This Week at Sunchild - Thursday June 23, 2001
Thursday Evening, June 21st,
Dear Friends,
Today was another chapter in our ongoing list of 'unusual' events that have followed us here at Sunchild. We had another funeral, but this was the second funeral for the same person - 14 years apart! Before we moved back to Sunchild, after spending several years in the northern Yukon, we spent the school term at Moberly Lake, British Columbia. About six months after moving back into Sunchild, Karen had a beautiful little full term baby that was still-born in January 1987. We named him James. We didn't know what to do about where to bury him, and since we had so recently come from Moberly Lake we decided to bury him in the church grave yard there in the mountains at Moberly Lake, a good nine hour drive from here.
It was following that, we ended up starting the grave yard here at Sunchild where we buried Jesse and Seth. We are in our last couple weeks here at Sunchild, and we will be moving back up to the Arctic. It's only natural that the graves were much in our thoughts, as one of the hardest things to deal with in moving. Without talking about it, Karen and I both had thought how much easier it would have been if we had been able to have all three graves in the same location. A few days ago I got a call telling us that due to some construction work, five graves had to be exhumed in the grave yard at Moberly Lake and moved. One of these graves was James', and they needed our permission. I told them that if they had to move the grave, we would like to bury James here in our own grave yard and have all three graves together. They agreed to this, and this morning they flew into Rocky Mountain House with the casket. It was amazing that the box appeared just as it was buried 14 years ago. Even the blanket that was wrapped around the rough box was in very good condition!
This evening a small group of friends and Native elders gathered in for a service and we had yet another funeral and burial for little James, and it was a very special time. In Corrie Ten Booms writing, she describes an event in the prison, the likes of which I had never heard of, or read of anything similiar in my entire life. When her sister died, she tells how God revealed her body in her glorified beauty, and this was witnessed by a number of people in the prison morgue. Though she was decimated by disease and starvation, in the morgue her body appeared as an exceedingly beautiful young woman, shinning in heavenly beauty, and that is how she was last seen. Though I hesitate to describe it in detail, this is exactly the experience I had with little baby James, here in our little church, in the middle of the night, 14 years ago when his little coffin was setting on the altar. I held in my arms the most glorious, beautiful sight human eyes could ever behold..little James in his glorified beauty. Perhaps I'm out of place for talking about this since, evidently, many Christian people have never experienced anything 'supernatural'. But it was definitely this experience that was formost in my mind as James came back to us and we had yet another funeral today.
I find it difficult to mentally process todays events and I can't imagine how I'll look back on it in the future. Regardless, the fact is that one of our last duties here was having all three graves together in one place. Somehow there seems to be a greater significance to these events than what we realize. In His Service, Rodger, Karen, & Family
Below, Darold Bales is helping me build the fence around our grave yard.
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