Perhaps it's disrespectful to be sitting out here eating Jelly Bellies and contemplating life on Mary Ann McTimmond's grave. If it is, and if she would have minded in a former life, I know she doesn't mind now. She, and likely those she influenced, has been dead and buried longer than I or my parents or my grandparents have been alive.

In a sense, she doesn't matter anymore. All she's left behind her, to me who never knew her, is a mossy, faded gravestone and a story that ended too soon. She was only twenty seven when she died. Four years older than me.

I wonder if she knew she was going to die, if it was some kind of long illness that took her. I wonder if she feared death. Or perhaps she looked forward to seeing again her infant son whom she'd held and loved for only a day before he was taken from her. She was twenty five then. Two years older than me. Too young to lose a child.

I wonder if she gave him a name before he died, a name she withheld because it was too precious to be carved in sullen stone and slowly forgotten. I'm sure she never thought it would be her name beside his lonely little title, for he died two years before she did.

Perhaps even in heaven children need mothers. It's a silly, theologically incorrect idea, but to my earth-bound heart it has a beautiful poetry to it.

I wonder if she left other children behind her and, if so, what became of them. Was her passing mourned by many or was her death the cause of few tears? Perhaps life moved on rapidly without her, the fingers of time quietly sewing up the hole she left.

Who she was, how she loved, what kind of influence she had doesn't matter now. And someday it will not matter about me either, not to those who stop to read my name on an unknown grave.

But my name has not yet been carved in stone. I am the only living soul in this graveyard, and narcissistic as it may sound, mine is the only name here that matters, here and now. These stones around me, these Yoders and Hershbergers and Schumakers, all testify to lives lived and ended.

The bones and dust buried here were once people with choices to make, things to do, tears to cry, and lives to live. Their problems were as real as mine are now, their joys as deep. They lived lives that mattered, not to me sitting here among them, but to the ones they loved and to the God Who loved them.

They were given their space of time in this beautiful world. So was I. Theirs is over. Mine is not.

Life matters. It may look to the world as if it ends in a lonely stone in a lonely yard, with fading memories that are soon gone altogether. But the endings around me are not endings at all, not to those who claimed Jesus as their Savior. For the lives lived for Him, these stones are just a beginning, an entrance into life eternal.

But it was how they lived while they were here that enabled them to step from this life into that one.

Mary Ann McTimmonds . . . Michayla Roth . . . not so different in the sight of a God Who sees all, Who dwells beyond time.

So while the sun is shining and my heart is beating, I will seek to live to His glory, and when it is my stone laid to rest in perhaps this very graveyard, I will be ready to go.

What an incredible hope. . .

"For this God is our God for ever and ever: He will be our guide even unto death." Psalm 48:14