Tommy Boyd - Thoughts And Memories

The following paragraphs are the words I shared at Tommy’s memorial service. They are also included in the booklet which accompanies the CD Join The Chorus.

For the past three years I've had the privilege of being Tommy's youth group leader. The year Tommy was in seventh grade, I had just been asked to take responsibility for leading the Junior High youth group. I thought, I haven't led Junior High youth group in ten years...I don't know if I can do this.

And then, to confirm my worst fears, in walked Tommy and Ellis. Those two boys had more energy, more rambunctiousness, and more mischief than the whole rest of the youth group put together.

And I thought, I'm never going to get these boys to sit still and listen...

But things changed in three years, and the Tommy we knew this year was not the Tommy we knew three years ago. I had almost forgotten the old Tommy, so didn't really recognize how much things had changed until I began collecting pictures of Tommy at youth group events.

In the old pictures, if a group picture was taken, Tommy was always in the front row, often in the very center, and with a big grin on his face.

But in the new pictures, there was a different Tommy. This Tommy was always in the back of the group, with his head peeking up over someone else's shoulder.

Things changed in three years. Without losing the sense of humor that we enjoyed about him, Tommy discovered the ability to be serious. He discovered a sense of quietness. He discovered the ability to sit in the stillness and enjoy the solitude. He discovered the ability to fade from the center and let someone else take the limelight.

This spring I approached Tommy and said to him, "I'm going to be traveling from church to church, preaching, doing ventriloquism, and doing concerts. And I need a sound man. Would you like to learn to use my sound system, and travel with me?"

Three years ago, if someone had told me that in three years' time I would be asking Tommy Boyd to be responsible for my sound system, I never would have believed it.

Tommy thought about it, and agreed that he would be willing to do that. We practiced many hours together. And once Tommy had agreed and committed to it, he never looked back, but just kept working.

I never really knew if he enjoyed working with me - if it was something that really mattered to him - or if it was just something to fill his time. His parents and his grandparents assured me that he was really enjoying working with me. But he never indicated that to me - perhaps that was just his quietness he had developed.

But then came the day that we did our first concert together. I packed my equipment in my car and went to pick up Tommy. After he got in the car, we hadn't even gotten to the end of his road when he said to me, "You know what is cool?"

"What?"

"You get to travel to all these different churches, play your guitar, and sing songs that you wrote, and people come to listen to you!"

And I said, "Yeah, Tommy, believe me, I'm as astounded by that as you are!"

Then he said, "But you know what's really cool?"

"What?"

"I get to be your sound man!"

And then I knew, for the first time, that it really mattered to him.

In times like these, I think of a verse in the book of Ecclesiastes, chapter seven, which says this:

It is better to go to a house of mourning
Than to go to a house of feasting
For death is the end of every man
And the living should take this to heart

In other words, it's better to go to a funeral than to a party, because those who come face to face with mortality, come face to face with the realization that what little time we have here on earth, it must matter for something, it must have meaning.

And I am so glad that, before Tommy left us, he had begun to find things that mattered to him, things that had value and meaning.

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