The Rev. Frank Logue
Emmanuel Episcopal Church
Athens, Georgia
March 1, 2008

Unfinished Business—A Eulogy for Tom Logue
Romans, 8:14-39 and John 6:37-40

My father died at work. I guess that was inevitable and probably even appropriate for a workaholic. He worked all the time. But that was a good thing as he loved his work. He found his work challenging, rewarding, fulfilling.

My Dad was happy to be able to go to Douglas, Georgia two and a half years ago to take up what he knew to be the right side in a struggle between Douglas Asphalt and the Georgia Department of Transportation. It wasn’t that he had an axe to grind with the DOT. He respected and even loved many people he worked with there over the years. It was that this cause was right, and my dad l-iked charging in on the white horse. Ever one to tilt at windmills, it took all of my Dad’s varied skills to navigate the technical, legal, political and human aspects of that job. This was nothing short of perfect for my father who loved The Quest from the Man of La Mancha. The words were on the wall of many of his offices through the years from CW Matthews and on through other projects. Today these words hang on his bedroom wall,

It is the mission of each true knight...
His duty... nay, his privilege!
To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go;
To right the unrightable wrong.

The true knight working to right the unrightable wrong. I know that sounds a little overdone, but that was how he saw himself. As a kid, I only remember hearing my Mom cuss in response to this one thing my dad said, but they repeated it often. He would say, “My strength is the strength of ten, because my heart is pure.” Then on cue, my Mom would say, “Pure BS.” But she wouldn’t use the initials.

But he considered it a duty and a privilege to be here fighting this fight. At age 73, he was in a stressful job making constant demands on him. It was exactly where he wanted to be doing what he wanted to do.

What he wanted that is until a massive heart attack felled him on February 21. I know he wasn’t quite done. I know that he left unfinished business. The corner had been turned. That he would win the long fight for Douglas Asphalt was assured. But there was more to be done. I know he would have rather not left that unfinished business.

And yet, leaving unfinished business was inevitable. If he had brought this whole mess to a satisfactory conclusion, the one thing we know with certainty is that he would have looked for another problem, just as challenging, to take on. He would have been lost without it.

My father thrived on working with big, multi-layered projects involving lots of men, machinery and materials. From building bridges, rapid transit stations, airport runways, tunneling the Flint River under the Atlanta airport while planes landed overhead, building or rebuilding miles and miles of Interstate or state highways to rebuilding companies, including Asphalt Paving, the little company owned by his parents where he first worked asphalt and got engineering in his blood. Civil Engineering. Now there is a contradiction. I have met a number of engineers. None yet who remained civil.

But Dad never lost his focus. He taught me that the key to success was to bring projects in on time or early and on budget or under. Watch the details. Keep the project on track. It was work he was built to do and we see this passed on most fully through my brother Randy, an engineer like his father. A love of problem solving and working through large projects passed from father to son. They loved to talk on the phone of their projects and challenges as much friend to friend as father to son. Beyond their mutual love of football, lived out not just in watching games on TV, but in Randy playing high school ball and then for Troy State and Auburn where engineering took over for the son as for the father.

But this far in, I have made my Dad sound like a workaholic. But that is not the whole picture. Dad loved the outdoors. He loved to camp and to hunt. In our youth, he and Mom took the five of us sailing, camping, fishing and he taught us to hunt. This most fully passed along to Leigh, his daughter who loved the outdoors as Dad did. Where Dad cleared land for roads, Leigh is a tree hugger. Where he would shoot a deer, Leigh hand feeds them. And yet, there was a common love of the woods and a common desire for conservation and Leigh even learned to cut some trees and to thin a herd of deer, even if she doesn’t do it herself. From those camping trips of our youth, Leigh learned a love of the outdoors and an abiding hatred of Spam.

Tom Logue was also Inspector Gadget. Lately this meant Gerty, that annoying GPS unit that he loved so much he would set the destination when he left his apartment to drive to Douglas Asphalt for the umpteenth time. But Dad had always been an early adopter, the one intrigued by technology and working on the cutting edge. I remember him working with my brother Merphis on what they called a portable computer. It was an old Compaq, the size of a current desktop tower, with a keyboard that popped off the front to reveal the screen. Portable only when compared to computers as big as a desk or a car, this one had the cutting edge amber screen instead of green on black. I see Merphis and Dad excitedly learning how to run it, Merph already knowing how to write batch commands in DOS. Now when was the last time anyone did that? But Merphis is that early adopting, technological guru too. Merphis was also the Army paratrooper, the only one to follow my father the Marine into the military.

Where do I fit in? Well Dad was a voracious reader, so perhaps one author out of five was to be expected. He was more widely read than he let on at times. He loved fiction and read lots of it, but he taught himself so much over his lifetime by reading. It’s not that he had no formal training, but that so much more of what he knew he taught himself by reading. He could still quote lots of the poetry he memorized in school and he loved a good turn of phrase. One night as I was getting ready for bed when I was in about the fourth grade, my father brought me a well worn book. It was Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels and it told of Halliburton’s travels to Kathmandu, the Pyramids of Egypt, the lost city of Petra in Jordan and more places that I have traveled to in person since he gave me that book. I know that gift turned out like he hoped it might. And if the book wasn’t enough, the journey he took with me from Cub Scouts through becoming an Eagle Scout and then Explorer Scout added fuel to that fire. In all this my dad was actively involved.

Then there is Michael, who Mom and Dad nursed at home with the help of Hospice Care. They had to do the impossible task for a parent of watching and caring for a dying son. And Mom and Dad both did this together with amazing care and love. But what I saw in my brother that was lived out so fully in my father was overflowing generosity. My father was raised by parents who saw scarcity wherever they looked. This served them well in the Depression and I am not beating up on my grandparents who I love. But I am just noting what my sister Leigh said, which is that it is wonderful that from such a background, my father became such a generous man, generous to a fault even. He was generous with his time to the communities where he lived through taking part in Rotary, working as an EMT and trainer for EMTs, or here in Athens he served on the library board when they built the current library, and in other ways big and small. He was loving. He was giving. He was generous. All things shared by his children, but so fully in Michael.

There was a downside to this. His ready wallet and desire to entertain made him the man not to send to the grocery store. He would go for one or two items that were needed and would come home with bags of stuff that he had run across in the store and would happily be showing them off. There were always pork rinds. Recently my daughter came home from the store. She went to pick up just a couple of things. She walked in the door and said, “I’m grandpa!” There was a gleam in her eye as she showed us the two new Pringle flavors and the other things she bought. She had discovered my father in her own DNA. That’s fine as my Dad loved his grandchildren, Thomas, Jessica, Taylor and Griffin.

So some of my father lives on. Some of his unfinished business continues in his children who in our different ways reflect some of Thomas Odom Logue, Jr. But there was so much left to do. My Dad wasn’t finished spending time with us kids or his grandkids, he wasn’t finished enjoying the company of his friends and he certainly was not finished spending time with my Mom, with whom he spoke by phone a lot and in person more than one would expect consider she lived here and he was living in Douglas.

All of this fits with his priorities. In going through his personal effects, my brother Randy ran across our father’s governing values as he wrote them out in his DayTimer. Number one was to Love God. Number 2, Love Judy, be good to her. Number three, love children and grandchildren. And lest you think I am preaching a sermon for a saint, number four was, learn to play golf.

Yes, my father had more to do, even if some of it was working on his golf swing. He wasn’t finished. My father was still enjoying life and had more to do, at work and at home. But this too was inevitable. He was never one to sit still for long. He always found something to do. And so no matter when he died, my father was destined to leave unfinished business as he would have always been in the middle of something. And so dying at work was not a surprise, even if it happened ten years too soon. On whatever day his big, generous heart gave out, he was bound to die with his boots on, still fighting the good fight and keeping the faith.

Faith. It’s come late into this eulogy. But I remember my father’s conversion. Not the thing of a moment, though I did see him baptized by Dr. Walker at Mount Paran Church of God. He respected Dr. Walker and Dr. McCluhan. Their own intellectual Christianity appealed to the reader in my father and he began a long journey. Along the way, there were others including the renowned preacher Barbara Brown Taylor whose church my Dad served on the vestry, the church board. And he found that he loved the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, and it’s celebrated abbot and author, Basil Pennington and the other monks there. It was a long journey for the hard drinking, hard fighting Marine and the not so civil engineer, but it was an interesting spiritual path to watch from afar and in some small ways to join him along.

So to my father who served long and hard in so many ways from Marine and father, to engineer and volunteer, I say it is time to rest and to leave your unfinished business to God. For unfinished business is God’s business. We will all leave things undone. The last word will not get written. The last hug will not be given. The last promise will not be fulfilled until time is fulfilled in the fullness of time.

We hear this ring of truth in our readings for this memorial service. Paul wrote to the church in Rome saying, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.”

There is suffering in the present and all creation waits for something more. These words spoke to the persecuted Christians in Rome to whom Paul wrote, but they also speak to those of us gathered today in the shock of our sudden loss, in the grief of mourning Tom Logue, a man we loved. The sufferings of this present time of our loss are nothing compared to the joy my father now shares with his Lord and the joy we shall share when we see him again.