Yesterday Melissa and I attended a funeral in Shelbyville.\u00a0 You might have read about the deceased in the newspaper.\u00a0 Genevieve Kelly was a 74 year old widow who was murdered in her own home, stabbed to death by a man who rented property from her.\u00a0 For as long as I can remember, Genevieve and her husband, John, were fixtures around the United Methodist Church where I grew up.\u00a0 John passed away just a couple of years ago.\u00a0 Everyone called him “The General” because he had been a Lieutenant General in the Air Force.Genevieve and The General were active with the youth ministry when I was youth pastor there during my years at Asbury Seminary.\u00a0 Their granddaughter, Genevie, was in high school at the time.\u00a0 The two of them even came along on a couple of our mission trips as chaperones.\u00a0 They were hardworking and energetic.\u00a0 And faithful.I hadn’t really seen Genevieve for several years, but the news of her death hit hard.\u00a0 We tend to think of murder as something that happens only in big cities or foreign lands – or even only in fictional TV shows and movies.\u00a0 I hate to think of\u00a0Genevieve’s last few moments on earth being filled with terror and intense physical pain.Her funeral was surreal in that I was back in my home church with quite a few of the same folks from my childhood memories but we’re all 30 years older.\u00a0 The pastor and family did a superb job of acknowledging the evil which led to Genevieve’s death without dwelling on it, leaving room for the proper focus of a celebration of her earthly\u00a0life and the promise of eternal life in heaven.The most striking thing about the whole experience was the bookmark the family created for each person to take upon leaving the sanctuary.\u00a0 Genevieve’s daughter said\u00a0they had printed the bookmark with\u00a0a quote which the family had found on a slip of paper in the house after the murder.\u00a0 Genevieve had been in the habit of collecting quotes and Bible verses which struck her.\u00a0 To attach this particular quote to her funeral was one of the greatest demonstrations of grace and forgiveness I have ever personally witnessed:”Forgiveness is the fragrance that a violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.” – Mark Twain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday Melissa and I attended a funeral in Shelbyville.\u00a0 You might have read about the deceased in the newspaper.\u00a0 Genevieve Kelly was a 74 year old widow who was murdered in her own home, stabbed to death by a man who rented property from her.\u00a0 For as long as I can remember, Genevieve and her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8576"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8577,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8576\/revisions\/8577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}