visiting the cemetery, and thoughts on leaving a legacy.

There's an historic cemetery right down the road from the building where we hold church, and for a while now, Todd has been wanting to go check it out.  (Because he knows how to party, if that's not obvious.)  So on Saturday, we chucked the kids in the car and drove over there.

It was small and beautiful, and so old.  One stone marked the grave of someone born in 1700.

The history geek in me was hopped up on a contact high.  (The 'mother of preschoolers' in me was popping homeopathic anxiety tablets while I tried to keep the running, shouting, climbing and other various attempts at grave desecration to a minimum.)  It was so amazing to think about all of the life that cemetery held - parents, children, husbands, wives.  Every single grave marked a story.

It was a family cemetery, and it was small, and there were so many infants and toddlers commemorated.  It was sobering to think about how much pain a single extended family experienced.  There was one tombstone marking the grave of a seventeen-year-old, who was remembered as 'a clever and talented youth.'  That struck me - if you had to sum up your young adult child's life in a brief sentence, what could you even say?  It seemed so affectionate in its brevity.

It seems like a weird place to take kids, I know.  But, as Christians, we actually talk about death pretty often with our kids.  Not in a morbid, sinister kind of way, but in a way that is absolutely necessary and foundational to our faith.  Jesus died.  We will die, too.  Our sins warrant eternal, never-ending death, but Christ in his goodness died so that we can live.  In Christ, we die every day to ourselves, and we identify with him in both his crucifixion and his resurrection.  Though we die with him, we'll be raised with him.

No, it's not the most pleasant thing we discuss, but in Christ, death loses its sting.  It's the final enemy, and Christ has conquered it already, so we don't need to be afraid of it.  So while it's not something we talk about constantly, it's far from a taboo topic at our house.  So the trip to the cemetery was a really great opportunity to talk to the kids about how we all have only one life to live, and how our days matter because we aren't given an endless supply.  We talked a lot about Ecclesiastes, in the spirit of chapter 7, verse 2: "It is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart."


The next day, Todd preached at Anthem - "coincidentally," over Psalm 127 and Christian legacy: how we ought to think about the time we've been given, and how we ought to use it.  It was a really, really powerful message - you should take a listen!