Volume 30, No. 38                                                   
September 25, 2005

Memorial Service

   In a monumental battle with his neighbours, the eccentric farmer cast the first stone — then ten more.

   It all began in 1915 when John Milburn Davis and his wife, Sarah, settled on 260 acres north of Hiawatha, Kansas.  They lived a quiet, frugal, hardworking life.  But things changed when Sarah died in 1930 at age 70.

    Bent on preserving what he called “the sacred memory” of his wife, Davis built a massive memorial in Mt. Hope Cemetery.  He started with a 52-ton cement roof erected on stone pillars surrounding her grave. Beneath it, Davis put eleven life-sized statues of himself and Sarah, each of them strikingly realistic and made of granite or Italian marble.

   The statues summarized the couple’s life together, starting with a courting scene in which John and Sarah were seated discreetly at opposite ends of a loveseat.  One statue portrayed Sarah as a winged angel in prayer, another depicted John kneeling to place a wreath on her tombstone, and yet another showed the lonely farmer seated next to a large, empty chair.

   Between 1931 and 1934, John Davis spent $200,000 on his monumental task, a staggering sum during the Depression.  As the memorial grew, so did the resentment of local residents who never forgave him for refusing to help Hiawatha build a badly needed hospital and a municipal swimming pool.  His critics said he treated Sarah poorly during their marriage and only built the memorial to spite her relatives, whom he disliked.

   When Davis died at 92 in 1947 and was buried next to his wife, most people ignored the funeral, prompting the officiating minister to gentlyscold the townsfolk for not accepting the solitary senior as he
was.  Only later did people learn that Davis secretly gave the needy tens of thousands of dollars, a few hundred dollars at a time.   

   Ironically, John Davis does in death what he refused to do in life.  He brings a very public economic boost to his community.  Each year, more than 20,000 money-toting tourists come to see the near-famous stone figures.

   All of this reminds me that, like the Davis statues, our characters have more than one dimension. We’re seldom as bad as critics believe, or as good as supporters guess. The truth lies in the twilight between the darkness of our heart and the dawn of our hope — hope of one day becoming more than we are.  But regardless of what people think, God knows the truth.  And when we truly grasp the stunning reality  that He loves and wants us, as is, we can finally start to find the guts and gratitude to let him change us into what we should be.

   Part of that transformation involves choosing to focus on the present, and not fixate on the past.  If we insist on building memorials to our pain, loss and loneliness, we’ll be oblivious to the obvious needs around us, making decisions that mystify and dismay those who expect better of us.  Think of the incredible good we could do if all of us rechanneled our angst and emptiness into personal, sacrificial service aimed, not at mourning lost love but making love last.  It would soon give a whole new meaning to memorial service.

   As you go through life, you can keep mourning or keep moving, and much will depend on whether you’re looking back or facing forward.  The Bible encourages us to “strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily hinders our progress.  Let’s run with endurance the race God has set before us... by keeping our eyes on Jesus...” (Heb. 12:1,2.)  He went first.  Now He must come first.  

   And that preacher in Hiawatha, Kansas was right.  We should all accept each other as we are — even when we disappoint one another — because we seldom know the whole story behind what people do.  Besides, even when we don’t do what’s best or right, God will often turn our mistakes or neglect into something good, when the time is right.

   We’ll always mess up, but our failures needn’t be chiseled in stone.
 
By Rick Gamble, published in Cross Current, the weekly newsletter of the Followers of Christ church family in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  Reprint at will in not-for-profit publications.  To receive these free weekly articles via email, send a note to sgamble@bfree.on.ca