Your Unique Eulogy

Richie Kaa

I have a couple of thoughts around the word ‘blessing’. It is not a word we use in our everyday language – we don’t commonly go up to someone and bless them! If you translate the word “blessing” it is actually the word ‘eulogia’, which is where we get the word ‘eulogy.’ When you break up the word ‘eulogia’, we have ‘eu’ meaning ‘you’, and ‘logio,’ ‘logo’ or ‘logos’ meaning ‘word’. So eulogia means ‘you-word’ or ‘word about you’. That’s what a eulogy is, isn’t it? At somebody’s funeral you hear stories about their life or the word about them.

My mum passed away just over a year ago, and I remember sitting down together with my brother, my sister and my dad and we started to reflect upon her life. We wrote all that we remembered about mum and we put together a story about her life based upon our memories. This is not meant to be a depressing thing – we had a great time remembering mum and writing our story about her life.

The word ‘eulogy’, and the way it is used in the scripture, is the key word of blessing. In the Bible, wherever God blesses someone it says “He blessed them and He said…” That’s how God blesses – by giving us a word. It is not a random crazy sentence that He throws at you. The word that He blesses you with is a word about you, and it is a word of your eulogy.

Psalm 139:16; says “Your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” That means all the days of our lives are written, finished and already completed.

For each one of us, there are two eulogies – God’s story of our life, and the story we concoct. We can break into the book that God has written about us, get out the ‘liquid paper’ and blot out various bits – bits that we don’t want to do, or images of us that we don’t want others to see. We try to concoct a story based on an idea of who we would like to be.

I remember when I was playing junior footy. I was a little bloke back then. I was an on-baller, and I loved it because I got as much of the footy as I could. When I reached year 7 or 8, I shot up really quickly whilst all my mates were still quite small. I kept trying to play an on-baller’s role even though I was six-foot tall and everyone else was only five-foot. That doesn’t really work! No one told me that I had to rethink how I played footy. They said ‘we need you to play in a key position, centre-half-forward’. Now I thought ‘how boring!’ – especially in my team, because the ball never came down to the forward line. I just wanted to kick the footy. I was out of alignment with who I was, and I had to catch up with that.

For some of us we need to catch up with who the Lord has called us to be – the person He has named us. There is a eulogy that is written, absolutely finished and complete. This is God’s word about you; it is the story about your life. This is the eulogy that I want you to hear and desire today. There is a eulogy that each of us will have spoken at our own funeral, because it is certain that most of us are going to die one day. I would hope that what is said of you, and the eulogy that is spoken about you, is in alignment with what the Lord Himself wrote about you before time.