Friends and Family.
I'm writing briefly from Gate 90 in Vancouver. Tomorrow I'll be celebrating my grandfather's life with family and friends in Greenville. It's hard to describe the sadness of a life lost and the joy of a life well lived. Some of you knew my Grandpa. I think he was a pretty exceptional man. Here is his obituary.
Before he died, Liz and I got a chance to see him over Christmas and during some brief periods of lucidity he told me that he was proud of me. That I was doing the thing (ministry) that he had prayed I would do for a long time and that I had a really great wife (who he correctly predicted I would marry when he first met her). Those are words I'll treasure for the rest of of my life.
My grandpa was a pretty neat man. He met my grandma working at a summer camp when she was a waitress and he was a busboy. They eloped and then a week later he shipped out for WW2. He was a cryptographer for the army and when I asked him what the neatest message he ever deciphered was, he told me it was the message that the war was over and he was going home. He played football for the Chicago Bears briefly. Then went on to grad school. I think he has a Ph. D in statistics but I don't really know. Growing up he always said he worked at 'the barn' so I thought he was a farmer. I found out later that he was in charge of a really big company.
He was the smartest man I knew. But he had some funny quirks. Duct tape was his tool of choice, most often to fix the other tools that he broke. He was obsessive about raking leaves. and when his rake broke, rather than fix it, he stuck a nail in the broken handle and picked up each leaf individually.
I miss him. But I am grateful that he loved the LORD and taught his family to do the same.
-matt
