I visited Michael Garner’s gravesite today. No, I didn’t know him. He died fifty five years ago at age sixteen. It has been a beautiful day today. I went to Walmart and passed a country cemetery I had never visited before. (There are few such around anymore). We recently had experienced some high winds and rain, so I thought I would check to see if any flower arrangements needed setting back upright. None did. But I noticed the young man’s grave as a beautiful fresh flower arrangement had been placed on the grave. I then noted that he had died in 1964 and was born in 1948. I thought, “What love and what enduring grief that after the passage of fifty-five years someone still comes to this grave and places fresh flowers thereon.” He died so young and may well have been a very godly young man with godly parents. “Time and chance happens to us all,” say the scriptures (Ecclesiastes 9:11). The good do die young sometimes.
Those of us who have now entered into our seventh and eighth decade of life are supremely blessed. We have no kick coming against God or fate. So what if we weren’t blessed with riches or fame or whatever. We had life and a lot of it. The wealthy thirty year old with a terminal disease would surrender all of his wealth to live another thirty years or more!
Christ’s Faithful Servant (Galatians 1:10-12),
Donald Wiley