I could all but hear him playing the piano at his own funeral, perhaps accompanying the congregation as it filled the sanctuary with The Church’s One Foundation. I could almost see him heading to heaven on the wings of a waltz, leaving behind with such great grace a world made more humane by his presence.

If you believe as I do that our lives are our best sermons, then Rev. Harlan L. Creech Jr. delivered a beaut. He died last week at the Asbury Care Center. He was 96, though that silver head of hair would have looked grand on any 56-year-old. While he spent a lifetime pastoring churches across the Western North Carolina Conference, he graced Myers Park United Methodist Church with his presence the last years of his life. “A giant,” Dr. Howell called him at the service.

Really, though, he was a giant whose life echoed beyond this church , beyond any church really, for the lessons he left apply to anyone who lives and loves and then must learn to live again.

Much of his life’s story was told in a powerful piece in The Charlotte Observer in 2007. It was my great honor to have had Harlan fill in some of the blanks for me after earning his spot on the front page. Since his death, I’ve been re-reading a precious detail from the story, how his late wife, Beckie, smiled at him from 13 pictures that filled his bedroom. She was the utter love of his life for nearly 66 years, and when she died of a heart attack in 1996, a piece of him died, too. It happens to so many of us, doesn’t it? The sadness stuck so tightly to his soul that he had to be hospitalized at one point for depression.

But then Harlan made the turn that many of must inevitably make in this world of loss, accepting the need to live again, even if differently. His comeback, though, was, well, cooler than some others. In his 80s and into his 90s, he took ballroom dancing lessons. He took piano lessons, learning to play the instrument that Beckie had played so beautifully for him and others. He also took up bridge, just in case there was a spare moment or two unaccounted for.

The zest had returned.

“I’ve begun a new chapter in my life,” Harlan told The Observer’s Kathy Haight way back when. “I can make it what I want.”

What a powerful creed, one that captures how a lovely man lived a beautiful life until we all gathered to sing Love Divine, All Loves Excelling at his service of death and resurrection.

I can make it what I want.

I’ve come to understand that our lives are our best sermons.

For Harlan L. Creech Jr., let us all say “Amen.”