Eulogy Helen Bell 10/4/2010
John 14:1-6 2 Tim 4:6-10
Every now and then God’s blesses us with a person in our lives who touches us in such a way that we are never quite the same again. There is something about the person that seizes us with his or her presence, and somehow we know this is a safe place to be. My brothers and sisters I submit to you, that Helen Bell was such a person. It is amazing what all God placed inside of her during God’s creation of Helen inside the womb of Louise, whom most of us knew simply as Mother.
I can imagine, one of the young angels looking over and asking as God was forming her in the womb, “why is God taking a little longer time on that one.” The other more experienced angel responded, “oh that one there is going to be one of the special ones down there on the earth.” “How so?”
He responded, “God is making her with a voice that’s so strong with little a touch of thunder, that all her sisters, brothers kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews will tremble at the sound of her voice. Yet He’s put in her voice a tone so gentle that all of them will want to be alone with her in their time of need. God’s making her as strong as a rock, that will be unmovable in the face of the storms of life. Yet she will be as soft as cotton for someone to come and lean against in their time of sorrow.
God’s pouring into her a river of love that will never cease to run its course. Yet she will be dam, to stop the flow of injustice and do her best to turn a wrong into a right. “What you say?”
He’s preparing her to know what it is to be poor and to lack a full education. But she will know riches beyond the grasp of many and will have a wisdom that far exceeds a phd. “Can God really put all that into one person ,” the first angel asked? “Oh God can do anything,” said the other angel. Why this one’s name name is already written in the Lamb’s book of life.
“How can her name be there, when God isn’t finished making her yet.” “Oh the Master knows those who are His. For those who die in Christ have had their names written in the Book Of Life before the foundation of the world. He knows everyone of their days, before they even come into existence. Why don’t we take a coffee break, and watch how she lives her life.” “Wow, this is going to be an exciting coffee break, said the younger angel. Our God sure is an awesome God.”
Sisters and brothers, could we join in on a coffee break and look at just a slice of the life and legacy of Helen Bell. Born in Ga, during the height of Jim Crow Laws and segregation, she knew a little bit about racism and discrimination. She didn’t grow up on the rich side of town, but instead grew up in the bottom.
It was called the bottom, because it was about as low as you could get. When the river flooded in Ga, the creek was near the house, so the house got flooded too. Our family lived near the butcher pen where the slaughtered the animals. On a hot Ga night, the smell that came from the butcher pen from rottening meat in the trash cans was something you did not easily forget.
I think that’s why they family couldn’t wait to head for North Carolina and on to New York. Her mother had 13 kids which meant at times Helen, had to act in the role of a mother to some of her younger sisters and brothers. She developed a friendship with her own mother that grew into a relationship in which they acted more like sisters at times than mother and daughter.
This family had an abundance of poverty and many mouths to feed. There was many a night when the one who came home late for dinner, didn’t have any dinner left to eat. Yet it was a family that was rich in love. Her aunt Lil was always sending money back to Helen’s mother to help out with all those kids. It was in this sending back to help others, that the richness of our family’s sense of family began. One of the great things that came out of her sister’s Mabel’s death, leaving Sonnie and Adlene without a mother is that our family chose to always stand in the gap for each other with an open heart.
It didn’t matter if you were a Mobley, a Fowler, a Norris, A Willis, A Bell, a Hill, a Bascomb, a Dixon, a Maul, or any other of the new names that have found themselves on the family tree, We are Family. We know what it is to turn to each other in times of need. We’ve been taking care of each other for a long time.
Helen Bell exemplified to us all what the true meaning of family is all about. Now she had six kids of her own in Ronnie, Yvonne, Lenora, Stevie, Madeline and Patricia. She was proud of each of them and recognized they each had their own gifts in unique ways. They all knew her as Mom, but her children did not stop there. Helen’ss got some younger brothers and sisters that called her Mom. Harold couldn’t make it but I heard him say many times that Helen was more lime a mama than sister to me. She ‘s left a host of nieces and nephews, that will say in an instant,” she was part my mama too.”
She’s got some folk outside the family, that will claim—“hold on now, she was part my momma too.” She’s got some people in the church that will say, “we didn’t call her Mother Bell for nothing, she was part our Momma too.” All of you grandkids and great grandkids who knew her as grandma. You know that some of your friends who you brought around her, felt like she was their grandma too. Helen Bell was so full of the love of Christ, that even people from the dialysis unit would call up and ask for grandma on the phone.
Why did we so easily want to claim her as our own. For one thing she had an incredible sense to see the good and the potential in others. When others would see a violent angry child, she would see a child that just needed more love in his life. She had an incredible ability to accept other people right where they were, and start to love them just as they were. She did not meet any strangers. Everybody was a potential friend in her life.
She had a way of making you feel like you were one of her special ones. She studied us all, and knew just what we needed to kind of lift us up. How many of us here knew what it was to feel the love of Helen Bell and to feel like you were special to her. She knew which one of us just needed a look to straighten up, which one needed a strong word to behave, and which one of us just needed a good butt whipping to do right. She had a degree in psychology without even needing to go to school for it.
God invested into her the gift of hospitality. She enjoyed simply being a blessing in other people’s lives. If you ever had the privilege of sitting down at her kitchen table, you know a little bit about what the feast in heaven is going to be like. I don’t care if it was fried chicken or neck-bones, macaroni & cheese or rice, chocolate cake or sweet potato pie. That woman could cook some food and threw in some love into just about anything she made.
When I first starting dating Toby, we were coming through Hornell for Christmas break at seminary. Toby’s birthday was coming up, and I knew if I could just get Aunt Helen to make her a chocolate cake for her birthday when we stopped by, it would help to seal the deal on getting her as my wife. Aunt Helen made one of her massive chocolate cakes, and we had a surprise birthday party for Toby at 22 Seneca Street. Once Toby tasted the love in that cake, I knew she was going to be a part of this family. That was 30 years ago, and she always looked forward to eating Aunt Helen’s cooking.
It was hard leaving the table of Mother Bell, without feeling real good when you got up or really bad from having overdone on that good food. That same spirit of hospitality has found its way into some of your lives, and you cook for others without even realizing its her influence working in you.
She showed us what it was to open her door to family members in their times of need, when they either needed some guidance or just a place to live. We probably would not have known what it was to love each other as cousins as much as we do, if she hadn’t opened her home all those summers for us to get together as kids in her home in Hornell.
We slept on couches, on floors and doubled up in beds, but she taught us how to get along and how to obey authority. Hearing her say, “I’ll bust ya” was enough to keep most of us in line. Some of us today have opened our homes to other people to come and live with us for periods of time, because we saw it in her and that spirit was passed on to us.
She showed us what it was to listen to the pain of others. When you really messed up and blew it, she was a person you could go to for comfort, advice and understanding. God gave her, her master counseling degree that came from the Master Himself. She could feel your pain.
Even when she was disappointed with what you had done, she did not cast you out of her life. She’d say in a minute, “we have got to forgive one another”. She never thought she was better than anybody. She’d say in a minute, “anybody can make a mistake including me.”
You could come to her in tears or you could break down in her presence it didn’t really matter. I don’t know how many times she said, “it may be hard right now, but “it’s gonna be alright.” I can imagine her looking down on all of us and doing that little shake and smile at how many folk are here, giving a loud “Shabbach,” and saying to us all “it may be hard right now, but it’s gonna be alright.”
Love carries with it a two sided sword. For the Scriptures says to speak the truth in love. One thing about Mother Bell, if you were wrong she was going to let you know that you were wrong. She wasn’t going to harp on it and, she wasn’t going to sugar coat it. She did not care who you were. If you were wrong, she was going to let you know. Now if she was wrong, she would come and ask your forgiveness and admit to it.
She was a friend on whom you could depend to walk with you when you blew it, but she was not going to call wrong right, just because you wanted her to. She feared God too much to go along just to get along. Is there anybody here besides me, that she had to tell, “you are wrong.”
There is another trait that runs throughout our family and it is the sense of humor that we possess. You all know that we are a family of comedians. Some of us are just plain crazy, but a few of us are actual comedians. I think our Aunt Lil was one of the best of the best comedians in the family.
A few months ago, when Mother Bell was in the hospital, we called to check in on her. I told her jokingly to lift her spirits, “Now I want you to promise me, you will not fall in love and leave that hospital a married woman.” She responded, “ Well I don’t know if I can promise you that, there’s a lot of cute looking doctors walking around here.” I couldn’t top that one.
We all had our own name for her. Mom, Helen, Aunt Helen, Grandma, Mother Bell, Ms. Bell or whatever name you called her by has lived her life in such a way to show us how to live, and to value what’s truly important in life. She never had a large bank account, but she left this world full of riches.
It was not by accident that she became the loving giant of a woman that she became. You could not speak to her for long without knowing, that one day she gave her life to Jesus Christ and was forever transformed by His love for her. When you asked her, how she made it through, she’d say in a minute, “God did it.” God was not some impersonal being out there some where. God was real and personal to mother bell through her relationship to Jesus Christ.
One of the most important gifts that she has given to us, has been the gift of knowing how to die. She believed “to live is Christ to die is gain.” She is one of the bravest persons in the face of death that we have known.
When the doctors gave her the news of a terminal cancer, she didn’t despair, she get didn’t angry, and she didn’t lose hope. Like Shadrack, Meshak, and Abednego who faced the threat of death if they did not give up their position on God before King Nebechadnezzar, she was able to say, God is able to deliver me from cancer, but even if God chooses not to, it will not change my faith or my position in God.
When she was offered the treatment of chemotherapy, she chose to decline it in order to live her final days enjoying what she had left. When she left that hospital, she did what she wanted to do most of her life, and that was to go fishing. You see, some of us wanted her to stay on this earth as long as possible for our enjoyment. Yet, there is far more to life than what we see on this side of the grave.
You need to understand that Aunt Helen has been laboring for the Lord for a long time and like the Apostle Paul she could say, 6For I am already being poured out like a drink offering, and the time has come for my departure. 7I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. 8Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing.
Did you know that according to Jesus, most people will not go to heaven? Jesus said, Mat 7:13 "Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. Entering into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is the only way to enter that narrow gate.
All you have to do is to admit, "God, I have done a lot of things I should not have done. I realize I cannot pay for all that I have done. I ask you for forgiveness. I accept that when Jesus Christ died on the cross, He being holy and righteous, paid the penalty for my sin. I invite him to come into my life and take control of it."
You will make numerous decisions in your life between your birth and your death. But the only decision that will still be personally affecting you a 1000 years from today, is what did you do with Jesus Christ.
The Bible teaches there will certainly be a resurrection of everybody from the dead, and then comes the judgment of God.
Helen Bell is prepared for that Judgment. She left this world in an apartment filled with the people she loved surrounding her having a lot of fun with each other. I think she said, “Lord I can go now, look at how they are loving each other. She then took to the Master’s hand and breathed her last. She was prepared to hear the words, “Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant.” She then entered into the place that Christ was preparing for her in heaven. There was a party going on, on the other side, for the Bible says precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of one of his saints.
For those of us who die without Jesus Christ, Helen Bell will only be a passing wonderful memory. For those of us who die in Christ, she’s waiting for us to join her in that great reunion that will certainly take place.
For the word of God teaches, 1 Th 4:13-18 Brothers & Sisters, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first.
After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage each other with these words.
