Victory

The snow was melting into deep puddles of slush as I carried a fresh bouquet of flowers through the shrouded pathway that led to the grave of my grandma's parents and brother. The cemetery was full of the living bringing Easter flowers to the graves of the dead.

While my grandma paused for a prayer by the graveside, I stared across the cemetery at the hundreds of crosses that scattered the hillside. The names, the year of birth, the dash, and the death date. How sobering to think that all of life is merely the dash between these two dates.

In this particular cemetery many famous people are buried... people that impacted more than the lives of their immediate families or friends. Composers, Olympians, writers, scientists, war heroes. Yet death shows no partiality: both the famous and the nobodies succumb to its power.

I laid the colorful flowers onto the snowy, muddy gray of the grave, and noted the ironic contrast. The living among the dead. It seemed out of place.

I never knew these distant relatives, so going to their graves is more of a tradition, and out of respect for my grandma. However, in the afternoon we went to a different cemetery where my grandpa and his sister are buried. I was close with both of them, and in some ways their deaths greatly defined my teen years as I began to gain a more realistic view of the world... death, pain, and grief included.

We stood around this grave, and I stood where I stood over six years ago as my grandpa's casket was lowered into crypt. I remembered the bitter sting of death as tears squeezed out from behind my eyelids. I remembered how final it seemed when the top of the crypt was set in place, sealing the casket on top of my loved ones. I remembered the anger, the hurt.

And then.

Somewhere deep inside of me... a small, tiny peace that grew outwards from its epicenter until it stilled my whole shaking frame. The peace then escalated into a deafening silence. And then a whisper: "Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is your victory? O Grave, where is your sting?"

Because just as out of place as it is for those living flowers among the dead... my Savior is not among the dead. He is risen. He is alive.

So I turned and looked down the long, paved driveway toward the distant hills, knowing this cemetery will one day no longer be a place of the dead but of the living, bursting victoriously from their graves... going to meet their conquering Lord... either with great joy or with fear and trembling. But ultimately... death is not final. Because my Savior has conquered death and He extends life and hope to those who accept His sacrifice.

 Death is conquered.

Life has won.

Happy Easter!