Good morning church family,
The closer Kelly got to school, the more aware she became that something wasn’t right. The long ribbon of sidewalk she traveled every day to Evermonde High was usually filled with other kids like her. On any normal school day, scores of teenagers could be seen trudging to class; bent over under bulging backpacks, walled up behind ear buds, and chewing breakfast bars with sleepy, bovine expressions on their faces. But today, Kelly walked the sidewalk all alone.
As she rounded the corner of Lyons and Lafayette, Kelly caught her first glimpse of the high school that lay a couple-hundred yards down the street. The broad and sloping concrete stairway that led up to a large covered portico near the school’s entrance was absent its usual flood of climbing students. Looking at the pedestals sitting beneath the school’s large and stately columns, Kelly saw no one sitting down to scribble out his homework assignment or to scroll on her phone. Most striking of all, the line of school buses that usually stretched down Lafayette like a locomotive idling in the depot yard, was nowhere to be found. The proud school building looked almost sad and hollow. “What’s going on?” Kelly wondered to herself; standing still now and trying to process the sight. “Am I way late? Way early?”
Kelly had been out sick the day before. “I had a high fever,” she suggested with furrowed brow, “but I wouldn’t have lost complete track of…”
Just then she noticed Mr. Saunders, Evermonde’s principal, coming down the school steps. Kelly quickly continued her procession, hoping to get within earshot of the administrator before he was out of sight. “Mr. Saunders,” Kelly called out as her principal hit the bottom step. He didn’t hear her but it didn’t matter. He’d turned and was walking toward her.
“Good morning,” the principal said once their paths eventually crossed. He had looked up from a folder full of paperwork he was studying and saw Kelly walking toward him as though she was headed to class. The principal couldn’t hide the quizzical expression on his face.
“Good morning, Mr. Saunders,” Kelly said somewhat sheepishly. It didn’t appear that Mr. Saunders had recognized her. “What’s going on today? Where is everybody?”
“Oh – there’s no school today,” the principal said; a bit too eagerly. “Today’s a holiday – it’s Good Friday.”
“Oh yeah, of course,” Kelly replied; lying. She had no idea what a “Good Friday” was. Since moving from Chicago to Louisiana the previous fall, she’d been initiated in all kinds of odd and curious things. “Well, thank you Mr. Saunders,” Kelly said, looking down and pulling her phone out of her back pocket. “I guess I’ll just head on back home then.”
“Okay, sorry about that,” Mr. Saunders said, smiling and picking back up his gait. “See you on Monday!”
Kelly suddenly felt conspicuous standing there with her backpack on and dressed in school clothes. She now noticed all the squinting glances she was receiving from drivers of cars passing by. Eager to get off the main road, Kelly took a side street she was fairly sure would wind around through neighborhoods and dump her out closer to home on Lyons. The sun was coming up now and the mid-April morning in the Bayou was quickly turning warm. Feeling hot, Kelly spied a concrete picnic table sitting under a large magnolia tree near the entrance to a cemetery. Feeling hungry all of a sudden, she decided to sit for a spell and have her lunch for breakfast.
The late-morning air was still cool under the shade of the magnolia and the light breeze clapping the leaves overhead felt refreshing on Kelly’s neck. She sat on the table’s top and let her feet rest on the bench below. Looking out over the cemetery, she breathed out a long sigh and let her shoulders drop. Her heart was turning light as she began to glory in the unexpected holiday. As she ate her turkey and cheese sandwich and sipped on her iced coffee, a meditative mood settled on her head. The quiet stillness of the cemetery park was proving peculiar food for her soul. But the faint hum of the morning traffic back on Lafayette, had her desiring to press further into the park in search of a sanctity she couldn’t articulate but knew she needed.
Leaving her backpack on the picnic table, Kelly ventured off to walk among the gravestones. As she nibbled on a granola bar and listened to the ice clink in her cup, she took note of some of the dates on the markers. This was evidently one of the older cemeteries in Houma. Most of the lifespans reported on the stones had been lived out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With few exceptions, the granite, marble, and limestone markers leaned at funny angles; their crooked stances made more pronounced by the straight trunks of the pine, oak, and elm that flanked the ends of every row. Black mildew and flowering fungus covered the tops of the stones and were spreading down their fronts and backs. Kelly noted some of the olden-sounding names. There was a Hortense married to a Clarence, a Millicent wed to an Everett, and an Adelaide joined in conjugal bliss to a Jarvis.
But more than the funny names, curious symbols, and interesting histories untold between the hyphenated dates; what most caught Kelly’s attention were the oddly written epitaphs carved neatly into the stone on the front of the graves. Most of the inscriptions appeared to be religious in nature; seeming to Kelly to be medieval in their language and forms. She mostly just read over them as novelties; not really reading for comprehension. But when she came across the grave marker belonging to Marguerite Cormier, something that had been carved in the stone instantly captured her attention. Marguerite, who had died when she was only seventeen, had the following epitaph written under her name and above the symbol of a cross:
On Good Friday
He proved His love for me
On Good Saturday
My debt was paid in full
On Good Sunday
His resurrection secured an eternity for me
Kelly stared at the stone for a long time; reading and rereading its message. Looking around at all the graves within sight, she saw lots of crosses, crucifixes, and crowns of thorns. Over and over, Kelly saw the name of Christ carved out on the stones. Did Good Friday have something to do with Jesus? Kelly had a sense that it did. “If Jesus is the ‘He’ in Marguerite’s message,” Kelly wondered in her heart, “how did Jesus prove His love for her on Good Friday? And how did what happened on Saturday and Sunday give Marguerite the hope she seemed to have?”
Sitting carefully on the top of Marguerite’s gravestone, Kelly stuffed the granola bar wrapper in her front pocket and pulled out her phone. Into the search field on her Google app, Kelly typed: “what is good friday”.
We’re looking forward to gathering together tomorrow morning to hail the King who conquered death on our behalf. Praise Him!!! May the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!
