As I write this, our team is busily setting up for Fall Fest, our largest church event of the year…reaching over 1500 people in our church family, neighboring community, schools, and workplaces! This super fun event is Saturday from 10AM-1PM. Bring your costumes, your friends and family, and join us for a completely free, totally fun time for all.
I love the way Fall Fest serves as little bright spot in a typically dark season. Now if you love Halloween, with all its ghosts and goblins, you’ll maybe want to skip this post. I have a hard time understanding a celebration of the pretend monstrous and frightening in a world that can be both monstrous and frightening. I’ve wondered maybe the homes that fill their front yards with gravestones maybe just haven’t yet had a lot of experience seeing a beloved’s name carved on one.
But I had an experience recently on vacation that had me studying and contemplating a lot of gravestones.
We toured The Freedom Trail in Boston this month (10/10 stars. Would recommend). This self-guided walk took us past tons of famous historical locations of the U.S. Revolutionary War. A couple of the stops were old “burying grounds” where we saw the graves of Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, and others.
But the thing that was most intriguing was the wording on most of the headstones:
“Here lies buried the body of…”
Not here lies Uncle Jimmy. Or Grandma Caroline. Or Dad.
Thanks be to Jesus Christ, the Mighty Victor over the grave, here lies buried only the body. The shell. A shadow.
The real person—their soul, and spirit, and personality, that is not here. That is not bury-able. That part has met its Maker as they say. And He in His merciful justice has decided what to do with each one.
As you drive through the neighborhoods covered in cobwebs and bones and blood on this holiday determined to make you afraid; don’t let it. Because you are in Christ, there is literally nothing to fear. No ghosts, or goblins, or zombie apocalypse or supply chain shortage.
“For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
Hope to see you at Fall Fest! 10/10 stars! Would recommend!