Standing On My Own Grave

Nothing bridges the imagined chasm of distance between time and eternity like standing on your own grave. I did it today. I stood on the plot I purchased for myself a few years ago and, right there, in Magnolia Cemetery, over the empty ground where I stood and gazed at my parents occupied graves, I remembered again that we were not created for this world. We truly are just sojourners – temporary visitors in a place we sense within is not our true home.

I felt it . . . *the desire* . . . not in a morbid sort of way, but in a way that C.S. Lewis knew:

“In speaking of this desire, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you – the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence.”  (*Surprised By Joy*, p. 16)

Have you ever felt it?  I did today. And I have no fear. None. Only the anticipation that one who recognizes his origin in The Eternal can understand. I think I’ll have a blank stone placed on that plot, for it is a sacred portal. No, better still, it is a promise.  “Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine!”