The Dash

On a warm summer night, I drove my son to a local cemetery. It was a Moravian cemetery that sits nestled on a hill overlooking a flowing creek. My son, a typical teenager in many ways—Xbox, iPhone, hormones, and hungry—lives in the culture of the immediate. We don’t go to cemeteries regularly, but I had a growing desperation in my heart to impart to him a larger sense of the urgency and opportunities of life.

He would be heading off to college soon, and opportunities to indelibly mark his soul were growing increasingly rare. The sun was just setting, and an air of soberness seemed to…