Ruth Ferguson Funeral
(speaker: Grover C. Loughmiller)
Why are we here today? We are not here for Ruth. She is gone and is in Paradise (her body is
still here~ but her spirit is gone elsewhere), a place where the scriptures tell us we rest from the
cares ann sorrows of this world and where we teach those 110thavins: had a chance to hear or fully
understand the Gospel while on this earth. This world has a lot of cares and SouOWS,but only
because we lack faith. If we trust the Lord, we just ask Him at each point what there is to learn
from each event, as Job did when he was at the very bottom of his struggles and tragedies.
Overnight, he had lost his six children, all his wealth, was tortured with sores and boils, had
"friends" who kept asking him what great sin he had committed to bring this tragedy upon himself,
and his wife spit on him and told him to curse God and die. At this lowest of low points, as he
searched for God and meaning in this tragedy ~~tated,
"Behold, Igo forward, but he is not there; and backward, but Ican not perceive him:
On the left hand, where he doth work, but I can not behold him; he hideth himself on
the right-hand, but I can not see him:"
You can hear his bewilderment at trying to make meaning out of what is happening to him, but
then note his response.
"But he (God) knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as
gold."
Then a couple of verses later he says,
"For he performeth the thing that is appointed for me" (and a few verses later) "For God
maketh my heart soft." (Job 23:8-16)
This is a powerful statement of faith, a powerful statement of trusting the Lord even under the
most severe adversity. These tragic experiences were necessary in order to bring out Job's true
greatness, or as he said, the "gold". This world does have cares and sorrows, but only to the
degree that we lack faith and fail to ask the Lord at each point what the learning topic is for the
. day. Those who do not have faith say along with Macbeth:
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time
And ali our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle,
Life's but a walking shadow,
A poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.
It is a tale told by an idiot,
Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
For those who have no faith and 110 spiritual understanding, life easily becomes merely strutting
and fretting our hour upon the stage of life and then exiting stage left. For those who have
sufficient faith and trust in their heavenly Father, this world is full of joy. It is a proving ground, a
place to test our mettle, and to see if in the eternal expanse of time, we can remain true to a trust in
God and follow His course, no matter what conditions we are placed in, for a mere seventy,
eighty, or ninety years of the Lord's schooling and qualifying tests. We are here to see if we can
resist being distracted by feelings of pride, self-sufficiency, worthlessness, lack of values, and the
lesser motives, and hold on to the truth and God's commandments.
So we are not here for Ruth. She is doing fine. She is doing her "first love", sharing the Gospel
with others. The scriptures tell us that as soon as we pass to the other side of the veil, we enter
into the work of the ministry, or sharing the Gospel. So then, why are we here today? We arc not
here to alter Ruth's destination, regardless of what we say or do. She has already written the last
words in the journal of her life. She has already taken the final exam, so we are basically
celebrating her graduation exercises. It is a time to celebrate all the hard work and effort that has
preceded and led to the graduation, much as Paul did when he said just before his graduation:
"For I am now ready to be offered, and the time of my departure is at hand"
It's interesting how people often have a presentiment that their own departure from this life is at
hand. He then says in his summation sentence:
"I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, 1 have kept the faith" (II Timothy
4:6-7)
We are also here to receive encouragement from the life of the deceased. Ruth was in school for
eighty-five years, having had her eighty-fifth birthday just the other day. As you know, many in
school become drop-outs and do not endur~ to the end, some dropping out early, and some nearly
at the finish line. Some make it to the finish line, but barely scrape by with a "e-" average, while
still others make "A's and B's'', and still others are honor graduates, and a few become
valedictorians and salutatorians, because they traveled the whole course, put out their best effort
all the way through, never letting up or taking "sit-down strikes" along the way. They walked the
full path, milked all the learning possible out of the journey, and endured to the very end. So it is
with life, and so it was with Ruth.
We are not here to measure Ruth's life. Only God can do that, because only God knows all the
secret recesses of our hearts and minds, and our motives, wishes, hopes, actions, many of which
are done in quiet places.far from the public eye. Only He can do the measuring and make the
awards, and honor those who have loved Him all the way and trusted in His goodness all the way.
And the Lord does love to honor those of His children who are true and faithful to Him. As He
said,
"I, the Lord, am merciful and gracious unto those who fear me and delight to honor those
who serve me in righteousness and in truth unto the end." (D & C 76:5)
The Lord does love to honor and bless those who are willing to follow Him, much as he did
Abraham, when He said,
"For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him, and they
shall keep the way of the Lord, to do justice and judgement; !.bat the Lord may bring
upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him (i.e. honoring and blessing him with
the Abrahamic covenant). " (Genesis 18:19)
So, the judging and honoring is left to God. However, even mortals can test the measure of a
man's life (or a woman's life) enough to see good where it rises above the surrounding plane,
where it rises above the common level of the mass of surrounding humanity, above the "general
average". And beyond celebrating Ruth's graduating, that is why we are here-not for her-but for (/5)
•••• the living}o take encouragement along our continuing path from the obvious jutting out of the
good in her life above the plane, of the endurance to the end manifested in her life.
I'm sure that every person in this room knew Ruth from a different dimension, and saw a different
facet of her and her life. 1 saw her as a fellow church member, as a Home Teacher, and as a
friend. My life is better because ofletting some ofRuth rub off on me. I think Ruth's spirit was
calling to me last Saturday and Sunday. Out of the blue, she came into my mind and I thought of
going to see her, but the call was weak or more likely, my receiver was weak, and 1 was too
preoccupied to hear the phone ringing and to pick up the receiver. Instead, l let the answering
machine take the call, as we all often do when we get caught up in the cares of the world, and the
promptings of the Spirit get only a weak signal through to us, and we fail to act on it. I would
have liked to have had a "last conversation" with her. Yet, I had many "last conversations" with
her over the years, and they were great conversations, and the Spirit at times was so thick that you
couldn't cut it with a knife. I never once talked with Ruth, but what I left determined to be a better
person. She always had a powerful spiritual story to tell. Some I had heard over and over, but she
told them with the power of the Spirit, and I loved to hear them again, just like we love to hear
over and over the story of David and Goliath. We each feel the David part of us rising in
renewed strength. We vow to be more like him, we vow inside to be stronger, to be a powerful
tool for the Lord, to not quiver in the face of adversity and overwhelming odds, to trust in God,
even when there is nothing visible to suggest that trust will be rewarded and our lives saved.
Such were her stories, and she had no shortage of them. She told stories of faith, and I told stories
of faith, and with each story, our spirits rose, our determination to be valiant solidified, and our
love for each other and the goodness in each other knitted together into a solid fabric-and we
became solid friends. We enjoyed seeing each other, we enjoyed being together in a common goal
and a common journey. We even jointly shared the Gospel together with several people who she
was in contact with, and a couple of them joined the church. I must say that Ruth was in contact
with a lot of people.rHer home was a way-station, a cornerstone of the church in this area.
Without her efforts, it is entirely possible that we might not even be in this building at this very
moment. She was the first speaker in this building at it's dedication, and she recounted the struggle
and perseverance that preceded this ~}~~t~urrounding-alld
most of the places that preceded it
where not exactly "holy ground". She told of years of struggling faithfully, of driving to Longview
and Kilgore every week for meetings, of periodically driving to Gilmer and Kelsey when they
needed some bolstering and relief from their smallness in numbers and scarcity of testimonies to
draw from. She told of running a furniture business on her own after her husband died, and many
a tale of giving 'away furniture to the needy, as wen as often giving them the Gospel along with the
furniture. She told of her excitement in having a dependant Sunday-School in her house, and how
they began to establish a small nucleus that became the core that preceded the present 1200-1300
members ofthe church now living in the Tyler area. She told of Camp Fannin in Tyler during
World War Il and how they loved to have the soldiers join them and to have the priesthood in her
home, and how she took advantage of every possible such contact, so that her son, Joe, could feel
the Spirit of the saints and of the priesthood, and recognize how that is different from the things of
the world. Her home often housed or was the way-station for the missionaries and she was their
"Relief Society" when it came to meals or anything else. The table was always set for the
priesthood, any member, and for that matter, any person.
She told of a time when she and others had a three-day fast and then a prayer meeting when the
mission president, headquartered ill Houston, was in attendance, and he promised that someday
Tyler would he a center stake, and there would be a temple near Dallas. At that time, all of that
seemed to be a pipe-dream, an impossibility. Yet the temple was built in Dallas and dedicated in
1984, and we are here not far from being a stake center. Ruth was one of the cornerstones 011
which all of this rests. We are the recipients of her valiance. Unlike us, she attended meetings in
her home, in a room above a smelly fish market, in a VFW hall (where they had to sweep up
beer cans and their sweet aroma from the preceding Saturday night before meetings could start).
She told of meeting in the Liberty Theater, the Texas Power and Light building, the Woodsmen of
the World building, of doing baptisms in swimming pools, lakes, other churches, and so on. This
takes testimony, solid-to-the-core testimony. These are not the fly-by-nights, the flowers that wilt
in the burning sun, the weak-kneed. This was not a place for sissies. To hold on to a testimony
under these conditions is to be another Moses, traveling in the wilderness, a Brigham Young
struggling across the plains. This means dogged determination, day in and day out, with little but
God to bolster your testimony. She was indeed a modem-day pioneer, and she possessed her
dogged perseverance and endurance to the last step of the trail of the faithful pioneer.
Ruth's doors were always open to anyone, and I mean anyone, and she seemed to fear nothing,
even when it seemed to me that she should. She took people in off of the streets, way-farers and
the homeless, and she probably housed as many needy as the Salvation Army across the street
from her house-rand every one ofthem got exposure to the Gospel along with their room and
board). She was unrelenting in principle, and those who stayed with her knew where she stood,
and to my knowledge, none ever over-stepped their bounds.
When Ruth could no longer care for herself and had to leave her home, I had the distinct privilege
of cleaning out her house, saving and boxing the valuable, discarding the trash, and selling that
which was to be disposed of. You learn a lot about a person in doing that, and there was nothing I
found that didn't make me love her more. Like many of the Depression era, she learned to never
throw anything away that might ever be useful. She had newspapers staked to the twelve-foot
ceiling in places, but she also had church magazines piled and boxed by year as her own personal
and shared library. She would give you anything you needed that she had. There were hundreds
of thank-you letters, hundreds of pictures of little children now grown tall, thanking her for her
contribution to their lives. Some were brief encounters and others more enduring. There were
thousands of mementos given her by the appreciative, and yes, there was documentation of every
transaction she probably made from age twenty, and I hauled offthree flat-bed trailer loads, piled
five or six feet high, to the dump-and that is where most of the "stuff" of this world will end up.
But as Alice, who I worked with to load up all those boxes in her truck to take them to Utah, will
tell you, there was a wealth of the "enduring" left, a wealth of memories, a wealth of
contribution to the good in life. I honor her for that. I have enjoyed traveling part of the trail of
life with her. My life is better because of her. She was not perfect, hut none of us are, and what
will the tale be when we lay down our load for the last time? Will our story be as good as hers?
She endured to the end, and sometimes the part near the end is the hardest part of the journey, the
journey of bad health, solitude, immobility, lack of church contact, etc. I salute her at her
graduation, and I hope my story wi1l be half as good as hers, and that the good I leave behind, half
as good as hers. May we all honor her in remembrance for the contribution she made to our lives,
by being better, more godly people, and may we resolve this day to rise to the greatness the Lord
planned for each of us, and may we endure to the end of our schooling, that we may be"honor
graduates" in our Heavenly Father's kingdom, is my prayer, in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.