Resurrection

This picture is from a cemetery I visited in Tunisia. We hiked up a hill through the city of Sidi Bou Said to an outlook that opened over the Mediterranean Sea. Its one of the bluest places I have ever been. A breeze came through off of the water and we all just sat up there and felt grateful to be there. I wandered off for a little bit while the group was talking into this cemetery. As I sat there I contemplated the deep humanity that runs through our veins. I thought of Shylock's famous speech:

I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions; fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die?

(III.i.49–61)

We are all made of the same stuff. What is so moving to me is that we all have a hope in the resurrection because of the atonement. We discussed this in institute yesterday. Alma goes to preach the word of God to the people of Amonihah. He finds Amulek who becomes his mission companion and they go out among the people. Zeezrom comes and challenges them. As Zeezrom experiences a change of heart he begins to question them sincerely and the first question is: What does this mean which Amulek hath spoken concerning the resurrection of the dead, that all shall rise from the dead, both the just and the unjust....? Alma explains that everyone will rise from the dead. As I sat in the cemetery the reach of the Atonement really hit me. It is for everyone. "All men shall rise from the dead" it does not matter who you are or where you are from. If you got a body, you will get it back. Wordsworth says:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:

The mystery of that hope gives me so much peace.