Dora Ann Dunkley Harbin - Memorial Service

Gathering Words: We gather today for several reasons. We come to bid farewell to a loved one who has passed from this life into the next. We gather to support one another in this phase of our shared grief at Dora’s passing. We gather to gain encouragement for ourselves as we face our own mortality, experiencing the death of one we have loved and who has loved us. We gather to join our hearts with one another and seek to better understand the imponderables of life with all its uncertainties.

Grief is a strange beast. It attacks each of us differently. Each episode of grief is different, as there is always so much to process and we cannot do that all at once. We have each lost someone different in Dora’s passing. She was mother. She was wife. She was friend. She was grandmother, sister, aunt, cousin, neighbor, coworker, volunteer, nurse, advocate, organizer, choir member, bowling companion, and missionary. We will all miss different aspects of who Dora was according to our individual relationships with her, along with our varied memories and the stories of our different and shared experiences.

Death has ever been a category we struggle to understand and process. From time immemorial, we have fought to make sense of death even as we wrestle with making sense of life. Faith calls us to seek answers in God, but we are not always comfortable or content with those answers. We struggle with faith, because, while we may want to trust God, it can be difficult to set aside our druthers to embrace what God has for us. We trust God, but God does not give us all we want, nor should it be any different.

Amid our grief, we are bombarded with many emotions. There is the obvious sense of loss, but there is also shock, relief, uncertainty, sadness, pain, joy, doubt, and peace that at times seem all jumbled up together. Dora was ready to go on from this life in many respects. Her faith prepared her for what lay ahead. She was assured of her relationship with Christ and God’s faithfulness and grace. Death is part of human existence. We may be prepared, but death never seems to come on our timetable. It most always seems to come too soon, especially as it relates to our loved ones. No matter how prepared we or they may be, death is still difficult for us.

These are times which call for assurance as well as facing the harsher uncertainties of life and death. We don’t know all we want to know of what lies ahead for us or Dora. We do know enough. We know of God’s abiding love, grace, and comfort. We know Dora remains in God’s care, even as she is separated from us. We do well to grieve our loss, even as we may rest assured that all is well with her, for nothing can separate any of us from God’s abiding love.

In that blessed assurance, let us pray.

Lord, grant us the grace and strength to confront our own mortality. Grant us the comfort we need as we peer into the unknown that lies before us. Grant us the confidence that Dora displayed in Your gift of love, grace, and provision for her future in eternity with You. May we be assured that Your arms remain open to receive us, as well, as we commit our lives to following Christ Jesus to embrace Your gift of redemption and eternal fellowship with You and with one another. Amen.

Acts 20:32 And now I commend you to God and to the message of his grace, a message that is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all who are sanctified. 33 I coveted no one’s silver or gold or clothing. 34 You know for yourselves that I worked with my own hands to support myself and my companions. 35 In all this I have given you an example that by such work we must support the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, for he himself said, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’” (NRSV)

When Paul was addressing the Ephesian believers in Acts 20, he could speak to his own example of life. He had lived a life that did not place a burden on others. He had shared an example of following Jesus’ character and teachings. He referenced Jesus’ words about being blessed in giving to others. That statement could have been written about Dora.

Dora graduated from nursing school on a Friday and returned to the same school on Monday as an instructor. She was immediately giving back to her community from what she had learned. As a missionary in Brazil, she was free to do as she pleased, but as she had time away from responsibilities at home, she was actively giving of her time and talents in the community, in the church, and among all her missionary colleagues. She taught hygiene and basic health. She gave vaccines to missionaries and seminary students after a flood or in other crises. She worked to advance Baptist work with children in São Paulo state, writing and coordinating large grants. She spent the night on the streets of São Paulo with a film crew working to document the lives of homeless children, saving one of those children from an overdose during the night. She worked with Christian Women’s Job Corps. I took her to a seminar on human trafficking, so coming back to Mississippi she became involved with Advocates for Freedom from Human Trafficking.

One of her favorite hymns, the last one she had me sing for her, was “Make Me a Blessing.” It encapsulated the thrust of her life. She understood her purpose here on earth as becoming a blessing to others by the use of her gifts and abilities. While the mission board referred a lot to a call to missions, she explained God’s call to me in a different way. “95% of trained Christian leaders live in the US among 5% of the world’s population. If I am willing to go, why shouldn’t I?” For her, call was about seeing the needs around her and simply responding to them. That is how she lived. That is how she taught me to live.

The love of Christ compels us to make a difference in this world. Sure, it calls us to live for much more than this world, but it calls us to live out the reality of God’s love right here and right now. I saw as much in Dora’s life. She tackled life with joy and laughter. She attacked life with kindness, care, and compassion. She saw needs around her and resolved to bring the love and grace of God to bear upon those needs. As Paul referenced, she was not concerned with position, status, and having others serve her or place her on a pedestal. She was much more concerned with living out God’s love which she had experienced in a way that impacted others positively.

Dora wanted others to experience the grace and love of God as she had. She wanted to bless others as she had experienced blessing. This year she was still working to organize the planting of some tomatoes at Provision Living, she continued serving on the resident council and teaching Sunday school as long as she was able. She was planning to make pecan pies for Thanksgiving, nevermind that she had no place to bake them, nor the strength to stay away to watch an oven. She was determined that she still needed a dining room table around which to gather her whole family.

Dora was always a practical joker. She asked a missionary what kind of fish he liked to eat. When Ray responded with “The kind that swims in water,” she brought him a live goldfish in a glass dish. In college, she convinced a classmate she was taking a correspondence course to learn how to swim. When auditing a colleague’s books, she called him up, “Craige, it looks like you transposed some numbers and owe the mission $1,000.” He told her he did not understand, but he would write out a check to the mission. She responded, “That will be fine. Oh, and by the way, Happy April Fools!” When she found out my sister had short-sheeted the beds of various missionary colleagues at a gathering in Brazil, she told Debbie, “I wish you had told me what you were doing. I would have helped you!”

Dora had a zest for life that did not let her take herself too seriously. She was committed to helping and serving others, whether that was baking cinnamon rolls for high school MKs coming over, working with street children, giving 500 vaccines after a flood in Recife, or serving on various mission committees, she found a way to make life fun, see its humor, and bring others a smile in the process.

She was the tireless energizer bunny, and it was hard for her to recognize that she could no longer accomplish what she was used to doing. Her routine had gotten to asking Trish or Debbie to pick up one thing or another for some new project she had up her sleeve. She wanted to gather some of the women at Provision Living to bake sweet potatoes. She organized the planting of some tomato plants. She took notes at the resident council meeting to pass on to the staff at Provision Living.

Every time we spoke on the phone, she would remind me of her prayers, love, and care for me and my family. She helped me keep up with what was going on in the lives of my extended family here in Mississippi. As her body continued failing, she continued to press forward tirelessly in her concern and thoughfulness for others. She was determined to be a blessing to all she encountered, from the staff at Provision Living to her church and to her family. She carried on the legacy she had learned from her own father, who worked harder in his retirement than he had running a grocery store in Beaumont.

We continue to grieve, yet we cling to more than the loss of what is past. We look to the memories we cherish and cling to. We look to other lives left behind that were also impacted by Dora's life. We take those memories, lessons, and gifts, using them to construct a new stage of life. We build a memorial to Dora in the paths we chose to take from here onward. God is fully aware of Dora's passing, life, struggles, experiences, pain, and joys. God calls us forward in confidence that none of that is hidden away. We carry the gift of her life with us, even as she remains present with God.

We have gathered to pay our respects, to celebrate Dora, and to support one another in our grief. We begin the process of making sense of our lives and suturing together the hole left in the wake of her absence. We call on one another to remember our experiences with her, keeping them close to our hearts. We take comfort in God’s graceful acceptance of all who would cast their lives upon Christ Jesus. There is life beyond death. There is joy amid sorrow. There is a bright morning on the way. We will meet again.

— ©Copyright 2021, Christopher B. Harbin

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