Summary: Once when I was pastor of a church between youth ministers, I stepped in to lead the young people in that interim season. We were getting close to Easter, and I announced one Sunday night that I had a surprise for them. We were going on a field trip. We loaded the church van and took off. You get the picture, right? A lot of excitement because we were doing something different, unexpected, out of the ordinary. It felt spontaneous which, if you hear that word, you certainly don't associate it with my name. You can ask my wife about our first date, and she'll give you the scoop. I had a van full of teenagers, and they were happy to be doing something special. Imagine their reactions when I pulled up at our destination: an old cemetery not far from our church. Some of the youth thought it was kind of cool. Some of them thought I wasn't serious, and some of them thought it was downright creepy. It was almost Easter, and I had been telling them about how important the resurrection is for our lives. In the midst of that, I read a great line from that great preacher we all wish we could craft words like, Barbara Brown Taylor. Somewhere she wrote that you can't get to Easter without going through a graveyard. And, of course, she's right. She's absolutely right. So I took the youth to a cemetery. I drove them over there to remind them that Easter's resurrection celebration is only meaningful if you remember that someone had to actually die first. A lot of us would just as soon have Easter without Good Friday. But as Brian Erickson has noted, "following Christ cannot be a part-time hobby."[1] If we are going to be serious about following Jesus, then we had best be ready to go some places we might not otherwise choose on our own.
