Eulogy for Juanita Lovelace 6/8/2021
By Rick Gillespie- Mobley
Summary: Juanita was an elderly woman who loved her family and came to the Lord just a few years before she died.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-3:14 Psalm 139: John 14:1-6
God is amazing. He knew Juanita Lovelace long before her parents did because the Scriptures tell us “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”
It was on a Sunday, the date was September 27, 1931, the place was Cleveland Ohio, that God sent a little bundle of life and potential to Samuel and Alice Lovelace. She was the fourth of five children to arrive and they called this latest bundle of joy, Juanita.
We are here today because that bundle of joy touched our lives in various special and unique ways and that same bundle has returned to the wonderful God who created her. She has completed that cycle of birth, life, death and return to God. It is a journey that we shall all one day complete.
There are some children that are born as sweet as they can be, and they are as gentle and obedient as your heart could desire. Juanita was not one of those children. She and her brother specialized in getting into trouble. Juanita was so sweet, she was sent to a detention schools for girls who misbehaved. From the beginning she has been feisty, spunky, spirited and even known as a firecracker. She continued with that lively personality right through her young adult and later adult years.
Juanita knew the joy of being a daughter, a sister, a mother, a wife, a grandmother, a great grandmother, a friend, a great cook, a child of God, and a gift to the world from God above.
Juanita was the work of God’s creation sent here to make a difference in the lives of others, 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.
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.
Juanita took seriously the time to laugh. She loved a good joke. If you came down the street with polka dots and plaids that were not matching, she was going to get a good laugh. She would give you some advice such as “Now baby, there is a reason they made mirrors. You’re supposed to look at them before you leave the house. We both know that you did not get a look.” She loved a good laugh. Anything that looked ridiculous would bring a smile to her face and laughter in her heart.
Juanita made us thankful that there was also a time to cook and to time to eat her cooking. She was a homemaker throughout her life and for those of you who loved Sunday dinners, she would have captured your heart. You see with her, you didn’t have until Sunday to eat like Sunday. If she felt like something on Tuesday or Thursday, that’s when she would cook it.
Her granddaughters said their grandmother’s meatloaf was the best along with her greens and macaroni and cheese. Their testimony was that she had a secret for even making vegetables taste good. I’m told she was a miracle worker when it came to preparing Brussel sprouts.
Part of the reason her food tasted so good was that she added some Lovelace love into it. Now if you waited until her later years to try to eat her cooking you might have discovered at times that occasionally she confused the salt and sugar. If you were wondering why those green beans tasted so sweet, you knew this was one of those times.
She really believed there was a time for everything under the sun. On a trip to Acapulco, she believed there was a time for her to go parasailing. That’s when you’re way up in the air connected to like a parachute while tied to a boat below that’s pulling you along. You’ve got to have a spirit of adventure to even try something like that.
On another trip to Florida, at age 75 she and Raquel went kayaking out into the Atlantic Ocean. Kayaking is one of those little skinny boats where you sit down in a hole and paddle with one paddle. They were in one boat together with two holes and Raquel got a little upset with her because her grandmother was doing a lot more talking than paddling.
The writer in the book of Ecclesiastes told is there is a time for love . Juanita could be tough to get along with because she had strong opinions about a lot of things, but one fault she did not have was a lack of love for her daughter Kathy. Kathy was her pride and joy. If you wanted to see what was dear to her you need look no further than her family.
Juanita eagerly and willingly made sacrifices for her daughter even though she was not a woman of great means. If her daughter needed something to fit in, Juanita made it her ambition to try to find a way to make it happen. Kathy was proud of the common sense her mother had and was able to pass on to her.
Juanita was the kind of grandmother many kids dreamed of having. She knew how to be strict, she knew how to be mean, but she really knew how to make you feel loved as a grandchild. She didn’t send you to play, she went out there to play with you teaching you how to climb trees and how to do flips in the grass.
She even taught you what to do if you got in a fight. She wasn’t in the Lord in those days so I can’t go into detail about her fighting strategies as this point. When the grandkids were given a choice of where they could go to eat or what amusement park they wanted to go to, their response was “we want to go to granny’s house. They never got enough of Granny’s house
When they grew up as adults, they knew they could count on her to keep her word. If she said she would help you, she helped you. If she told you, if you mess up again, then you are on your own, if you messed up again, you were on your own getting out of that problem. It’s a blessing to have someone willing to stand with you and help you grow into being a responsible person, even if they sometimes have to tell you no to make it happen.
Juanita’s favorite holiday was her birthday. She didn’t mind being the center of attention. She was a beautiful woman growing up that could turn some heads so she didn’t mind celebrating her. She liked gifts, but she didn’t want you to spend too much on her. She didn’t mind getting cash gifts.
But the gifts connected to family actually meant the most to her. Her daughter gave her a mother’s ring with opal-colored stones for Juanita, her daughter, and her grandchildren. It was as if the gift was priceless to her. Sometimes she didn’t want to wear it for fear something might happen to it. She loved family and family loved her.
She knew how to honor others above herself. She rejoiced greatly in the accomplishments of her descendants. You could find every graduation diploma and degree in the family hanging on a wall in her home. She treasured her family’s accomplishments.
Some people think the only way to impact this world is to be a CEO of a large company or a famous politician or become a well known Celebrity. But Juanita learned it was just as important and just as effective if you concentrate on loving one generation after another that will carry on long after you are gone. You never know who you might be raising when you invest in your kids, your grandkids, or your great grands.
There is a time for everything under the sun. We will all have many experiences throughout out lives, but there is one experience we can be sure of all sharing in. That 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. At the end of our lives we want to know that we are walking with the Lord. It is amazing how God pursues after us throughout our lives.
Juanita was not walking in the Lord for many years. But God touched her granddaughter Candice one day at a beauty shop to respond to an invitation by Pastor Toby to come to her church for a visit. She came a few times. She invited her mom and her grandmother to come. Little did she know she was changing the course of her grandmother’s eternal future with that invite.
Juanita came to our church and fell in love with a young adult outreach we were trying, called the PEAK. She was thrilled to see the young people praising and worshipping the Lord. She loved the atmosphere of love and acceptance that she found. God is something. We set up a ministry to reach young adults, and God touches the heart of a 85 year old woman.
But then again, Juanita had always been young at heart. She found herself saying one Sunday, I want to go forward to give my life to Christ. She did, and together she and Pastor Toby prayed as she admitted that she was a sinner in need of a Savior. What had started out as a conversation in a beauty shop, led to this lady entering into the kingdom of God.
The Bible tell us that there is a way that seems right to a person, but at the end of it is death. If we are all living in order that we might someday die, it should be of utmost importance that we live in such way that in the end our lives would not have been lived in vain.
Whether or not we have lived in vain will not be determined by how much we accumulated in terms of material goods, for naked we came into this world, and naked we go out. No matter how independent and strong we may think we are in life, we all need a relationship with God.
Of all the decisions that Juanita Lovelace made in life, what she chose to do with the claims of Jesus Christ upon her life, was the one that will stick with her throughout all of eternity.
In our lives, the only decision that we can make today, that will still be affecting us in 500 years, is the decision we make as to following Jesus Christ. For the Bible tells us, there is no other name given by which we can be saved.
Life is so strange and so short. That’s why we need to live and to love as though each day may be our last. You may say Juanita Lovelace was my sister or my mother or my grandmother or my friend and those things may be true.
But the greater truth is that God gave Juanita on loan to us for just a little while, and through death God has called her back to Himself not as a sinner, but as child of God made new by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Death is so much closer to us than we think. We may have escaped its grasp on several different occasions under different situations. Some of us know we have done things or been in situations that could have taken us out of this world, yet we are still here. But don’t kid yourself.
There is appointed a day however, in which each of us shall surely die. The best way to die, is to have lived in anticipation of that day in which we will give an account to God. The Bible tells us that Jesus has gone forth to prepare a place for each of us in the afterlife.
Whether or not we make it to the place that Jesus has for us will not depend on whether our good deeds outweighed the bad ones. Everything depends on whether or not we invite Jesus Christ into our hearts to give Him control of our lives.
nnnnnnYou see death is not something to be feared, For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not die but have everlasting life. Jesus said, let not your hearts be troubled, you believe in God, Believe also in me. For I go to prepare a place for you. Not only has Christ gone to prepare a place for us, Jesus has revealed to us the road in which we should follow.
Juanita Lovelace has made her choice and her assured salvation rests totally in the hands and mercy of God. None of us know the day nor the hour when we shall leave this world. Christ has died on our behalf that we might have life. He rose from the dead as proof that he can give life to us and that He is the Son Of God.
It’s a simple as confessing our sins, our yielding our lives to him. For in the end, the only decision that will matter is what did we do with Christ. For only what’s done for Christ will last for all eternity. What have you done with Christ for your life.
It’s not over for those of who know Christ, for the word of God declares.
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 (NIV)
13 Brothers and 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. 14 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.
15 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.
16 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.
17 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.
18 Therefore encourage each other with these words.
