Funeral Eulogy Bessie Payne Bryant
By Rick Gillespie- Mobley
Psalm 139:1-18 Ecclesiastes 3:1-14
Summary: Bessie Payne Bryant was an elderly believer who loved her family, had a special bond with her sister, and gave her life to Christ as a child.
It is amazing how God uses governments and nations for his own purposes. God raised up Pharoah in Egypt, to prepare a place for Moses to be born and raised. God raised up Augustus Ceasar of the Roman Empire with his mandatory census, just to make sure that Jesus Christ, the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem.
Some of you may recall the great French General Napolean Bonaparte. He was the ruler of France in the early 1800’s who conquered much of Europe. When he was finally defeated on June 18, 1815 at the battle of Waterloo, many of his officers and fighters fled to the United States.
They petitioned Congress to buy some land in Alabama so that they could build a community for themselves. They settled in western Alabama and founded the city of Demopolis.
The same God who used Pharoah and Ceasar, used Napolean for his own ends. Napolean’s soldiers built Demopolis, not knowing God intended for it to be there to be the birthplace for Bessie Payne 121 years into the future.
Bessie was a humble, gentle, and sensitive person who had always in the background the strength to put her foot down when she needed to. The spirit of drawing a line in the sand that you better not cross came from her great, great aunt Louise who had been born a slave in the South. She had a strength in her spirit, that she passed down through the family.
Story has it that Aunt Louise refused to do what her master told her to do.
She told her master, “You will have to kill me first.” But since she was the head of the kitchen and an excellent cook, the master decided to let her be smart and bossy like she wanted. That gene of mental toughness and resilience would be passed down for generations to come,
God is amazing. He knew Bessie Payne would be born in Demopolis, Alabama long before her parents did and God used Napolean to make to make sure Demopolis would be there for them.
The Scriptures tell us “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart” God has a plan for each of our lives.
For Bessie, the date was on a Monday, January 3rd, 1938, the place was Demopolis, Alabama, the event was that God sent a little bundle of life and potential to William and Louise Payne. She was the fourth of five children to arrive and they called this latest bundle of joy, Bessie. She arrived just six months ahead of her sister Ella, who would become almost like a twin in their love and affection for each other.
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 returned 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. Bessie was one of those kids. She wanted to please her parents.
She was born in between in her brother Sam and sister Ella. When those two wanted to do some thing they shouldn’t, Bessie would always go in the opposite direction. She believed you should follow the rules and stay out of trouble.
Bessie was crazy about both of her parents. She loved the encouragement she received from her mother to get an education. She loved the way her father treated her mom and took care of them. Her father told her mom, you don’t have to do anything but take it easy. He worked building houses. He would come home from work and cook. He even paid someone to come and help clean the house. Bessie remembered eagerly waiting for her father to come home, and running up to greet him. He often brought her and Ella dolls home.
Bessie never forgot her last whipping from her mother when she tried to make a joke about her father. Bessie’s mother was very fair skinned and her father was very dark skinned. She told her mother, “You really got yourself a coal burner.” She never made a joke about his color again.
Bessie’s mother saw to it that they were in church as they were growing up and that’s where she gave her life to Christ. God has a way of sending us the people we need in life. For Bessie, it came in the form of her younger sister Ella. They became each other’s guardian angel.
Bessie said she didn’t like fighting because she did not want anybody messing up her face. When someone tried to provoke Bessie into a fight, Ella would step in fight for her.
Bessie was shy growing up as a child. She was too shy to even pray in Sunday School. No problem, Ella stepped in and prayed out loud on Bessie’s behalf. Now it’s a blessing when your baby sister can fight and pray on your behalf.
Bessie enjoyed school. She became a majorette and she said she could really twirl a baton. Unfortunately for her, her mother forbid her from going to football games so she couldn’t march with the band on the field, yet her mother was very proud to see her daughter stepping high and twirling the baton in the parades.
Bessie was a leader even in high school. She was her class president in both eleventh and twelfth grade. Her mother insisted she get an education so she went off to LPN school in Montgomery, Alabama. She said her grades were excellent. Although she worked for a while as an LPN, she was prouder of her work as a dispensary nurse at a plant because it paid more money.
She saw her success as a chance to be a blessing to others. Her family left Demopolis and moved to Washington. She came home on Mother’s Day and went to the florist and bought her mother the biggest floral arrangement she could afford along with a new red suit. Her mother loved the gift and the suit became one of her favorites.
Each holiday she wanted to make her sister Ella feel special, so Bessie would always buy her something fancy that nobody else had. Ella loved her for it.
When Bessie’s mother was dying, she called Bessie in with a request. She told Bessie, “I want you to promise me that you will look after my Baby, your sister, Ella.” Bessie made that promise and carried out for decades. In reality though, they ended up looking out for each other.
The bond between them continue to grow throughout their lives. Bessie had some talents and some weaknesses. She was a very good bowler and that was the only thing she ever won a trophy for. One of her weaknesses was her ability to cook. She just wasn’t good at it. She said once she put some food on the stove and told it, “just cook yourself.”
Bessie fell in love with Robert Bob Bryant. Unfortunately, she did not have Ella’s approval of dating Bob. Bob was a guy that smiled a lot and that got on Ella’s nerves. As Bob, Bessie, and Ella were being driven to the church, Bob smiled one time to many, and Ella threatened to knock his head off. Fortunately, Bessie had a lifetime of peacemaking, smoothing things out after Ella had given someone a piece of her mind. That day in the car she was able to maintain the peace and the wedding took place.
Bob didn’t know that Bessie couldn’t cook, but Ella did. Ella went to her sister and told her, I know you’re going to need some help with your new husband, so I will cook the meals for you and your husband for supper. That promise lasted for the duration of their marriage.
Jesus once said, blessed are the peacemakers. For they shall be called the sons and daughters of God. Bessie carried her peace with her when she entered a room. She had a heart to listen to others and to be sensitive to their feelings.
She didn’t mind honest confrontation so that genuine healing could take place in relationships. She would often use humor to help diffuse a situation.
When it came to God, she was serious about her relationship to the Lord. Her favorite book to read was the Bible. She would love talking to you about the goodness of God, but if you wanted to argue about a text, she would simply just let it go.
Bessie knew of me before I knew of her. Pastor Toby and I use to be on a radio program on WABQ called “Another Perspective.” Bessie and Ella both listened faithfully to our program. Because of my teaching style and western NY accent, the radio host Denver Wilborn, would often refer to me as the white boy preacher.
When I finally met Bessie face to face back in the days of Calvary Presbyterian Church, I knew I had found a new sister in Christ, a prayer warrior and a source of encouragement all rolled into one.
She was a blessing to us as her pastors. She was a joy to visit and a pleasure to talk to. When my mother came to be with us this past summer, she had the opportunity to meet Bessie. Once they discovered they were both born in 1938, they took off talking like they had been friends for life.
As they started talking about the goodness of God, Bessie said, she was ready to go home and be with the Lord. It was not a statement of despair, but one of hope of being with Jesus and being with her family who had also died in Christ. She understood more fully the words of Paul in the Bible when he said, “for me to live is Christ, but to die is gain.”
She had fought a valiant fight in overcoming the struggles she had in her life. I can remember how disappointed she was at the possibility of losing her leg. But months later when I saw how she had mastered the use of her electric wheelchair in getting her laundry to the laundry room and into the washer and dryer and, I was amazed. She kept the warm soft smile through the midst of it all and still glowed with the love of Christ.
So when she said she was ready to go home, I knew these were the words of a woman whose faith had matured and who was anchored in her lord Jesus Christ. She and my mother had a praise time together and we all prayed at the end that God’s will be done. As we were leaving, my mother said, “I’ll see you next time. Bessie smiled and pointed her finger back at her. Neither of them knew that within three months just a few weeks from each other that the both would be in the presence of the Lord.
The good news is that they were both ready and prepared to meet the Lord. Bessie could truly say, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith, now there is in store for me a 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.
Bessie has completed the task assigned to her from the day of her birth back in Demopolis. But my friend what about you. Are you prepared to die?
Bessie 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 and the gifts God blessed her with, as we must all one day give an account.
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 will want to know that we are walking with the Lord.
The Bible tell us that there is a way that seems right to a person, but at the end of it is death.
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 Bessie Payne Bryant 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. For the Bible tells us, there is no other name given by which we can be saved.
God gave Bessie 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.
Whether or not we spend eternity in heaven with God 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. Jesus is the only one who can deal with the sin problem that separates us from God.
2000 years ago, God sent Jesus Christ in this world to die and pay the penalty for our sins, so that we would not have to pay it ourselves. It’s a debt we could not pay anyways. If we are willing to humble ourselves, admit God is right and that we are sinners. We can have our debt paid in full. Ask God to forgive you of your sins, and ask the Lord to change you. God will be faithful to you.
No matter whether we believe the bible or not, we will all spend eternity in either heaven or hell. Jesus has done all that he can to show you how much he loves you and wants you to be in heaven with him. The choice is yours and yours alone. Bessie chose Jesus, and that’s why our hearts are filled with hope today.
