The Exhumation
There was a funny Country Song that circulated some years ago, and the chorus went something like this; “I’m digging up bones, I’m digging up bones, exhuming things that’s better left alone, I’m resurrecting memories of a life that’s all dead and gone, yet tonight I’m sitting alone, and digging up bones.” Here is a Quote; “Then let us not gather together all the unpleasant pictures—the iniquities and corruptions and disappointments, the evidences of Satan’s power—to hang in the halls of our memory, to talk over and mourn over until our souls are filled with discouragement. A discouraged soul is a body of darkness, not only failing to receive the light of God, but shutting it away from others. Satan loves to see the effect of the pictures of his triumphs, making human beings faithless and disheartened.” {CCh 80}
It is so easy to go about our life and then to have “A Pity Party” and return back and to re-visit and to re-call past traumatic situations, to then get out our spade and to start digging, and the more recently buried ones just plain stink, and are obnoxious, and very quickly everyone knows all about them, and then the accusations and slander descends upon us once again. The long gone hurts and woes from years back, just become a pile of dry bones at our feet, and so often we pick them up again, try to re-live the dead past, which often gets embellished way bigger than they actually were, out comes the “Telling Bone,” I mean the Telephone, and we start to unload on others, and the gossip lines run hot as the story is oft repeated by those that were there, or for those who did not know the trauma, it gets repeated as being very current news, it just happened, did you hear about what’s just happened, the “Telling Bone” runs hot as the “Jungle Drums” beat out the bad news, and the stench and the past trauma is once again exhumed and is back and roosting in our hair.
Back to the start; do you often sing this wee chorus, “I’m digging up bones, I’m digging up bones, exhuming things that’s better left alone, I’m resurrecting memories of a life that’s all dead and gone, yet tonight I’m sitting alone and digging up bones?” Is your cupboards and house full of “Skeletons in the Closet?” Why not have a “Dead and Buried” past, by confession and forsaking your past, burry them deeply and to start a “New Life,” and especially a “New Life in Jesus Christ” with the past forgiven, restored through the Healing of the Holy Spirit, the Past is forgotten as you now live a “New Life in Christ Jesus.”
Is your life, is my life full of Bones, or worse, mummified corpses propped up about in us like some Macabre Museum Display? Why not have a “Spring Clean” and invite Jesus Christ into your life, and then together haul out your grubby Past, and to then dig a great big deep hole and then to consign them all into it, and then to cover it over thickly, no plaque or memorial spire, just cover it with lawn so that it will never be found again, gone are the days of Exhumation and weeping over them, they are gone and right now we live that “New Life” where all is new for “we don’t go that old way anymore” as we press forwards in newness of life, the Past, well I don’t go there anymore, as it is a forgiven and forgotten Past that is bound up in Christ Jesus, forgiven and passed away, and soon to be permanently Erased from all record in the Books of Heaven.
There is a story from a wee Island, where a lady disappeared without a trace, she was supposed to have traveled to another Island to a new life, but nobody ever took her there, she just evaporated as it were. The years passed and a new Chief Detective was appointed and his first case was to re-look at this situation, and to see what they could uncover after many years. So the Detective visited the husband, and the story was pretty much the same, new enquiries were just about the same as the old dusty ones, dead end. Then the Detective, looked “outside the box” as it were, and then it was there in plain sight, so he got the X-rays from the missing lady, and there was a broken arm bone that was a few years old, a good place to start.
They went to the Husbands Job Site, and there in his classroom there was a Skeleton, as is usual in a Biology Classroom, you know the one, all wired together and hanging from a hook in the top to a frame, that numerous students over many years had studied for their Anatomy studies, a closer look at the arm bone, and the truth was uncovered, there in plain sight, right at his work place, was his dead wife, truth uncovered, case closed, not missing, but she had actually been murdered by her own husband. What skeletons do you have that are right on display, right there, that are actually the sins of our past, things that should have been buried, here exhumed and publicly displayed.
Back to the start; do you often sing this wee chorus, “I’m digging up bones, I’m digging up bones, exhuming things that’s better left alone, I’m resurrecting memories of a life that’s all dead and gone, yet tonight I’m sitting alone and digging up bones?” Let us right now burry our dead past, and live that “New Life in Christ Jesus” and refuse to go back to the old paths.
