Talk by Joseph W Roberts at his mother’s, Loanda Roberts, funeral Sept 22, 2012
If my Dad had had his way, they would have had 14 kids and this funeral would have been really long. I said I would go last and see what was left unsaid, and I don’t think there is very much left unsaid. I want to, on behalf of all of us, thank you for being our friends, thank you for being our wonderful family.
It is just amazing to me to be part of this family, the strength in all of my brothers and sisters. I look at it and say “where did all that strength come from”, because I see -- I know lots of families that don’t have anything like that going on in their lives. My wife and I just came home from a mission in the Philippines and we saw lots and lots of people whose lives were very, very, tough and stressed. They can’t even imagine what you have seen here today and all of this strength in family. So I ask again “where did that all come from? “ I thought about that, I thought that all night, I thought - where did it come from? Then I realized ….. my Mother made a decision when she was a young girl that she loved the Lord. !!!
Proverbs 31:30 “Favor is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised”. She made up her mind. You know, when a mariner was going to cross the ocean, before all this modern technology, he found the North Star, and if he could find that, he could find his way across the open ocean. You had to have a reference point to go to. Our Mother picked a reference point when she was young, and that reference point was the Gospel of Jesus Christ. She loved the Lord, feared the Lord, and made up her mind that all the decisions of her life would fit on that straight and narrow path. In everything that you’ve seen, in everything you’ve heard described, and in everything that I experienced, everything that she was, because ---- she made those decisions easy, when you make up your mind to serve the Lord, to follow Jesus, strive to be like Jesus, and that’s the way you live, then all these things, good things happen, and they are good things!
You know, I was going to tell you, when – when she was in the rehab center a few years ago, her and Dad were both in there at the same time, and they put them in rooms right next to each other so they could be close, but, that didn’t work because Dad was always hollering around the room “MOM”. She was in just as bad a shape as he was, but he wanted some service, so they had to move her down the hall a ways. So, I visited Dad and then I went down to see Mom. Now this was fairly late at night. As I stepped into her room, I heard her talking in there. I looked in there and I said, “oh my gosh, she is talking to herself”. She wasn’t talking to herself, she was praying. I stood there and I listened to her praying for you (pointing to persons in the congregation), and you, and you, and me, and I said “what a blessed boy I am to have a Mother like that.
A few months after Dad died I went to see her one day across the street over her (at Meadowbrook Assisted Living). She was dressed in her temple dress, all in white. I said “Mom, what are you doing?” She answered “I am going to die today and I want to be dressed for the other side”. “Oh” I thought, “well maybe she was, I didn’t know”. I asked “what are you going to do now?” She said “I am going to lie down on my bed”. I said “do you want me to lie down beside you?” She replied “please”, so….., I laid down beside her on the bed and we waited. After about 20 minutes, I said “Mom, do you want to play Tile Rummy?” She said “yeah, let’s do it’ (laughter from congregation). So we got up and played Tile Rummy. But just think of the peace. When I get to that point in my life, I hope and pray that I am so confident in my standing with the Lord, because of the way that I have lived, that I can have the peace that she had, to cross that veil at any time, and know that all is well. She is a disciple of Jesus Christ.
I invite all of her posterity to carefully consider that, in their own lives, how important it is to have that North Star, to have that Gospel as your anchor, because otherwise you are adrift on the sea, and everything can happen and ….. it will, if you are lost without that anchor! I say this in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen