As many of you know, our son Parker David Gilles was stillborn and spiritually reborn on Sunday, October 21, 2012, and like all of God’s sleeping children, he will be raised up. We long for that day. Bobby and I, along with our Smith and Gilles families and community group, celebrated a Resurrection Party on yesterday, October 20th, in remembrance and celebration of our son Parker’s 1st birthday.
We gathered in the cemetery where Parker’s body was laid to rest last October 25th, and we looked forward together to the day when Morning comes, Christ descends, the trumpet sounds and the dead in Christ burst through the earth. After reading aloud passages from I Corinthians 15, Isaiah 25 and 26, and a devotional from Charles Spurgeon’s Beside Still Waters, we launched colorful balloons into the sky above the cemetery (pictured above), imagining the day when all the redeemed joyfully rise, soar through the skies and sing God’s praise.
We hope you’ll be encouraged by this Charles Spurgeon devotional, Death’s Shallow Victory:
In a little while, I shall slumber in the tomb. Yet, “I know that my Redeemer lives, and He shall stand at last on the earth; and after my skin is destroyed, this I know, that in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:25-26). My eyes, which soon will be glazed in death, will not always be closed in darkness. Death will be forced to give back its prey. I see death, and it has the bodies of the just locked in its dungeons. It has sealed their tombs and marked them for its own. Oh death, foolish death, your caskets will be seized and your storehouses broken open.
The morning is come! Christ has descended! I hear the trumpet! “Awake! Awake!” From the tomb, the righteous spring and death sits in confusion and howls in vain, for its empire is deprived of its subjects. “Precious shall be their blood in His sight” (Ps. 72:14). Precious shall be their bones; their very dust is blessed. Christ will raise them.
Think of that, you who have lost loved ones. Weeping children of sorrow, your redeemed friends will live again. The hand that grasped yours with a dead clutch will grasp you again in paradise. Those eyes that wept away in tears will wake in the noon-day of great happiness. The frame that you sorrowfully buried, yes that same body, will be raised incorruptible (I Cor. 15:52).
If you are redeemed, you will see that loved one. Death will not keep one bone of the righteous, not a particle of their dust, not a hair of their heads. Christ has purchased every part of our bodies; the whole body will be complete and united forever in heaven with the glorified soul.
We are extremely grateful for your continued prayers as we meet the first anniversary of this very difficult year and as we look forward with all the saints to the day when there’s no more suffering, tears or dying. Christ will return and raise us up.