Fall has always been my favorite season, and October is the heart of it. It is also the month I lost the two greatest influences in my life. My mother, Gloria, went home on October 14 seven years ago, and my father, Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, went home on October 16 eighteen years ago. So every year the middle of my favorite month carries both things at once: the reflection I welcome and a sharper awareness of their absence.
I stand on my father's shoulders. I am in legacy work because of him, and everything I publish, teach, and speak traces back to what he built. My beautiful mother was the elegant, graceful, godly woman who made Tremendous possible. What I'd give for an hour with the two of them again.
This past Sunday, Pastor Gary Hamrick of Cornerstone Chapel announced his text as 1 Thessalonians 4, and I have studied enough eschatology to know what I was in for. I wept anyway. Gary is the pastor we traveled to Israel with in 2023, and he baptized me in the River Jordan. On that trip, I stood overlooking Har Megiddo. I stood on the Mount of Olives, where the Lord will return. Those places are not just pages in my Bible; they are ground I have walked, which is part of why a sermon on what is still to come lands on me the way it does.
Paul wrote that chapter to grieving people. The believers in Thessalonica had buried friends and family and were afraid the dead had somehow missed out, that the living would be with Jesus first and the ones in the ground would be left behind. Paul turned it around. The dead in Christ rise first, and then those still alive are caught up together with them to meet the Lord in the air. He opens the passage by telling them not to grieve like people who have no hope and closes it with "comfort one another with these words." It is a grief passage with a trumpet in it.
The rapture by itself would be wonder enough: the trumpet, the clouds, Christ Himself coming to gather us. Paul does not stop there. Three words in that passage carry the rest: "together with them." He could have left it at being caught up to meet the Lord. He added that we go with the ones who went ahead, which means the question is not only who we are going to see, but who else will be in those clouds with Him.
When that trumpet sounds, Charlie and Gloria Jones are in the first wave, and I join them on the way up. I will not get an hour with my parents. I will get eternity with them, in the imperishable bodies Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 15, my father with all of his energy and none of the wear, my mother with all of her quiet tenderness and none of it diminished. That is not a visit. That is the rest of the story with both of them in it.
There is more. Paul wrote "we who are alive and remain" in the first person, because he expected to be among them. Every generation since has held that same possibility, and ours holds it too. There is a generation that will not see death at all. It will hear the trumpet and go. What hope we have as believers!!
This October I am doing what I always do, missing them both, with one difference. I would still give almost anything for an hour with them, and I am going to get eternity instead. I am not only looking back. I am looking up.
