Isn’t it interesting that the only time we’re able to sit still for our life portraits is when we’re dead? Instead of carefully painting them ourselves we end up handing the brush and palette to a pastor, family member, or friend. We spend a lifetime carefully writing the story of our lives and then abruptly ask others to create a eulogistic masterpiece in several short days, a lifetime of poetic nuance reduced to Cliff’s Notes. It’s as if we were assigned to write a school paper about how we spent our summer vacation, but this time the paper is about how we spent the last eighty years of our lives. Sadly, we procrastinated too long, our papers are due, and the date just happens to coincide with the day of our death. So there we are lying flat on our backs, dressed in our Sunday best, unable to gather enough breath to blame the dog for eating our homework.

I was honored to give the eulogy at my father’s funeral. I had only a week to compose it, and I think I did an adequate job, but I have since realized his portrait continues to paint itself. Over the years, I have had the opportunity to talk with family, friends, and colleagues about the impact my father had had on their lives. I continue to reflect on our relationship and wonder what he would have thought of the changes in my own life. The eulogy I gave for my father is continually being rewritten in my mind as I learn to appreciate the complexity of his life. It’s quite reassuring to know that the door to my father’s memory gallery is always unlocked and that I am permitted, if not encouraged, to periodically stand at the foot of his portrait, pull out a paintbrush, and lovingly daub in a few more details.

I find it interesting that it is only the Christian that is capable of writing a proper eulogy. Every other competing worldview lacks an appropriate foundation upon which to construct an adequate tribute. They are forced to steal words from the Christian lexicon like spirit, purpose, compassion, redemption, and heaven. An atheist eulogy must applaud a life of foraging, surviving, and procreating. Buddhists cannot speak about any accomplishments in this life because every accolade is but cruel recognition that the deceased suffered at the hands of their pathological desires. The Hindu eulogy may recount the deceased’s former life OS 3.0 but will remain uncertain if the next will be the new and improved OS 4.0 or merely an obsolete beta version of Pong. New Age religion will have some nice things to say about the departed but then can only offer an afterlife in which the deceased becomes more voltage for the world’s spiritual power grid.

A Christian eulogy is not about a partially filled earthly bucket list but rather an overflowing vat of heavenly blessing. While a secular funeral may try to put on a happy face it will always be overshadowed by the ever-present frown of death. Ironically, Christians go to a funeral not only to celebrate a new eternal life, but also to dance on the grave of the Grim Reaper.

When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting? (1 Corinthians 15:54-55)