A Humbling Experience

All week I've been anticipating going on a fieldtrip with my classmates for our class Leadership and Administration in Youth Ministry. Today was the day. None of us knew where we were going, because our professor refused to tell us. We all loaded up into vans, speculating where is was that we could possibly be going. Imagine our surprise this afternoon when we pulled into a graveyard.
We unloaded from the vans and Professor Brandt talked with us for a moment and told us to spend about 20 minutes just walking around and looking at the graves, what they said, what they looked like, the dates on them, the surroundings.
I looked at the area that had the babies first. The first stone I looked at said "Lost but not forgotten." I didn't think much about it, until I was further down the line of the baby graves and saw places where there was a stone, or a marker of some sort, signifying that a baby lay there, but time had faded away the name. Have these children been forgotten?
After I looked at a long line of childrens graves, many of which the stones said "our bright eyed child", "or beloved child" and other variations of those two, I visited some other graves. One of the ones I saw had a stone for two people, and the date of thier marriage was on it. The date was in 1996. The date of the death of the wife was in 2000. Someone else said they found one that had the same thing, except the date of the death of the wife was the day after the wedding. I saw a lot of war veteran graves. But they were forlorn, by themselves, and out of place with the rest of the graves. Alone.
A lot of the stones had poems, or epitaphs on them. Beloved Mother. Beloved Father. Beloved (fill in the blank). It was interesting to realize that people want others to look at their family members graves and know that they were loved.
The last grave I looked at had passages from the Koran on them, but there was something remarkably different about these graves than the rest of them. All the foliage around these graves were dead, or dying, and covered in spider webs. I'm sure it was just a coincidence, well... I'm not sure I believe in coincidence, but it just made me think. As a Christian, I know that death is not the end for me, for there is life after death, an eternity in heaven with Christ. I can't say that I know for sure that these islamic graves held people who's names aren't written in the book of life, but I can make an educated guess. It just dawned on me that these graves symbolized life without the saving grace of Jesus. It's death. Spiritual death.
It was a pretty intense experience. Life is short.