Today's Daily Lesson is in Memoriam:
Yesterday I had the honor of officiating a celebration of life service for a woman named Jan Caffey. Jan was a woman with a personality (and hair) as big as life, and someone who always took up the cause of the underdog.
At the service Jan's daughter Liz shared a story from a baseball season in Liz's childhood. As a 2nd or 3rd grader Liz was on a team whose coach had directed all the kids who couldn't hit the ball to simply never swing when they came up to bat. His philosophy was that they had a greater chance of being walked to first base than they did making it there on their own.
Well, Jan couldn't believe it. To her, this seemed antithetical to the whole idea of youth sports and sportsmanship in general.
So, being who she was she decided to do something about it. Still decked out in her big hair and big makeup and big flair jewelry (she did exchange her big high heels for some more sensible sneakers), Jan took all the kids who supposedly couldn't hit and she went to coaching batting practice. In fact, she and her husband Richard coached them through the offseason and then put them back together for the next year. And that next season all the kids who the year before had been told to keep their bats on their shoulders came out swinging and ended up actually winning the league.
At the end of the service yesterday, Grace Rogers, a woman in the congregation who had taught with Jan came forward carried on an old memorial tradition introduced to us by one of Second B's former pastors, Ted Dotts. She renamed Jan. And the name Grace gave her was "Champion".
That was fitting and true in many, many ways.
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