By Dr. Alex McFarland for TOWNHALL
Before me was an object that shouldn’t exist.
The first few seconds when one stands up to officiate a funeral service are never easy. Even after decades in the ministry, one’s heart still breaks before an audience of mourners longing for closure amid bereavement.
But for one particular funeral service, the emotional weight in the room was unimaginable. From the pulpit, I stared down at something so incongruous, so just… wrong… that I momentarily forgot to speak.
It was a child’s casket… like an adult’s in every detail, just small. The little girl inside had left this world at five years old, perishing in a car accident. The cream-colored, rectangular box before us resembled a scale model of an actual casket, like an example created as a sales display. If only that had been so. But this was real, a little life had been extinguished, and a room full of heartbroken grown-ups awaited some words of comfort.
As I began with a Scripture reading and prayer, a little girl approached the podium. She was dressed as Elsa from Frozen, and raised her arms in that precious, universally-understood way that means, “Pick me up.”
She whispered in my ear, “I want to say something.”
Holding the child with one arm and wresting the microphone from the lectern, I nodded, “Go ahead.”
