The Last Suit He Ever Wore

When 94-year-old D-Day veteran Harold "Hal" Gruber of Scranton, Pennsylvania, was buried in 2019, his family dressed him in his Army dress uniform — the same one he'd worn when he stormed Omaha Beach at twenty years old. The jacket no longer fit the way it once had. The wool was faded, the brass tarnished. His body, ravaged by decades and disease, bore little resemblance to the young soldier who had charged into gunfire on a French shoreline.

But here is what stopped me cold at that funeral: his granddaughter leaned over the casket and whispered, "You won't need this uniform where you're going, Grandpa. You're getting a new one."

She understood something Paul shouts from the rooftops in 1 Corinthians 15. This perishable body — worn thin by cancer, by arthritis, by ninety-four hard years — will put on the imperishable. This mortal frame, stitched together with failing joints and dimming eyes, will be clothed in immortality. And when that happens, death itself gets swallowed whole.

Hal Gruber stormed a beach under enemy fire and survived. But his greatest victory was not won on that shoreline. It was won by Christ on a cross and sealed at an empty tomb. Because of that victory, death has lost its sting. The grave has no claim.

So we do not grieve without hope. We stand firm. We press on. Because in the Lord, nothing — not one prayer, not one act of faithfulness — is ever in vain.