He is Not Here, For He is Risen

I kind of have a thing for graves. I know that sounds so weird, but I'm so interested in the history of a person that graves represent.  I also love the concept of memorialization. When we were in Pennsylvania a little over a year go, I saw a little cemetery on the side of the road, walled off from the field of cows  around it, stones just quietly standing sentry over lives gone by.  I had to run across the street and look around a bit and found that it had graves in it from the 1800's.

This morning, I was looking through my pictures so I could make an instagram post of the Garden Tomb in Israel. In scrolling through the couple of pictures on my phone, something struck me about those two.... As many graves as I have visited, as many burial sites on which I have stood, from Westminster Abbey, to Pompeii. to Cambodia's Killing Fields, to Arlington, to the Baha'i Gardens in Haifa, to every cemetery in between, not one time had I visited a burial site that didn't actually contain a body. Until October. It's the first time I have ever gone inside a grave rather than just standing outside or above or next to.

Resurrection Sunday is about so much more than centerpieces and egg hunts and pretty pictures. It's the beauty contained in an empty grave. It's the hope of an eternal promise.