My mother was living in a nursing facility near us in Florida when she died at age 95. Our last conversation was during the residents’ Christmas party. She was enjoying the festivities when she said, “I’m ready to go. Take me home.” When I started to roll her wheelchair toward her room, she said, “No! Take me home to Pennsylvania.” We fulfilled her last request by taking her ashes to the cemetery in the town where she lived most of her life and where many people she loved are buried.

We all make that journey. Like Joseph and Nicodemus, we carry the remains of our loved ones to the grave. But because we know the rest of the story, we do not “grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13). I received a sympathy card from two faithful friends who are the same age as my mother. They ended their message with the words, “We know there’s more.”

Before he went to prison for his resistance to Hitler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to his students to report the death of three friends. “Now they sleep with all the brothers who have gone before them, awaiting the great Easter Day of Resurrection. We see the cross, and we believe in the resurrection; we see death, and we believe in eternal life; we trace sorrow and separation, but we believe in an eternal joy and community.”*

Because of Jesus’ resurrection, we face the stony silence of Holy Saturday in hope. We carry our loved ones the way we will one day be carried to the grave—knowing that there’s more.

*Geffrey B. Kelly, The Cost of Moral Leadership: The Spirituality of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2003), 220.