This Friday, we welcomed home a member of our church family who had served in Iraq for a year.

When the battalion departed for Iraq on a chilly, dark morning in 2010, the feeling of grief was utterly palpable.  In the sea of sadness, the only sound was weeping fiancees and children.  What a different, electric feeling this last Friday as the motorcade pulled up!  Incredibly warm welcomes and long, crushing embraces.   What a privilege to be at both moments.

It was a small foretaste of the wonder of 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17:

16  For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. 17  Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord.