Planting potatoes. That was what I was thinking about instead of the funeral we were attending. I try not to think too deeply at a funeral – and we’ve been to a lot of them lately. That happens when you get older. Maybe thinking about potatoes is my way of avoiding the thought that someday it will be one of us they are honoring.
We are ready for that possibility – no, I mean probability – at least in the planning of finances and notifications and so forth.
But in a greater way, we are also ready in the spiritual sense. We are followers of Jesus. We know that this life is only a shadow of the forever life we have with Jesus when we die and with those we love who have already “graduated.”
But there will still be the grief for whoever is left here. I can take comfort in what Paul says in the scriptures that our grief is not without hope. When you grow potatoes, you only harvest after all of the green above the ground has died. Then you can dig up the potatoes.
Like potatoes, the life we see above the ground is only an announcement of the real treasure below the ground, eternal life.
Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying.” John 11:25 (NLT)
