The Gardener Who Came Too Late

In April 2011, Lisa Harmon drove back to Joplin, Missouri, three days after the EF5 tornado shredded her neighborhood into splinters. She came for one reason: to dig up her grandmother's rose bushes — the ones Nana had planted in 1968 — and save whatever roots she could from the wreckage. She brought garbage bags, a spade, and low expectations.

When she turned onto her street, the house was gone. The fence was gone. The old oak was snapped at the trunk. But there, in the middle of a bare dirt scar where the garden had been, Nana's climbing roses were blooming. Not just alive — thriving, pushing red and pink flowers out of soil that should have been poisoned with debris. Volunteers from three states over had already cleared the lot, piled fresh topsoil around the root balls, and staked the canes upright.

Lisa sat in her truck for twenty minutes and told no one. She called her sister that evening but couldn't get the words out. "I went to bury them," she finally said. "And they were already alive."

That is the gospel of the empty tomb. The women came to Mark 16 with spices for a corpse, rehearsing how to roll away a stone too heavy to move. But someone had already been there. The work of death was already undone. And the news was so staggering, so impossibly good, that for a moment even faithful women ran away trembling, because resurrection doesn't just comfort us — it overwhelms us.