Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash.
When we recently moved to Washington, DC, there was one tourist attraction on the top of my list to visit: Arlington National Cemetery. Eighteen years ago when I went for the first time, it was an interesting historic place. But as I prepared for my second visit nearly two decades later, it was different.
Now I have friends buried there.
Visiting the Dead
I went alone with a dozen yellow roses from the grocery store. I walked through the visitor center, tears blurring my vision, and boarded a bus that would take me to the individual grave sites. I went to Mark’s grave first, in Section 60. As I searched for his name, I recognized many others. At the military school I attended, students memorize the full names of hundreds of classmates. The names I recognized were my peers.
From Mark’s stone, I glanced up and saw the markers for two of my husband’s friends, Doug and Megan. I only brought one bouquet, intending to lay three flowers at the four graves I came to visit. But now I wanted to place a flower at each name I recognized. I didn’t bring nearly enough.
I placed the first flower and stood there, staring at the white granite and a name etched so clearly. Now what? I bowed my head and waited. Only tears.
Praying for the Living
Do I pray? This was a holy moment, and my desire was to cry out to the Lord. But who or what should I pray for? Not my fallen friends. We don’t pray for the dead, only for the living. Should I pray for comfort for their families? Or that their deaths wouldn’t be in vain? Or that God would be glorified somehow? Spiritual angst intermingled with grief and confusion.
Then relief swept over me as I remembered that Jesus told us how to pray. So I prayed the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9–13).
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer in times of sorrow and suffering, we have a tendency to emphasize “Thy kingdom come.” We cry out, Deliver us from this sorrow and pain and confusion and just come already!
But standing in the cemetery, the Holy Spirit led me to pray for myself, for the here and now. The bodies of these friends are in the ground. Their time is done. While we rightly take our grief to the Lord and look forward to Christ’s return, we must also remember that God is still at work today, on earth among the living.
Thy will be done on earth—and in me—as it is in heaven, I prayed over and over again. Thy will be done on earth—in me and through me. Use me how you will.