Eulogy for Fearless Love

Dear Friends:

On February 11, 2021, three days shy of her 98th birthday, Lottie Krogh, my mother, died. With restrictions in mind and cold weather (-4 degrees), we held a small, private service. For today’s Monday Musing, I would like to share my remarks from her funeral service.

I would like to begin by offering our thanks to Pastor Paul for his great attention to Mom. Your deep, caring and regular visits were meaningful to her, and when she could no longer attend in person, you kept her connected with the congregation she had known for 90 years. As family, we are deeply grateful for your ministry to her.

Thank you also to those who are watching. (The service was live-streamed, with over 200 viewers.) There will be a time for shared memories and expression of celebration and condolences when both the pandemic and frigid temperatures recede. We will be able, with apologies to the Gospel songwriter Fanny Crosby, to “see face to face, and tell the story – saved by grace.”

Just a few thoughts today about Mom’s wisdom and witness...

As a child, there were three things I remember Mom doing most. They were, in no particular order, ironing, singing and praying. Her fourth activity was “trying to wonder,” but that’s a thought for another time.

As children we play the hand we’re dealt—we have little awareness of how other households work, so what is, just is. Not every household was as dedicated to a crisp crease, but let’s face it, Mom wanted her family to look good. Not as an act of vanity, but as her gift to us.

Singing, on the other hand, was self-indulgence for Mom. She did not sing for our benefit, although much of our theology and spirituality was learned through song; but Mom, and Dad for that matter, gifted our childhoods with a soundtrack. Not random background music, but strains that carried themes, emotion, transition, purpose, plot. While Dad alternated between George Gershwin and Ralph Carmichael, Mom’s playlist was strictly sacred—sometimes classic hymnody, often tent-meeting Gospel, but always Bible-based, salvation-grateful and heavenly inclined.

The third activity of engagement for Mom’s attention and time was prayer. I did not realize that most children seldom saw their mothers on their knees, quietly bringing praise and petition before God. In fact, as a student of mine remarked many years ago upon the passing of her mother, “It is hard to reckon with the loss of a person you knew for a fact prayed for you every day.” Of course, Mom prayed not only for her children, but for the world, and big portions of that world she prayed for by name.

There you have it, the tripod of memory for my mom—ironing, singing, praying. But, of course, the purpose of a tripod is to provide stability and balance for something else, something I would like to give the somewhat redundant name—fearless loving.

Redundant because, as 1 John 4.18 reads, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.”

There is no fear in love.

For those who know Mom’s testimony, you’re aware of the intimate relationship between her accepting Christ as her Savior and her desire to expel fear from her life. Mom wrote about this in her essay contribution to the book, The Best Thing I Ever Did for My Marriage (Nancy Cobb & Connie Grigsby, Multnomah Press, 2003).

Mom’s childhood could be called nothing short of Dickensian, except that is a literary reference; Mom’s young life was tragic beyond fiction. While her memories of poverty were simply the hard conditions of childhood, her father’s betrayal of all sense of security and provision was deeply scarring.

As a child, Mom deeply desired to give to the Lord her fears. She did, and God replaced that justifiably profound terror with a deep capacity to love, not romantically, not sentimentally, but fearlessly.

And while Mom loved us and adored Dad, her spiritual convictions turned her passions to attentive, careful, blessed love for the least, the last, the lonely and the lost. Lottie’s life’s purpose was to demonstrate Christ’s love to those whom the world had perhaps discarded as loveless.

We’ve offered a few examples in her obituary, but those are just the highlights. Lottie worked with profoundly disabled children, looked them in the eye and told them they mattered. There were many families who lived next door; the house was rental property and a veritable conveyer belt of human dysfunction. But a lot of the kids who lived there were scooped up for Sunday School so they could learn, too, how by God’s grace, fear withers in the presence of love. Why else would a new widow in her late seventies work for certification as a chaplain for the women’s correctional facility if it wasn’t to plant herself in the front row to cheer on, to speak hope to those who had no champions?

One last thought about love and fear. Growing up, Mom’s major influence was, of course, her mother, but there was also her Aunt Betty. She was a woman frozen in Edwardian romanticism, but she was always bickering and judging, always suggesting that, while God’s grace was free, the Christian life was not; and we were always moments from condemnation if we allowed the immorality of the age to wither our faith. It was a fearful, fearful way to live. And I would suggest, a spirituality that was always on the cusp of stealing Mom’s confidence.

I didn’t understand until I was much older that that was why Mom so passionately and doggedly cared for the lost. As a young girl, Mom gave God her fears, and as a woman, God gave Mom her capacity to fearlessly love.

If we are in fear, it is because we have not allowed God’s love through us to be perfected...completed.

Fear is cast out not by being loved, but by the act of loving.

So, concluding, let me reference Fanny Crosby once again—with a Gospel song Mom sang with a prayerful heart while ironing…

O troubled heart, be thou not afraid,
In the Lord thy God, let thy hope be stayed;
He will hear thy cry and will give thee aid,
Whate’er thy cross may be.

Refrain:
He is able still to deliver thee,
And His own right hand thy defense shall be:
He is able still to deliver thee,
Then be thou not afraid.

O troubled heart, though thy foes unite,
Let thy faith be strong and thy armor bright;
Thou shalt overcome through His pow’r and might,
And more than conqu’ror be.

O troubled heart, when thy way is drear,
He will rescue thee and dispel thy fear;
In thy greatest need He is always near,
To Him all glory be.

With great joy for my mother’s fearless love, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor