The Ultimate Donation

Tomorrow I will conduct my third memorial service/funeral in this church. I've been here just over a month now. All three of these services will have celebrated the lives of women, and two of them will have been memorial services. In my definitions, "memorial services" are conducted in the absence of a body, while "funerals" are conducted when the person's body is present (whether in a casket of in the form of cremains).

I'm pretty sure that every other end-of-life service I've conducted in my 7 + years of pastoral ministry has been a "funeral," whether with a casket or an urn present. But, for the second time in less than a month now, I will conducte a "memorial service" tomorrow in the church. And the reason for the "memorial service" rather than the "funeral" is the same in both cases: Both women donated their bodies, as their husbands had also done, to the Medical University of South Carolina.

We live in a day when suicide bombers are blowing up themselves and as many innocent victims as possible, when gunmen are targeting Christians in their own churches (let us pray for the our brothers and sisters in Christ as well the perpetrator of this terrible act in Knoxville, TN), when so many people are taking the lives of others without regard for their value. What a powerful witness to the self-giving love of Christ, then, when one chooses as a final act of grace to give one's body away so that others might learn to give and preserve life.

I've thought about what I want done, or rather what God wants done, with my body after my death, I really have. I thought I'd decided that my faithful witness would be to have it buried in a plain wooden casket built by my husband with no metal parts at all, in a grave with no vault--the most natural burial possible. But now I'm thinking...I almost went to MUSC as a medical student earlier this decade...maybe one day I'm supposed to actually let myself go there in a much different way.

I'll be praying about that, thanks to Mrs. D and Mrs. M., two women for whom I and my new church family give thanks to God.