked up the gun from the floor, and Mom picked Lizzy up to give her the biggest hug ever! Dad told her that the gun was loaded and would have shot someone if one of the kids had pulled the trigger. They took the bullets out and put it where no kids could get it again. Then they treated her to a big bowl of Unicorn Sparkle Ice Cream to celebrate her boldness!

Mark Miller once made a statement that has forever stuck with me: “The Bible is all true…but it does not contain all truth.” I believe you would agree with me that God gave us the ability to learn and pass on our knowledge of the world, so that we can build up wisdom through discovery. You would certainly want your brain surgeon to have gotten his education from just the Bible, and your ship captain to have some knowledge of a map, a compass, and how the ship’s engines work! God’s gift to us is a book of spiritual guidance and history, a community of people, and our ability to learn. Science is not in opposition to God, it discovers and glorifies Him when done with Him in mind!

I begin with this train of though because people often criticize the Bible for not giving more clear medical guidelines, or for often suggesting practices that cause people to lean more on faith for their healing than science. I believe that the Bible balances this approach well. As I read through the most specific laws regarding cleansing, disease, and even epidemic sickness in Leviticus and Numbers, I am reminded of a few key ideas that I wish to pass along:

The Bible’s medical guidance is often pretty advanced:

The Bible defines an authority figure, a process, and isolation for both people and buildings showing signs of dangerous contamination. Many of the animals it defines as unclean are, generally, not as good for you as the one’s it approves for the Jews to consume. Although I’m no expert on the ancient world’s medical practices, I find that these restrictions and processes are pretty advanced. Today we understand microorganisms, disease transmission, and hygiene in a way they could not. It was gracious for God to provide a law that required them to follow practices that helped them avoid the outbreak of disease. Just imagine how much more devastating a serious disease would have been in ancient times, when there were no hospitals, medications, and sanitizing agents to help control disease!

The Bible’s medical guidance is also often spiritual:

Although a disease or circumstance often had very rational origins, it is also often the timing of God that causes hardship to come upon a group of people, which is why a medical process was also almost always coupled with a spiritual act of repentance and cleansing. There are even a lot of circumstances where God did not follow conventional medical cures to solve a medical problem, showing His people that He can and will often heal them if they will heal their own hearts first, the most noteworthy example of this in is Numbers, when God chooses to have the people look upon the figure of a snake to counteract the venom of serpents who had invaded their camp and were killing people.

Balance, again, is the key. Not every sickness or circumstance should be interpreted to have spiritual origins. And every cure should couple the wisdom we have in medicine with a plea to God for healing. To isolate one from the other can often mean asking God to heal something supernaturally that He has given us knowledge to heal naturally–robbing people of their purpose and taking the significance of our accumulated wisdom He has allowed us to collect away. On the other hand, trusting doctors to cure us without asking God to intervene, and seeking anything sinful in our own lives we should take the opportunity to ask forgiveness for, robs God of the respect and opportunity to intervene personally and powerfully in our lives.

We need always keep in mind that from the first pages of Scripture, the world is broken because of humanity’s unwillingness to obey God. Plants do not grow as well as they should, all of nature is out of sync and in conflict with us, and sickness reigns where everlasting life would have existed in it’s place, because we disobeyed God and sought the knowledge of good AND evil. Sickness, disease, pain, and death are ultimately our fault, not His, but He graciously intervenes in the midst of it all to provide for us.

For those who seek God’s forgiveness, a new paradise and everlasting life is again our promise: our healing will ultimately be a reality! And, for those who walk in faith, God extends to us protection, empowerment, and resources in this life in much the same way as He sent food for Israel for 40 years in the wilderness, and kept their sandals from wearing out.

God’s Word often outpaces human knowledge.

God’s Law can be trusted and followed, even when we don’t fully understand why.

And the answer to our crisis is always faith: faith in God and faith in the ways God has allowed us to advance our knowledge for health.

Let’s lift up our hearts and minds today in prayers of faith: repenting for our sins and those of our world, asking for God’s healing, thanking Him for how much He’s allowed us to learn about treating sickness, and asking for strength and wisdom for each person who is in the medical field, working hard to help others in this specific time.

Years ago, one of my favorite friendships grew out of a difficult question we got during a weekend message where I was a part of a panel of pastors who answered questions from the audience. The big question was about homosexuality. I promised that day a response to every question, and I intentionally didn’t address the question that day, because I didn’t want the response to be incomplete since our format necessitated short answers. I later met the person for coffee…and the conversation wasn’t perfect, but it was far better than a monologue. That’s my first advice for you: anytime you get a faith question that’s complicated, try to always have a conversation where you do as much listening as you do talking.

Today however, I will attempt to write a response (moreso to challenge myself as a writer than to provide a perfect answer) and at the end, I’ll also share the question and answer from years ago:

Why do you (as a Christian) not accept my being gay?

Thank you, for such and honest question! My closest friends in this world are people I don’t see eye-to-eye with on issues big and small. Please don’t take our difference in perspective as any indication that I view you negatively, because I don’t. I am glad that it’s important to you that we discuss this issue together. But let’s agree now to take our time talking through it. I value you too much to give you a short conclusion without walking you through my thought process, and I want very much to hear your thoughts and the experiences that have led you to your current mindset. You are God’s creation, He loves you, and you’ll find that my behavior will reflect that. Let’s start with you. Why do you feel differently that I do. Tell me about the experiences and information you’ve processed to come to your conclusions!

Before I explain my reasoning, let me first apologize for the actions of others in my camp. I know that some Christians have been outspoken and offensive in their opposition to your lifestyle, and I’m sorry. We all tend to want to fixate on some things in life, and several groups chose to fixate and make a big deal out of this issue, killing conversation and communicating that Christians don’t value people who see relationships differently than they do.

Personally, I really struggle to want to judge a different set of things that are socially acceptable. My struggle with judging others is biggest in the areas of alcohol, parents who’s kids are always on tablets, and with guys who father but don’t parent their children. Society is ok with things like that, but I’ve seen the worst of those things, so it’s hard for me not to be angry or devalue those people. Given too much influence, I would lead a movement to abolish alcohol, or get too involved in a campaign to outlaw phones and tablets for kids under 21.

Not only do we all have our fixations on who or what behaviors we would judge, we also have our own weak areas that we are tempted and drawn into bad behaviors more easily than others. It’s easy for me to judge alcohol, because I’m not tempted or addicted to it. It is harder for me to judge lust and infidelity because I enjoy the little spikes of adrenaline that come with physical attraction and society has made us think that its normal through their movies, tv, and advertising. The average person would even argue that we are genetically programmed to lust, and that genetic predisposition justifies our behavior. “God created us that way,” many would argue. I, on the other hand, would have to agree with my pastor friend, who said that although, “I have a genetic predisposition to want to have sex with every attractive woman I meet, that is just my flesh (a sinful inpulse in my life I’m responsible to deny).”

I don’t believe that just because our genetics cause us to be bent toward alcoholism, lust, or same sex attraction, it makes it acceptable. In most cases, it just makes following God really hard! And although I want everyone to be happy and healthy spiritually, relationally, and emotionally, I believe that happiness is only truly found to it’s fullest in the way God designed the world to function. Unfortunately in our broken world with a broken genetic code, that means often fighting our own nature to follow God’s design. The Bible very plainly calls out sex and marriage as only belonging between a man and a woman. I do believe it’s wrong to live a same sex lifestyle, in the same way it’s wrong for me to lust, or pursue sex outside of marriage.

Your struggle and your sin doesn’t alienate you from God any more than mine. It does not deserve public condemnation or excommunication from the church any more than other sins. In fact, I’d readily vote that there are far more damaging behaviors that people engage in. That sin won’t keep you from heaven. And it’s fine to be a Christian–to be trusting Christ to save you and change you–and be working out your perspective on this, struggling with it, or even actively living in opposition to it. Trusting Christ and believing in God doesn’t mean we have everything worked out. God has us on a journey, and I’ve found He leads us in a way that helps us see as He sees one step at a time.

More than anything, I want you to know and walk with God so that you have eternal life. If that’s all the two of us ever see eye to eye on, I would be thrilled…and we can always ask God to sort out the rest for us when we get to heaven. However, I believe that if you will trust Christ and read the Bible, God will convict you, change you, and lead you to a place of greater joy by living according to His design in this life too. I’m living proof of how amazing that lifestyle is, which is why I want it so bad for you. I want something HUGE for you: God’s best.

If you feel you need to solve this issue now and you’d be open to looking through the Bible at all the Scripture on this topic, I’d be happy to do that with you. If there’s a more pressing issue, or you need time to think about it, then I’m hoping you’ll keep our present disagreement from being a barrier to friendship. I would love to get to know you better. I would love to encourage you in your faith. And I promise not to make this a topic that we have to solve or agree upon.

Can we pray together for God to give us both a heart of understanding?