Funeral for Betty Green, June 30, 2018

Order of Service – Funeral for Betty Green

Welcome:
A loved one is a treasure of the heart and losing a loved one is like losing a piece of yourself, but the love that Betty brought each of you did not leave, for the essence of her soul still lingers.  It cannot escape your hearts, for it has been there forever. Cling to the memories and let them find their way to heal you. The love and laughter, the joy in the togetherness you shared, will make you strong. You will come to realize that your time together, no matter how long, was meant to be and you were blessed to have the precious gift of her love in your lives. Keep your hearts beating with the loving memories and trust in your faith to guide you through. Know that though life moves on... the beauty of love stays behind to embrace you. Your loved one... Betty has left you that love... her love, to hold in your hearts forever. 

Today, we have come together within the strengthening fellowship of friends and family:
to praise God for the life of Betty Green ;
to share our grief with God and with one another;
to reaffirm our faith in God's unfailing goodness;
to hear again God's promise of resurrection;
and to commend Betty to God's everlasting care.

Music:

Opening Prayer:
Gracious God, your love endures forever.  Your faithfulness is unfailing and all your promises are true.  The movement of your Spirit is evident even in our darkest moments.  Attend to us now in our grief as we trust you will.  Speak words of comfort to our hearts.  Open us up to receive your hope. O God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day our sister Betty. We thank you for giving her to us, her family and friends, to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. In your boundless compassion, console us who mourn. Give us faith to see death as the gate of eternal life, so that in quiet confidence we may continue our course on earth until by your call, we are reunited with those who have gone before; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Old Testament Reading:
Let us hear now a reading from the Old Testament, 
Psalm 23  King James Version (KJV).
23 The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
2 He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
3 He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
4 Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
5 Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
6 Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

New Testament Reading:
Let us hear now a reading from the New Testament,
1 Corinthians 15: 35-44
35 But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?” 36 How foolish! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.37 When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else. 38 But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body. 39 Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another. 40 There are also heavenly bodies and there are earthly bodies; but the splendor of the heavenly bodies is one kind, and the splendor of the earthly bodies is another. 41 The sun has one kind of splendor, the moon another and the stars another; and star differs from star in splendor.
42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.  If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

Pastoral Prayer:
Let us please pray: God our Father, Your power brings us to birth, Your providence guides our lives, and by Your command, we return to dust.  Lord, those who die still live in Your presence, their lives change but do not end. I pray in hope for this family, relatives, and friends, and for all the dead known to You alone.  In company with Christ, Who died and Who now lives, may they rejoice in Your kingdom, where all our tears are wiped away. Unite us together again in one family, to sing Your praise forever and ever.  Amen.

Music:

Message:  Pastor Roy Karlen – Woodlawn Christian Church
Betty Green, 84, died Wednesday, June 27, 2018, at Stewart Memorial Community Hospital in Lake City.  Betty was born on April 5, 1934, to Alma (Buss) Pierce in Sac County-Coon Valley Township. 

Betty is survived by her children... daughter Mary Ann (husband Bob), daughter Rox (husband Mike), and son Tim, by her long time and special friend Jake, by 8 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren and by her brother Larry (wife Jeri).

Betty was one of twelve children and she went to grade school at Cottonwood Grade School, where she like many children in that period of time had to walk to school.

She lived for a time in Spirit Lake and often talked about ice skating on the Lake.  In the early 40's her family operated a resort on Spirit Lake where she helped to clean cabins.  Through the years she owned and operated here in Lake City the Dairy Sweet and the Lake City Café, and was also the hostess and a waitress at the Wagon Wheel in Lake City, she also helped at Pam’s Place and the Wright Place, and for 25 years she managed detasseling crews.  She owned the Lake City Cafe in partnership with her sister Helen, and then in 1971, she purchased the Dairy Sweet.  During her employment at the Wagon Wheel, she worked for several of the various owners of this establishment through the years.

When I asked the family for words to describe Betty they listed, tough, a great mom, that she was fun loving, a hard worker, and just fantastic.  That she liked to go to the casino, she enjoyed playing cards, she liked to fish... but only from the dock, that she liked her jewelry and always had to have her earrings on, that she loved to dye Easter eggs, that she liked ice cream and especially liked to go to Glidden for ice cream.  Tim talked about his mother taking him hunting and fishing and you could see that those were and are very precious memories to him.  They told of Betty fishing with her sisters up at Spirit Lake.  Both Mary Ann and Rox talked about taking trips with their mother out West to Casper and Cheyenne, WY, to Denver, CO, and to Idaho to visit their mother's brothers and sisters.  Though in her later years she enjoyed shorter trips to Lake View to eat or to other nearby locations.  The family told stories about taking Betty to the casinos in Jefferson or to Praire Meadows to play the slot machines.  In fact, they mentioned a nickname that she had of “Betty Meadows”, perhaps one of them will tell you more about those trips and that moniker during the eulogies or perhaps at the luncheon.  It certainly sounded like it was hard to convince Betty to leave once you'd taken her to the casino, and there were stories about her hiding so they couldn't find her to take her home... again perhaps one of the family will flesh those tales out as well.

There have been so many people that I've talked to in the last few days here in Lake City that told me how wonderful, how much fun, and how loved Betty was in the community, I really wish I'd had had a chance to get to know her myself... but, sadly she had been basically homebound for the last several years due to various health issues. 

The family mentioned several times, how much Betty loved and enjoyed spending time with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  It would seem that she agreed with the author of the 17th Chapter of Proverbs: 
Proverbs 17:6   “Grandchildren are the crown of the aged.”
Truly, as Betty and the author of Proverbs 17 knew, grandchildren, as well as great-grandchildren, are one of the greatest joys in any lifetime.

Betty loved her family, her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  At the end of life, it really doesn't matter what you had in life, where you've been, in life, or even who you were in life, what really matters, what remains behind... is the love that you shared with others, it's the love that remains.

1st Corinthians 13:1-13  New Revised Standard Version
13 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. 7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. 9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; 10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

When you lose someone you have loved... you grieve... and your life becomes very strange,  even the ground beneath you seems fragile.  Your heart has grown so very heavy with loss; and though this loss has wounded others too... no one else knows quite what has been taken from you when the silence of absence dwells in your heart.

Flickers of guilt kindle... and regret for all that was left unsaid or undone.  There will be days when you wake up happy once again and inside feel the fullness of life... until that dreaded moment breaks and you will be thrown back into the black wave of loss and grief.  Days when you will have your heart nearly back, and you are able to function again... when suddenly with no warning, you become ambushed by sorrow.  It becomes hard to trust yourself, and all you can depend on is that sorrow will remain faithful to itself.  More than you, it knows its way and will find the right time to pull back the curtain of grief.  And when the work of grief is done, the wound of loss will heal and you will have learned to wean your mind from that gap in your heart and be able to enter that deep place in your soul where your loved one has awaited your return all along.

Though all of you gathered today, shall miss Betty, you should all rest assured that this is only a temporary parting and that you'll each get to see Betty's smile once again when you are reunited in Heaven.  Praise be to God.  Today Betty is reunited with all of her friends and family that have gone on before her, and today she is in the very presence of our almighty and all-loving God... Praise be to God indeed...

Eulogies and Memories:
If any of the family or friends would like to share a memory or story, please either come forward at this time or stand and speak from where you are seated.

Closing Prayer:
The family invites you all to join them in further celebration of  Betty's life and a time of shared remembrances and closure, by joining with them for a lunch at the Wagon Wheel here in Lake City, immediately following this service.

Let us pray:
O God, our Strength and our Redeemer, Giver of life, and Conqueror of death, we open our hearts to you just as we are.  We celebrate your gift of life freely given but are grieved by a sense of loss in the face of death.  The love which binds us to one another leaves us aching as ties are broken.  Accept our tears as emblems of devotion, and transform them into waters of life to nourish us in the days ahead.

We trust you.  We love you.  We know in Christ that your love is everlasting.  Nothing can separate any of us from your abiding care.  With you is eternal life.

With confidence, we now entrust Betty to your unfailing love and overflowing goodness.  Through the power that raised Christ from the dead to live eternally with you, lift up this, your servant, to life fulfilled beyond our imagining.  We give you but your own, enfold her in your everlasting arms, hold her for she is your child.

Now strengthen us, through the gift of your Spirit, to face into the future with confidence that you stand with us.  Grant that the changes of life may leave us stronger as we journey through life.

Reassured of your abiding presence, help us to knit more firmly the ties that bind us one to another.  Renewed by your love, help us to love in ever larger circles so as to embrace your people everywhere till at last we are all united eternally through Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.  Amen.

Benediction:

Music: