Cemetery Trip

Last Thursday I really enjoyed the class trip to cemetery. I’m generally not one for poetry and struggled through the reading. Even reading the poem in cemetery wasn’t much of a help. So I started reading the gravestones, looking at the dates and the inscriptions. The oldest grave I found was from 1862. Some of the graves I looked at had inscriptions, some just names and dates. While most inscriptions on the grave stones read something like “loving mother” one caught my attention above the others. It read “he died as he live, a Christian”. This got me thinking about what people will remember about, or if those things will even be worth writing about. My thoughts then came back to the poem I was holding in my hand. Knowing that it was delivered at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral it got me thinking about all the other ways people have chosen to remember him. His face is printed on our money and we have built monuments in his honor. Today he is a hero, but during his own life he was very controversial and was forced to make many difficult decisions that ultimately got him killed. In doing something great and to live a life worth truly living it required great personal sacrifice. Going back to the inscription written on the stone that first brought about this thought I began contemplating what that man’s life must have looked like that being a Christian was so consistent that his family thought that the most important thing remembering about him. I took it as a challenge for my own life, it was a nice reminder to remember that things we do now are important and not just those at the end of our lives. It isn’t always easy walking out the Christian life and it places requirements on the individual. The journey being significant, as is the destination, I want to live in the same way I die, a Christian.