More Than Meatloaf

 

What do 15 pounds of hamburger, a dozen eggs, oodles of oatmeal, some ketchup, evaporated milk and assorted spices make?

It makes a whole lot more than meatloaf. It - along with a table full of homemade sides - is a love gift for grieving families from our church family.

On Saturday, I organized my second funeral dinner for the church. I've helped with dozens of these dinners, but I'm not typically the organizer for them. I'm certainly not a stranger to organizing meals or special events from bridal showers to youth dinners to 4-H fundraisers to PTO soup suppers to Core meals ... the list goes on and on.

But our new funeral dinner leader was out of town for the Labor Day weekend. And I just couldn't let the Stafford Methodist Meatloaf tradition down for this particular lady.

We were celebrating the life of Wanda. A few years ago, she was bound and determined that she'd make it to the 200 funeral meal mark, each detailed in the 3-ring notebook she carefully propped onto the huge stainless steel island in the church kitchen as she prepared funeral meals. Once she reached that mark, she evidently thought it was time to turn over the notebook to someone else. 

 

At about the same time, she handed me a business-sized envelope after church one day. She had my name as the addressee and her name in the return. It included her "formula" for Methodist Meatloaf, as well as the number of salads, potatoes, cakes and French bread loaves it took to serve anywhere from 5 to 130 people. I stuck it in the back of my calendar, knowing I had that resource at my fingertips if ever I needed it.

 

I must admit: I didn't follow her meatloaf recipe to a "T," but I sure used it as a guide to convert my own recipe. And I did use her calculations for how much of the "extras" to ask for from other congregation members.
 

I joked on Saturday that I may get met at the Pearly Gates some day by disgruntled Stafford UMC ladies already in Glory. I used disposable tableware to speed clean-up on a holiday weekend. (And, truth be told, I'll do it again if I'm called to duty for the job. It made the clean up so much faster!)

 

Are there sunsets in heaven? I don't know, but I can imagine the beauty. (Sunset 9-8-21)

 

And Wanda may greet me to give me the "what for" about the ketchup bottle on the serving table. Wanda would definitely not approve. When she was in charge of the meal, family members would sometimes come into the kitchen and ask if we had ketchup. She'd say, "There's ketchup in the meatloaf." (However, we didn't place the ketchup on the table for her husband's funeral dinner. And one of her own family members asked for it. I just was saving a step on Saturday, or so I'd like to believe.)

The funeral service was in the church sanctuary, while we prepared the meal in the kitchen downstairs. I imagine that the smell of baking meatloaf was as much a benediction for Wanda's family as the closing prayer.

 

Our lives are a Christ-like fragrance

rising up to God.

2 Corinthians 2:15

 

I've always loved this quote attributed to Teresa of Avila:

 

 Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which He blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are His body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours. 

Teresa of Avila 

One of my favorite Bible passages -- I Corinthians 12 -- talks about all the parts of the body being important and working together. 

 

It takes "the body" to accomplish a funeral dinner .. all those people who say "yes" when asked to bring a salad or cake, help set up or clean up or accomplish the myriad of other behind-the-scenes tasks needed.

 

Yes, it takes all of us, using our God-given gifts to do the work of the church or the community - whether that's a funeral dinner, school music, sports, 4-H, Scouts, Chamber of Commerce, the county fair, food bank ... the examples are endless. And so are the opportunities.

Saying Goodbye

A dozen of us gathered on what passes as a hill just west of Stafford. It was one of those deceptive days at the Stafford Cemetery - bright sunshine but a December chill in the air in a location not sheltered by trees, only gravestones.

There was no green mortuary tent. No shiny hearse. No extra mourners. No minister.

It was a memorial service like many other families have opted for during this global pandemic - just a few relatives gathered around the family plot. 

 Randy's brother, Lyle, died on September 17. A niece's birthday will now be a death day, too.

Randy and his sister, Kathy, decided to wait until all our family members could gather.  So December 5 it was.

The family - plus me as a shadow!

 Kathy wrote this on her Facebook page later that night:

A mixture of emotions today as we laid my brother's ashes to rest next to my parents in Stafford this morning. Lyle was the younger of my two older brothers and he passed away in September. Today was the opportunity for my oldest brother, Randy, and I to place our loved ones together where they can rest in peace. While this was sad, we also took advantage of being together to celebrate an early Christmas and reminisce a bit. I'm thankful for family, time together, good health, happiness, and an act of kindness for which I will be forever grateful. My heart is full.

Lyle was a guy who would prefer an outside gathering rather than a stuffy, traditional service in a church sanctuary anyway. Kathy had asked our local florist to capture an outdoor, woodsy mood with the grave decorations. 

Thanks to Freund's Crafts 'n' Flowers for the beautiful grave decor.

After their dad died, Lyle had left the flat Plains of Kansas and purchased a small motel in Cascade, Idaho. The mountains and abundant waters were his happy place.

Warm Lake near Cascade, Idaho

Even after a health scare a couple of years ago, Lyle preferred to stay at Deadwood, S.D., where he was nestled in the Black Hills, rather than moving closer to family back home.

So the cool, outdoor gathering was just as much about what Lyle would have wanted as a response to Covid-19 concerns.

Afterward, we gathered as a family in the church basement where we could spread out a bit more. We shared a lunch of homemade pizza and fixings. It was a nod to my late mother-in-law, Marie. Just a week before, a cousin had mailed us a copy of Marie's pizza recipe. She'd found it among some family photos while cleaning out memorabilia. (I guess that's one positive of Covid - a bunch of us have undertaken some deep cleaning!)

I knew the pizza recipe had been part of a column I wrote for The Hutchinson News, At Home With Kim, so I dug through those columns to find the whole thing. 

It was just another way to honor family ties. So was the banana cream pie Kathy brought as one of the dessert selections. Kathy remembers sliding her mom's freshly-made meringue topping off of the hot banana pudding filling onto Lyle's plate. Marie protested that she should eat it herself because meringue was hard to make. 

Snippets of memories like that filled the day. Randy said the burial was harder than he thought it would be. But he's grateful for the time together with family.