A Grave Perspective
Happy Memorial week-end! I hope you have some neat plans for the holiday. My family has done some pretty cool things on this holiday. When our kids were first married. The six of us spent the week-end together. We would play games, cook-out and just enjoy each other’s company. One week-end we build a storage shed in our back yard (it turned out to be more work than we thought, in fact that may be the last time we spent the week-end together).
I must tell you as a kid growing up, we never spent the holiday having fun. I’m sure we had some fun, but my parents were devoted to the purpose of the day. Every Memorial Day after lunch we piled in the car a visited cemetery’s. We decorated graves of mostly family members who had gone on to their reward. My parents planned the route to visit the half dozen or so cemetery’s. For a kid, it seemed the waste of a good afternoon. The only thing that made it worthwhile, we always had the last stop at the Tasty Freeze for soft serve ice-cream.
For my parents it was a journey in memory. Decorating the graves and remembering two things; the past, and what the people meant to us, and the future. Some day we would join them! Today I call what they did so faithfully and loyally, a grave perspective. That’s right the visit to the grave, gave them a renewed perspective about life. This new or renewed perspective included dying. The Bible tells us that ‘we all have an appointment with death’ (I Hebrews 9:27). An overview of life will include death. May I remind you that death signals the end of your body, but not the end of you.
The last time I decorated my Fathers grave, I did it for my mother who was unable to travel. She prepared some flowers and asked me to place them on her husband’s grave. I did, and I couldn’t help but thinking about 2 things; one, how much he impacted my life and two, that I will see him again someday. Thankyou God for the hope, forgive us for being too caught up in a holiday that we have no time for a ‘grave perspective on life’!