Yesterday evening, our supper table was full.
Beck and I were there with our six children, along with her brother Mark, his wife Bessie, and their four daughters. Somewhere between passing plates and laughing over the day’s events, we heard a story that gave us fresh insight into the mysterious workings of a four-year-old mind.
Aunt Bessie had taken our little Ella to water flowers at a family cemetery. They trudged across a green pasture toward the small fenced enclosure, each carrying a watering can, trying not to spill too much before they arrived. Ella wriggled beneath the horizontal wooden rails of the fence, carefully protecting what little water remained.
Once inside, Aunt Bessie quietly reminded her, “We need to whisper here. This is a place where we show respect to the memory of those who are no longer with us.”
“Those who died?” Ella asked, making sure she understood.
“Yes,” Bessie answered. “Those who have died and are now with Jesus.”
They watered the petunias and the rosebush beside the grave. Then, without speaking, they slipped back under the fence and started the walk toward the farmhouse. As soon as they were far enough away that conversation felt appropriate again, Ella piped up.
“Aunt Bessie, when my daddy dies, we’re gonna plant him in the front yard like that, and you can come see him.”
She stated it as though she understood—but hidden inside the statement was a question. Am I getting this right? Is this what all of you are doing? Is this mysterious ritual what death means?
Bessie laughed. “Oh my . . . I’m afraid I may die before your daddy does.”
Without missing a beat, Ella reassured her. “Oh, then I’ll come see where you are planted!”
While they had been at the grave, Ella had also noticed the simple wooden cross marking the place. She asked several questions, making certain this really was where her little friend’s mother was buried.
“Yes,” Aunt Bessie explained. “That’s where she is.”
The next day, while playing together, Ella turned to her friend and innocently asked, “So . . . did your mommy die on a cross?” To Indie’s great confusion and protest.
To Ella, the cross wasn’t a symbol of what Someone else had done for her friend’s mother. It wasn’t a testimony pointing beyond itself. It was simply the instrument of death. If there’s a cross there, surely that’s how she died.
Oh, the wonder of raising children. Every parent eventually discovers that children have an astonishing gift for asking the questions the rest of us have long since stopped asking. They force us to explain the difference between metaphor and reality, symbol and substance, ritual and relationship.
But from her father’s perspective, there is something remarkably true about both of Ella’s misunderstandings. Because, in a very real sense, she was right. A life faithfully lived is not merely buried. It is planted.
Even her assumption that they were watering the person instead of the flowers isn’t entirely wrong. There is a sense in which faithful lives continue to be watered. Their memory, their sacrifice, their love, their obedience—all of it continues to nourish those who come afterward. In time, buds appear. Flowers bloom. Fruit grows.
I find a lump rising in my throat when I realize that Ella herself is already flowering from lives she has never known. She is standing beneath the shade of trees planted by people whose names she may never hear. Grains of wheat that fell into the ground . . . and did not remain alone.
Of course, Jesus is the great fulfillment of those words. But the pattern belongs to all who belong to Him. Those who choose not to preserve themselves, but to pour themselves into the soil. Those who lay not only their strengths, but also their weaknesses, not only their victories, but also their wounds, not only their joys, but also their losses into the furrows of God’s kingdom. Not into the cold permanence of a concrete mausoleum, but into living soil—where even our disappointments, our sufferings, our departures, and our deaths become seeds that God Himself waters until they bear fruit long after we are gone.
* * *
This week I happened upon a recording of my father’s preaching from the fall of 2018. By then, cancer had greatly weakened him. It was less a sermon than a father speaking to his family.
He reflected on how Christ came as Life itself—the incarnate Word of God, the Word made flesh. John says that “in Him was life, and the life was the light of men.” Then my father reminded us that Peter says the Day Star is to rise in our own hearts, and Paul says we are to shine as lights in the midst of a dark world. Through a frail, aging voice, he pleaded with us not to betray life by surrendering to defeat or hopelessness when God had entrusted us with such a mission.
Then he said something that stuck with me.
“I still have life to give, and I’m going to give it to whoever will listen. If one more message can help someone, I’m going to preach it. If one more writing can strengthen the church, I’m going to write it. Because I still have life to give as long as I have breath.”
Those are the words of someone who understood that life is measured by what is given away. Not by what is preserved.
Later I thought of the writer of Hebrews, speaking of Abel:
“Though he is dead, yet he still speaks.” (Heb. 11:4)
What remarkable words. Death did not get the final sentence. Life did. That is not extinction. That is planting.
* * *
Then I thought again about Ella’s second question. “Did your mommy die on a cross?”
No. Her friend’s mother died the same way my father did. Cancer. But in another—and infinitely deeper—sense, they both did die on a cross. Not literally. Daily. They took up their cross and followed Christ. They spent their lives allowing suffering, disappointment, sacrifice, unanswered questions, and costly obedience to become part of the story God was writing.
And perhaps that’s where the two little misunderstandings come together. A departure from this world only becomes a planting if the life preceding it was lived on a cross. Only when the pain is fastened to Christ. Only when ambitions, pride, control, impatience, self-preservation, and self-rule have already died there. Only then does death become sowing instead of losing. Only then does the grave become a garden. Only then can what appears to be an ending become a beginning.
“If we have died with Him, we . . . shall also live with Him.” (Rom. 6:8)
I do not get to choose the length of my days. I do not get to choose the strength of my body. I do not get to choose whether those I love will leave sooner than I wish. But I do get to choose what my life is about.
I can spend it protecting myself until, at last, I simply disappear into six feet of earth. Or I can become part of a Life that has already conquered death. A Life that walked out of the grave. A Life that made a public spectacle of every power of darkness. A Life that offers a peace that cannot be stolen, a joy the grave cannot extinguish, and a love that “many waters cannot quench.”
I want my life to be a planting—one that keeps bearing fruit long after I am gone.
So perhaps we should take our theology from a four-year-old. Die on a cross. And let it be a planting. Become, in the beautiful language of Scripture,
“the planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.” (Isa. 61:3)
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