Eulogy Jewelyn Barnes

Jeweln Yvonne Barnes by Rick Gillespie-Mobley

Ecclesiastes 3:1-3:14

Jewelyn Barnes

On August 6th, in a very small town called Columbia , in the heart of southern Mississippi, in the year 1936, God sent a little bundle of life and potential to Joe Harper and MayBelle Haynes. They named that little bundle Jewelyn Yvonne Barnes.. You see Joe and Maybelle had responded to the call of God to be fruitful and fill the earth. They did not know they were not the only ones given the commandment, because they tried their best because Jewelyn was number 15 with three more to come.

Jewelyn was the work of God’s creation, and as beautifully as God created her to be, she has returned to her Creator. She now stands before God, to give an account for the life that she lived, as we must all one day give an account. For all must appear before God after death.

The Bible tells us, there is a time and a season for everything under the sun. A time to laugh and a time to cry, a time to hope and a time to give up, a time for joy and a time for pain, a time to be born and a time to die. The one experience that is common to us all is death. It is as common and as natural as all the other things done under the sun.

We all have a certain number of days to live, and our joys and struggles are different. But in the end we all come to the place that is called death, and from that point we look back and see what happened during our lives. Who was this person that the world knew as Jewelyn Yvonne Barnes?

I didn’t know Jewelyn personally, but I did get a glimpse of her through her daughter Wardella and her son in law, John. They both agreed as many of you have known, that she was a loving and caring person. She walked through life with a good amount of humility about her. It was important to her to treat people well.

Life was not always easy for Jewelyn. Any black woman born in Mississippi in 1936 was going to know what it was like to face challenges in her life. Any child that was the 15th in 18 children was going to know something about hand me downs, and struggles to have her parents make ends meet. There were not going to be too many steak dinners and visits to the restaurants. Many of the these we take for granted today, would have seemed like a rich person’s dream to Jewelyn as a child. Any child that loses a mother in life before reaching adulthood, carries a pain and a hurt that few may know about.

But that didn’t stop Jewelyn from having a vision of a brighter day in life. Young people drop out of school today claiming they have problems. But 95% do not come close to having the kinds of problems that Jewelyn had to overcome, and yet she graduated with her high school diploma. Problems do not have to keep us down. She had a strength and a tenacity to try to do better in the face of her problems..

Jewelyn did not allow her circumstances to make her bitter about life. She chose to look to bring joy into the lives of others. She looked at the gifts that God gave to her and realized that she could make a difference in people’s lives. She took that gift that she had to sew, and if you needed prom dress, but didn’t have prom dress money, she was a friend willing to make you look good in the dress she would make.

God blessed her with the gift of being able to cook. I asked John what did she cook that he liked best. He said, “that’s easy, I liked everything she cooked the best.” If you told her what you really liked, she would do her best to make it for you. Her heart was filled with love and generosity when it came to eating and feeding people. She was the kind of person that got joy in seeing others having a good time.

Wardella was a Christmas gift to her mom in that she was born on Christmas day. She told her mom, she was tired of cake on her birthday. That’s all her mom needed to know. From then on, Wardella was treated to a thick deep dutch apple pie with brown sugar crumbs on the top. She loved it so much she learned how to make it for herself.

We have a society that likes to talk about mother-in-law jokes. John loved his mother in law and she loved him. Only the Lord knows how many episode of Gunsmoke and Happy Days, along with black and white movies they shared together but he enjoyed her company and she his. They could sit together on the porch with great conversation.