The Distinguished Graduation – My Pappa

About a week ago, I received an inevitable phone call that you always hope is far into the future. My grandpa had died only minutes beforehand. After receiving the news, I decided to pray and open my Bible. What I read in 2 Corinthians inspired me to write the following eulogy for my grandpa to honor him and comfort my family:

The Distinguished Graduation – My Pappa

My Pappa. One of the things that we always enjoyed together—and many of you enjoyed with him, too—is baseball. In his younger days, Pappa could really play baseball, couldn’t he? I mean, how cool is it to be a pitcher and have a nickname like Cannonball? In fact, I would guess that there is a great number of people who never knew his real first name, but they knew Cannonball Walls…and they probably said it with much more affection if they were on his team and not trying to catch up to that inside fastball!

Last May I was fortunate to play catch with him one more time. I was fresh off of ACL surgery and his shoulder didn’t have much left…but we were able to play catch for 5 or 10 minutes, maybe 30 feet apart. I’m very glad that we took that opportunity and it’s something that I will remember for a long time.

Well, it is the month of June and graduation days are upon us. Many of you have probably attended a graduation recently. Large celebrations inside NFL-sized stadiums, as well as quaint country gatherings, mark the end of a season in life and the beginning of summer and whatever is next for each young honoree.

This is the time of year that we celebrate achievement and usher graduates onward to bigger and better things, whether it is into meticulous preparation for things much farther away or into immediate life practicing that which we spent our time, energy, and possessions to learn.

I say to you that we are gathered here today for a graduation. A much distinguished Graduation with a capital “G.” This is the Graduation of my Pappa, for he has learned, loved, and lived for this day, whether full-knowingly or unknowingly. He surely knows it now. And we praise our Father in Heaven and Savior Jesus Christ for my Pappa’s most distinguished Graduation. I would like to usher Pappa, our beloved graduate, into the bigger and better thing that awaits him with 2 Cor 4:16-5:8.

This passage was written to Christians with the promise of God’s grace to believers in Christ:

2 Cor 4:16 – 5:8 (emphasis added) -

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. ¹⁷ For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. ¹⁸ So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. ² For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed with our habitation which is from heaven, ³ if indeed, having been clothed, we shall not be found naked. ⁴ For we who are in this tent groan, being burdened, not because we want to be unclothed, but further clothed, that mortality may be swallowed up by life. ⁵ Now He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who also has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

⁶ So we are always confident, knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord. ⁷For we walk by faith, not by sight. ⁸ We are confident, yes, well pleased rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.”

Pappa is now absent from his body…but present with the Lord. He has walked by faith on this earth, and now he walks by sight, being further clothed with the righteousness of God, that his mortality and earthly life is not swallowed up by death…no, as 2 Cor 5:4 assures us, he has been swallowed up by Life eternal and abundant.

Thank you, Pappa, for walking by faith on this earth. Thank you for teaching me all about pitching and sharing great stories of baseball and your life. Thank you most for your love, which I felt to be unconditional, a glimmer of the love of our Father in Heaven, whom you now know better than ever.

In view of these truths, though we mourn his physical absence from our lives, I encourage you to celebrate a life well lived, a death that brings glory to God, and eternal life in the splendor of Heaven for our beloved Pappa, Cannonball Walls.