Walking Among the Dead

Yesterday, I got to see my mother for the first time in two months by making a visit to her home.  She and I have been very careful with our covid-19 isolation.  So, we decided to take the risk of a visit.  We spent the day going for car rides around the countryside, enjoying the gorgeous North Georgia spring day.

One of mother’s “jobs” is to keep nice-looking, fake floral arrangements on the family grave plot, across the old highway from my family’s home church.  Because the four she had ordered arrived, one of our stops was at the church cemetery.  We put the retiring arrangements in the trunk of her car.  See, there is a “pecking order”, of sorts.  Our immediate family gets the newest “freshest” (an incongruent descriptor....) floral creations, while the more old, tired, faded ones are handed down to the graves of more distant relatives.  Accordingly, we next visited the graveyard where other relatives are buried, appropriating two of the arrangements there.  And finally, we visited a third cemetery, where we graced the graves of mother’s great-great-grandfather and also the graves of family friends with the remaining two.

Part of the adventure was mother remembering (or not...) where so-and-so was buried.  “I think it’s beside that large tree.”  “Well, maybe it’s the next one.”  She did the directing, as I did the searching out and placement.  All looked more “inviting” - - really?! - - than they had before our visits.

When I was a child of 5 years old, my mother worked full-time as a school guidance counselor.  She worked outside the home all my years there.  The kindergarten in those days was a private option, for those who wanted to pay tuition.  Also, it was only half-day.  Mother dropped me off in the empty garage, where the classes were held, on her way to school in the mornings.  The only other child to arrive so early was Tony, who terrorized me on a regular basis.  (That’s another story.)

At the half-day mark, another mother would retrieve me and her children, depositing me at the home of my great-grandparents, who lived right beside their home church and even closer to its cemetery.  In those days, grandparents just fed their young grandchildren and, on sunny days, let them roam.  Where did I roam?  To the cemetery, of course!  Most of the names I did not know, but I sharpened my imagination looking at their tombstones, inventing stories about their lives.  Walking among the dead.

I thought of these memories yesterday as, once again, I roamed where I had a half-century ago.

You may not have spent much time in a graveyard, but we all walk among the dead.  Some of us are “the walking dead.”

The apostle Paul stated quite frankly in Ephesians 2:4 that, before Christians were met by the Holy Spirit and brought to spiritual life, we “were dead in our trespasses and sins”.  Christians who believe so strongly in predestination to the exclusion of free will claim it is impossible for something or someone dead to make a response or to make a choice for or against Christ.  I won’t plunge off that theological precipice here.  The point is, before we meet and accept Jesus Christ as Savior, the Bible rightly claims we are dead and totally incapable of gaining our own eternal life, achieving our own salvation, no matter how “good” we try to be.

This is a deadness so much more pernicious than physical death because, whereas physical death is a one-time happening, spiritual death leads to torment for all of eternity.  A story in the book of Luke (16:23-24) tells of the man who went to Hell and proclaimed “for I am in torment”.  He also begged for a drop of water to assuage his thirst.  Though not stated, an additional dimension of this torment will be for all who enter a one-way ticket to unending separation from God.  Hell is a place God will not be.  The worst experiences endured in this earthly life would not even begin to compare.

Which is it for you?  Are you one of “the walking dead”, or are you spiritually alive, yet walking among the dead as you live here day to day?  Whatever your answer, there is an urgency.  For the non-Christian, obviously, the urgency is to make a decision for Jesus Christ, before it is too late.  For the Christian, the urgency involves seeing those whose souls are perishing.  Both graveyards and the rest of this world are places of concealment.  The physically dead are concealed in tombs.  The spiritually dead appear to the eyes like everyone else, for the most part.  Satan is famous for deception....and complacency.  He works on both groups, to spiritually damn the former and to spiritually incapacitate the latter.

I pray God will open the eyes of those who are dead, blind or sleeping, while we still walk above ground, while (as the Bible describes) “it is still day...  For the night is coming, when no man can work.”  (John 9:4)