No week’s holiday would be complete without time spent wandering around a graveyard. So that’s what we did today, spending a pleasant half hour looking for the final resting place of my wife’s relatives, believed to be in the burial ground surrounding St Mary’s Church in Carew.
But our quest was in vain, the inscriptions on most of the headstones too weathered and worn to be read by modern day passers by.
Which made me think of how all but a very few of us will eventually be either lost to those who one day might come searching for us or, alternatively, simply anonymous to those frequenting such places – as were the bones of those who, in centuries past, uncovered them whilst digging new graves, only to subsequently be deposited in the charnel-house, along with the remains of countless other long forgotten lives.
So wouldn’t it be great if there was someone who not only knew us and remembered us in death, but also could be trusted to keep the promise he has made his followers – to one day come and take us to be with him where he is.
As I believe there is. [John 14:3]
Later, we visited the Lilly Ponds at Bosherton and, from there, walked part of the Pembrokeshire coastal path. As we strolled along the cliffs, we could hear guns being fired as part of the military exercises that were being carried out nearby. For us the noise was merely an irritation but I was conscious of those, in Ukraine for example, for whom, together with falling missiles, the sound holds a far greater significance – a constant reminder, as it is, of the transience of all our lives.
Even so, tragic though this is, I’m glad that believers in Ukraine too will not be forgotten – not in life, and certainly not in death.
Related posts:
To read ‘When Bad Things Happen’, click here
To read ‘Weeping with those who weep’, click here
To read ‘Still weeping with those who weep’, click here
To read ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’, click here
To read ‘on the FALLEN and the FELLED’, click here
To read ‘When our joy will be complete’, click here
To read ‘What becomes of the broken hearted? Sorrowful yet always rejoicing on Palm Sunday’, click here
To read ‘Why do bad things happen to good people? Sorrowful yet always rejoicing on Good Friday’, click here
To read ‘Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things? Rejoicing, though temporarily sorrowful, on Easter Day’, click here.
To read ‘T.S. Eliot, Jesus and the Paradox of the Christian Life’, click here
To read ‘Monsters’, click here
To read ‘On Sleeping like a Baby’, click here
To read “Hope comes from believing the promises of God”, click here
To read ‘Reflections on the death of Leonard Cohen’, click here
Some musings 