Reflections on living a Godly life.
On September 14, 2023, my 97 year old mother, Joy Iddings, peacefully passed away. She had been ready to leave for some time. The following is what I shared at her funeral on the 22nd.
A little over a month ago, some good friends who attend our Sunday School class in Kentucky traveled to New York City for the weekend. They had been invited to a memorial service like this one. However, the one they attended was at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and it was attended by over 2000 people from all over the world. It was an event that attracted news coverage and editorial reflections in major publications such as Christianity Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Fox News.
Tim Keller, renowned writer, scholar, speaker, and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York had died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.
If you read the high praise written and spoken about him by famous people around the world, you immediately think that his life was truly remarkable. Here was a man of God who made a difference. Here was someone God truly used to do something. His passing certainly is a great loss to the People of God.
All that is true. I personally have benefited from the ministry of Tim Keller.
That memorial service was last month. Today, we’re gathered here to remember the life of my mother, Joy Iddings. Though this venue is very nice, If you hadn’t noticed, it is not one of the great cathedrals of the world. We, who are gathered here, are few in number. There are no reporters. I haven’t read tributes to Mom in the papers. Indeed, the local paper wanted to charge to post an obituary.
And if we look at the outline of her life, few things strike us as more than ordinary. Sure she was raised by missionaries in Korea and China. She had experiences in Asia few of us have. Instead of vacations every year at the Jersey Shore or Myrtle Beach, her family spent time at the beach in Wa Jin Po in North Korea. She loved ice skating at Beihai Park next to the forbidden city in Peking. And for a time during WWII she and her family were confined by the Japanese in the Wei Shien concentration camp in China’s Shandong Province.
But by most measures she led a life we all recognize and dismiss as pretty average. She was something of a tomboy as a kid, not really worrying too much about all things girly. She grudgingly practiced piano every morning. She had a stubborn and rebellious streak as a teen, locking horns with her parents about boys and entertainment options. Just before Pearl Harbor, she, in fact, had sneaked out of the house to go to a forbidden movie.
When she came to the States she earned a bachelor’s degree in history and went on to achieve a Masters of Divinity from seminary. But she was unsettled in her new country as a young adult. She struggled with a sense that her younger sister was much smarter and more popular than she was. She went through a tough time of break-up with a college guy she thought she would marry. She wrestled with where and how God wanted her to serve Him.
She met and married an Indiana boy named Roger on Easter Sunday in 1953, right before he shipped out to Korea. (He actually proposed at Fort Indiantown Gap where Mom was laid to rest by his side this morning.) After Roger returned from the war and secured his science education certification, he took a teaching position which moved them to the Detroit, Michigan area. They had two kids in the span of a little more than two years, settled into a church, made friends, and made due on a teacher’s meager salary.
Roger went on to secure his masters and PhD. Joy went with him each step finally landing in the Dayton, Ohio area where Roger was first a professor and then a dean at Wright State University.
Joy’s days were filled with the standard stuff of life. She took kids to school activities. Went hiking and camping with the family. Enjoyed family summer vacations. Was active in church, teaching, leading retreats, and singing in choir. And when the kids were old enough, took a job at the university library.
But as with all of us, she had her share of trials mixed in. She struggled with anxiety and discouragement from time to time. She could be quite outspoken and wrestled with controlling her tongue on occasion. Depression and feelings of inadequacy were often lurking somewhere beneath the surface. She went through hard times and good times like most do.
When Dad retired and the kids were launched and married off, he took a new job on the faculty of John Brown University in NW Arkansas. Again, Mom integrated into the community through church and university friendships and activities. She enjoyed visits from kids and grandkids as well as vacationing with family and friends. When Dad began to decline they moved here to Pennsylvania to be near their daughter, Pam. And for the past 15 years, Joy has been a part of the Messiah Lifeways community.
On the surface, there is not much similarity when we look at and compare the lives of Tim Keller and Joy Iddings. One had a fabulous public ministry while the other seems pretty ordinary.
But dig a little deeper and you find they had much in common.
You see, both Keller and Joy had been transformed by Jesus. And the result was, in Paul’s words, “new creation.” The Holy Spirit was active in both of them. And the glory of God shone through them. Both had yielded all that they were to their loving Lord and were adopted into His family.
That transformation meant that few who met Mom didn’t also meet her Savior in some way. Reading letters and cards sent to her over the years while we have been cleaning out her apartment has made it profoundly clear how many people were impacted by Mom.
She was a woman of prayer who did not hesitate to ask whomever she met, “can I pray for you?” She was a woman who drank deeply of the word of God such that she would always share just the right passage with someone—usually from memory. She had a deep desire for those she encountered to know the Jesus she knew, so rarely did someone spend much time with her without her introducing them to the Messiah. And, though not a natural extrovert, nor someone given to easily making friends, somehow, even toward the end when she was frail and had memory issues, she communicated her love for each person and they reciprocated in kind.
So while large numbers in our world took note of the passing of Tim Keller but few noted the passing of Joy, both left the fragrance of Christ behind. Because both had met Jesus. Mom’s testimony was no different than one of the most famous Christians to ever live, the Apostle Paul’s:
“I have been crucified with the Messiah. I am, however, alive – but it isn’t me any longer, it’s the Messiah who lives in me. And the life I do still live in the flesh, I live within the faithfulness of the son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Galatians 2:19b-20 NTE
Our world is fickle with regard to whom it bestows praise and acclaim and whom it ignores. Not so with Jesus. In the Kingdom of God, both Tim Keller and Joy Iddings are being embraced with the same words. “Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.” (Matthew 25:23, ESV)