As the Twin Towers in New York City collapsed into mountains of rubble, I sat far away before a flag-draped casket in the ruins of my own tragedy—saying goodbye to a towering presence in my own life. After a heroic but losing battle with heart failure, my father was gone. And on this day of shock and infamy—9/11/01—we laid him to a well-earned rest on a beautiful hillside in an Idaho cemetery.
Who among us doesn’t have that special place, or places, where our loved ones rest till the day the trumpet blasts, the sod rolls back, and they emerge in youthful immortality?
With every birthday, I come to appreciate more a certain Bible passage: “It is better to go to a house of mourning,” the wise man wrote,
than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of everyone;
the living should take this to heart.
Frustration is better than laughter,
because a sad face is good for the heart.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure
(Ecclesiastes 7:2–4).
I find added insights from more recent translations and appreciate how these verses are rendered in the New Living Translation: “It is better to spend your time at funerals than at festivals. For you are going to die, and you should think about it while there is still time. Sorrow is better than laughter, for sadness has a refining influence on us. A wise person thinks much about death, while the fool thinks only about having a good time now.”*
Keep in mind that the Bible doesn’t say that going to a party, laughing, or having a good time is wrong. Jesus Himself enjoyed social situations. The picture I find in my own search for God in the Word is that He wants us to enjoy life to the full. The Bible also says that there is “a time to laugh” (Ecclesiastes 3:4)—and I find little evidence supporting the idea that God wants His followers to go through life burdened with unrelenting sadness. If a sense of humor is a universal trait of human beings, then it must certainly be because God made that part of the package when He created us.
So Ecclesiastes is not proposing that we should replace laughter with sighing or that we should replace good times with lifelong mourning. How attracted to God would be those who don’t know Him, after all, were they to conclude that His followers live in constant misery?
No, the verses we’ve noted don’t propose that we choose between mourning and mirth. They simply tell us that one of these is “better” than the other—that it deserves our making it a priority.
From my own experience, I know the value of attending a funeral. But here, I want to focus briefly on a few blessings I’ve experienced from spending time in cemeteries.
A cemetery is an ideal place for reflection. Since Dad passed away, I’ve returned many times to his graveside. His marker bears his army rank from his service in World War II. My family and I keep a small flag flying there and flowers. When I visit this special place alone, there’s so much to think about. I think of how grateful I am that after the struggles and hardships of his life, he can remain blissfully unaware of the burdens his loved ones must still carry. As the great battle between good and evil rages and races to its final conflict, he does not have to hear any of the appalling events and changes that fill up the daily news.
And it doesn’t need to be just at Dad’s graveside; I find the quietness and the company of the sleeping lead me to consider my present life and the eternity soon to come. I have a dear friend who also finds cemeteries—most any cemetery—ideal places to meditate on things that matter. In addition to the quietness, the beauty of nature is there all around me, and the silent “presence” of a multitude of those who have gone before creates an environment that contributes to my reflections.
A cemetery is a reminder of my own mortality. As I linger at Dad’s graveside or spend time in some other cemetery, I’m reminded of how swiftly life races by—of how, soon enough, I, too, will be at rest in just such a quiet place, unless the return of Jesus intervenes.
I think of the priceless gift of the unknown days still left to me, and I’m driven to give careful thought to how I should live them. Life’s priorities, much-needed personal changes, wrongs to be righted, accomplishments I hope to achieve, the desire for my life to “count” for God: all of these need my attention as I take the “long view” in a cemetery.
A few years ago, after a cancer diagnosis, I had reason to believe, based on what my doctors said, that I might have less than two years of life remaining. Such news brought me into a direct confrontation with the prospect of my own death in a way nothing else possibly could have.
Since that time, I’ve lost other friends to this terrible “dragon,” but I’m ever so grateful that recently I passed a wonderful milestone: six years of clean scans. Since I’m still here, I need to learn all I can of God’s purpose for whatever time remains to me. And one place I reflect on that most intently is in the gardenlike environment of a cemetery.
A cemetery compels me to understand the awesome power of personal choice. Surrounded by grave markers, I think of the vibrant, full lives represented by the names engraved around me. Each of the people now resting in this place knew the full spectrum of human emotion and thought: joy and despair, love and loss, success and failure, peace and anxiety. Represented here are those who experienced marriage and divorce, child-rearing, the pursuit of education and career, times of fun, and times of grief.
Yet some of these who sleep will hear the sound of the trumpet at the return of Jesus. Others will sleep a thousand years too long and awake to a final judgment leading to eternal oblivion. The difference? The choices each person made. God’s choice is that we will all be with Him for eternity. But He will never force or veto our choices. And it’s our daily choices toward Him or away from Him that ultimately decide which resurrection will be ours.
I am reminded, as I linger in the presence of those whose choices are now irrevocable, that I still have the precious gift of time in which to change or reaffirm my choices. Then, if and when I sleep in death, I will have made the specific choice for Jesus to be my Savior and Lord, to live in me and change me.
A cemetery leads my thoughts to the day of resurrection. Life can get so hectic, so rushed and frenetic, that it feels as if we’re living on permanent fast-forward. The here and now can become so all-consuming that we rarely find or make the time to take the larger view and consider eternity.
But with one eye on Bible prophecy and the other on what’s happening in our world, it’s hard to miss that we’re rapidly closing in on the last years of the long great controversy. And the day Jesus returns is the day of resurrection. There is good reason that we call this our “blessed hope.”
Many years ago, as a new pastor, I conducted a funeral for a young girl in my church, who went in for a routine surgery and fell into a coma from which she never woke. At the graveside, tears streamed down the faces of her parents and loved ones. Occasional quiet sobs could be heard. But I could see in those tear-stained faces a confident hope in the certainty of resurrection and reunion.
In contrast, perhaps a few hundred feet away, those of us gathered under the graveside canopy could hear the despairing wails of another funeral taking place that same day. The heartbreaking cries signaled the utter despair of hopelessness—the agony of a goodbye that was to be forever.
“We do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death,” Paul said, “so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
We who feel the wrenching pain when our loved ones are torn from us have not only God’s immediate comfort and healing of heart, but the golden hope of a day when we will stand face-to-face with those we’ve lost, look into their eyes, and see reflected there our own realization that never again will another goodbye be necessary.
The next time you find yourself near a cemetery, take some quiet time to reflect and meditate. Whether a run-down patch of wooden grave markers, an old churchyard, or a modern place of burial, you will likely come away with a renewed sense of joy in the promise of the resurrection.
