Most embarrassing funeral...

Yesterday I performed the first of three funerals I will be conducting this week. Three in five days! (That's a record for me.) Everything was going fine until I got to the end of page one.

But let me back up a bit.

I spent the whole day Monday preparing for this first-of-three funeral. I began work around 6:30am and finished everything up around 10:00pm. I wouldn't have been at it so late, but Monday also happened to be my newsletter deadline and I had a couple of missionary related events to participate in. (Enjoyed lunch with Todd and the evening with Tim and Lindsay. No regrets for the long hours.)

I got up early yesterday morning and, while breakfast was in the oven, ran over to the church to check over my notes. When I finished up my practice, I noted a few paragraphs that I wanted to revise and ran home to eat. I returned to my office before 8:00am and edited the service, reprinted it, copied the twelve pages for the family and placed my copy on the pulpit in the sanctuary. I was ready for the day.

About 9:45am, people began arriving at the church. I greeted some of them and helped out where I could.

Around 10:15am, it was clear that we were going to need more seating, so I worked with several men to set up chairs at the back of the sanctuary. We managed to get everyone seated before 10:30am.

A minute or so after 10:30am, I walked the casket up the aisle and stood on the platform while the family filed in. When they were seated, I stepped to the pulpit and began.

Everything went smoothly at first. I talked about Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous, “Serenity Prayer," reminding everyone that there are things we cannot change (like the death of a loved one) and things we can change (like following a good man's example) and wisdom we could seek in the confusion of the grief process. That was all on page one.

As I was finishing the last sentence at the bottom of the page, I flipped the sheet over and stopped. The page was blank. I looked frantically across at the top of the next sheet - Page 3. I died a thousand deaths in that moment. I couldn't go on. I apologized, said something about having the wrong notes and stepped down from pulpit. I walked briskly to the back of the sanctuary and turned toward my office. As I entered my study door, my friend Tytus, one of the funeral home's staff members, stepped toward me holding out a copy of my notes. He had retrieved them from my desk to save me time. I thanked him and returned to the sanctuary.

Remember when I said that I had printed my notes then copied them for the family? What Tytus had handed me was the family's copy. The family's copy which I had copied from the notes that had the blank second page. In my panic that did not occur to me. So I positioned myself behind the pulpit once again, opened this freshly retrieved copy of my notes and stared at a blank page for the second time in less than five minutes. I was about to cry at this point. I apologized again and repeated my exit, stage right.

This time, I dug frantically through the recycle bin and found my original notes, the ones I had successfully practiced with that morning. They weren't revised like the others, but they were all there. No blank pages! I returned to the sanctuary and the rest of the service went amazingly well.

Other funerals have been more interesting (even amusing), but this one tops the red-in-the-face list.

The rest of the story: I went back after the graveside service and looked at the offending copies. My office printer had pulled two sheets of paper through at the same time, so page 2 was on the back of page 3 and page 4 was on the back of page 5. I had an entire set of notes the entire time. I didn't even think to look.