Nana Funeral Message

Good afternoon. My name is TJ and I am Leslie’s grandson. I am so honored to be here with you to speak about my incredible Nana. I have been thinking a lot about her wisdom and her love. I’ve been thinking about the last time I was in this auditorium, for Chuck’s funeral, my Pop. To me, they were always a pair: Nana and Pop. She had the sense, he had the jokes. Which is not to say that Nana is no fun, she gave me snacks with a smile a wink. Nana and Pop were, in my eyes, the definition of a power couple. I remember when I was here, at his funeral, how so many people I did not know came to see him because of his influence and his care and his sense of humor. And today, again, to see so many more, I am reminded of the thing both my Nana and Pop had that has left such an incredible imprint on each of you: their love.

That is the legacy of my Nana—she loved the people around her. I felt this love as a grandson, through holiday meals and hugs and family vacations. You may have felt this love as a friend or a student or a player, through a word of encouragement or the time she took to listen to you or just a smile.

And as we celebrate her legacy of love, I believe she would want you to know about this love. You see, my Nana is humble, and I don’t think she would want the credit. She would want you to know that this love was given to her. I want to read a passage from the book of 1 John in the Bible.

1 John 4:16–19 (NLT)

1 John 4:16–19 NLT

We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love. We love each other because he loved us first.

The Bible says that God IS love. I think that’s beautiful. Not that God has love or does loving things. He IS love. If you boil down the character of God to its essence, it’s love. True, deep, sacrificial love. That kind of love is hard, it’s the kind of love that gives up what’s easy or what’s comfortable and enters into something hard.

If you were on one of Leslie’s teams, I imagine that she pushed you to work hard and to work together, because she cared about you and knew that your path to success required hard work. But I also imagine that for every win and every loss, she was there, with you. She showed up. She cared. She listened. I imagine that’s true for you because I know that’s how it was with me.

What Nana understood about God and about life. That it’s about love. So she loved well. She loved the way that Jesus loved, full of grace and truth. She was always there, always caring, always interested in what was going on in my life. And that love came from God—we love because he first loved us. She had this deep well of faith in a God of love, a God who loves her, a God who was not afraid to enter into our own difficulty, pain, suffering, and sin, and whose love overcomes all that to make it new. And I think that love shaped her and made her the person we all are here to honor and I think she would want to give God the credit for it.

Lastly, I just want to point out this. It says here in this passage that perfect love casts out fear, that we have nothing to fear on the day of judgment, but that instead we can have confidence. I think a lot of us fear death, and what comes after. If I am honest, I do. But I don’t think Nana did, because Nana knew that on the other side of death is Love itself. She faced it with confidence because she was filled with the love of God and knew the love of God and lived the love of God, and now she gets to experience it more fully and deeply than we can even imagine right now.

So today, we grieve. We grieve because we miss my Nana. But we do not grieve as those without hope. We hope in the God of love. The God whose love shone so brightly through her. So today is also a celebration. It is a celebration of the life of Leslie Akers and the love of Leslie Akers. Her love is her legacy, and if we love, in the way she loves, in the way Jesus loves, then her legacy lives through us.