Life Tribute for Grandma Laura Threadgill

You don’t have to know a lot of things in life to make a huge difference for the Lord in this world.  But you do need to know a few things that are great and be willing to live for them as well as be willing to die for them.  People who make a great difference in the world are not usually people who have mastered a great many things but rather are people who have been mastered by a very few things that are very great.  If we want our lives to count we don’t have to have a high IQ; we don’t have to be smart or have good looks; we don’t have to be from rich families or have graduated from a prestigious university.  We just have to know a few basic, simple, majestic, obvious, glorious, eternal things.  We just have to be gripped by them and be willing to live our lives by them and be willing to die for them.  Grandma Laura’s life models this fact and each of ours can too.  Because ultimately, it isn’t any one of us that matters but rather what grips each of us that makes a difference.

The question fundamentally is … Do we really want our lives to make a difference?  Not all of us can truthfully say yes to this question.  Too many of us just want to be liked, to finish school, to have a good job, to find a good spouse, to have a nice house and yard, to have a nice car, to have long weekends, to take great vacations, to grow old and be healthy, to die easy and to not go to hell and that’s all we want.  Do we really care if our lives on this earth count for eternity?  If not, then that is a tragedy in the making!

Grandma Laura did not care very much about the things this world thinks are important. 
She lived most of her life in a small house on the landing approach pattern near a moderately busy airport and would have never moved except the City of Tulsa condemned her home.  And as far as I remember she never even learned to drive a car.   Those things were not important to her.  But what she did care greatly about and poured her life out for was this one thing:  to make Jesus Christ known to everyone that she came into contact with.  And for me this started way back in the Fall of 1972 when she became my new grandmother and the first person in my life to show me what his gospel looked like up close and personal in real life and in real time.

Is Grandma’s passing at nearly 98 years of age a tragedy?  An entire life spent devoted to one idea … that Jesus Christ is Lord … is not a tragedy.  A tragedy is to strive to retire early to live a life pursuing worldly pleasures and worthless idols such as mansions on the beach, yachts, endless rounds of golf, countless fishing excursions, etc. as the final chapter of our lives before we stand before our creator to give an account of how we spent our latter years … as John Piper famously said twenty years ago over a field of hundreds of thousands of college kids at One Day “here it is Lord, my shell collection … Lord, look at my shell collection … and I’ve got a good golf swing … and look at my boat!  God, look at my boat!”   That’s a tragedy!  But not for Grandma Laura.  Don’t waste your life … don’t waste it.

Grandma’s life could be best summarized by this simple yet profound couplet:

Only one life … twill soon be past,

Only what’s done for Christ will last.

Let’s please not throw our lives away on what John Piper calls “fatal success.”  This idea didn’t originate with John Piper though.  It was no less than Jesus’ who lamented the rich young ruler who came to him in Matthew 19:16-21 and who went away sad “because he had great riches.”  Rather we should strive to emulate Grandma who lived her life following the words of Isaiah [in 26:8] who said Your Name and Your Renown is the desire of my soul!    Grandma’s soul desired something infinitely great and infinitely glorious and her passion was that those around her would come to have that same passion.  My prayer is that this would become our passion as well.

Thank you Grandma for that precious gift.  We know you are finally home and finally eternally happy!  Well done good and faithful servant.  Kiss the Son for all of us!  We love you and will sorely miss you.  Until we meet again!