Throughout my posts about our trip to the Smoky Mountains, you'll see lots of cute pictures of our family and our adventures. But the most moving time for me - and for Tim - came as we toured the cemetery at the old primitive Methodist church building on the Cades Cove Loop. The building is a classic white church building in the country...very picturesque and heartwarming. As we ventured into the backyard of the church, we walked around the cemetery which had headstones dating back to the Civil War.

Some of the headstones were so worn that they were only the stumps of rocks, with no names remaining on them at all. We had the opportunity to share with the boys how nothing we do in this life will stand the test of time. History no longer even recorded who those people were or what they had done: only Heaven held the accounts of their names and accomplishments now.

But more moving to us were the plethora of infant headstones in the graveyard. As we began reading the headstones, it was like almost every person in it had died only a few days, a few months, or maybe a few years old....if they had even survived birth. It was sobering to see how much infant death the pioneers of that area had encountered. I left that cemetery looking differently at what mattered in life to us now. How easy I have it! And how misguided my priorities often are.

Tim, however took another perspective from the cemetery. He looked at all the headstones and saw how much those early residents of Cades Cove valued life, much more than our generation does. Even though so many of those babies were still-born, these settlers - who had no luxuries and very little money - spent their time and money buying and carving headstones for their deceased little ones. They grieved for these children, even the ones who had never taken a breath. Granted, today we have other forms of burial and cremation for similar situations which allow parents to appropriately grieve; however, living the age of abortion, it was a moving testimony to see those headstones as a monument that those people did what they could to show that they had valued those little lives. Although these mountain people were uneducated and technologically deficient, they sure could teach the people of 2012 a lesson or two about the sanctity of life...