Thought of the Week: What Will Your Epitaph Say?

Ever walk through a cemetery on the way to a particular burial plot just to notice the epitaph on a gravestone? An epitaph is a summary statement to commemorate a person’s life. It may say something along the lines of, “Loving daughter, mother, and wife,” “Brave Soldier Who Fought to Defend the Lives of Many,” or “When All Hope Was Gone, He Never Gave Up.”

Sometimes, these epitaphs are humorous in a morbid way. In Philadelphia, on the tombstone of a man who died of yellow fever in 1790 is written:

Grim death took me

without any warning

I was well at night

and dead in the morning.

 In describing the death of one Anna H., who fell from a presumed fall, has an epitaph which reads:

Here lies the body of our Anna

Done to death by a banana

It wasn’t the fruit that laid her low

But the skin of the thing that made her go.

Some even described individuals who weren’t well liked. In Nova Scotia a tombstone reads:

Here lies Ezekial Aikle

Age 102

The Good Die Young.

 Sometimes, an epitaph does not properly describe an individual’s life. That’s not to demean that person in the least bit but it is true. Maybe the words written do not do proper justice to the person in the grave who was so caring that it is hard to express in such words. Sometimes, that person doesn’t deserve the words written on the grave.

Throughout the Bible there are “epitaphs” concerning certain men and women. It is through these that we remember them and their character. If your epitaph were to be completely honest about you, what would it say? Would it be similar to the ones we read of in the Bible? Would it be said that you had “forsaken the right way and gone astray” as those who followed after the way of Balaam, loving the wages of unrighteousness (2 Peter 2:15). Would your tombstone read that you wanted to be first like Diotrephese, who loved the preeminence (3 John 9)? Maybe it would say that you, like David, were after God’s own heart (1 Samuel 13:14). Will it read “Ready to be Offered” (2 Timothy 4:6) or “Unprepared to Meet Thy God”? Hopefully, it can be etched in stone that we “became obedient from the heart to that form of teaching whereunto ye were delivered” (Romans 6:17). Sadly, there will be some who it could be said are “not able to enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19).