Graveyards

Graveyards have been put in the backyard of our culture.  They used to be in plain sight, but nowadays it seems they exist not in the midst of those places we live, but on the edges on the communities where we spend our time.  We no longer have to see them as places to be passed as we go our way and neither do we have to think about the reminder their presence might speak to us.  As is sometimes said around these parts, "Out of sight, out of mind."

 

I remember it being different as I was growing up.  The churches which dotted the rural landscape were small, but most all had their own burying ground.  And, maybe it was because I went there one day to leave a father when he was too young to be going to such a place that I have so many memories of going and leaving the place littered with memorials to the dead.  Early on as a child I learned to live with the reality of death which soon took me to a hope of heaven and a resurrection.  Long before such a hope became a part of any understanding of doctrine or theology, this hope was growing within me. 

Of course, graveyards exist in the unseen places of our backyards, but they speak important words to us about our living.  Listening to those words about dying enables us to do a better job of living.  There are too few places and moments which speak to us about the fragile nature of our life and the certainty of our mortality; thus, we are tempted to live as if there will always be a tomorrow.  It may be a guarantee we want to give ourselves, but it is not one God gives to us.  He gives to a guarantee that right living will make our journey through the span of our earthly years worth something and He also guarantees through the great graveyard escape of His only Son that death does not have the last word.  It did not have the last word for Jesus.  Neither does it have the last word in our life.