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That’s why it’s so important to pay our respects to deceased friends and relatives at the cemetery. Sometimes you hear people say that they don’t think that’s necessary because the person’s “not really there,” that he or she is “with God,” or that the best thing to do is “say a prayer” for the person’s soul. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it’s only half true. As we’ve said, after someone dies, only part of the person is with God. The other part—the person’s body—is still here with us on Earth. When we visit someone at the cemetery, we are showing that we understand and believe this truth: that the person we loved is not just a spirit, that he or she is going to be a whole person once again. Justin Martyr, writing a little more than one hundred years after Christ’s own bodily resurrection, summed it up perfectly: “If God has called humans to life and resurrection, he has called not a part, but a whole—and that is the soul and the body.
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