The Love God Survival Kit

Julianne Koepcke was seventeen years old when she was in a plane crash. The small airplane, a Lockheed Electra, was flying over the Peruvian jungle on Christmas Eve, 1971. Julianne had just been to the local Roman Catholic Church. She was wearing her white confirmation dress and high heels and was sitting next to her mother on the plane when lightning struck, causing the plane to suffer extensive structural failure. They were going down and the plane was coming apart at the seams.

Julianne would later describe that her initial feeling was not panic but wonder as the plane went down. "I noticed that the trees of the jungle looked like cauliflowers," she would later describe. She was awake and aware, not screaming or vomiting or crying but just noticing everything around her.

Julianne awoke in the dark. She was still strapped into her seat and her mother was nowhere to be seen. It was raining hard. Julianne hid under her seat to protect herself from the rain and waited for daylight.

When the sun rose, Julianne made up her mind to get up and find help. She had no survival gear, just a few pieces of candy and a small cake in her pocket. She had no idea how to live in a jungle, but her father had told her that if she was ever lost to go downhill and try to find water, that people were most often found near or around water.

Julianne walked for eleven days. She walked in the cooler parts of the day, and rested in the heat. Tropical insects bore under her skin to lay their eggs, hatched, then dug out of her body. Leeches drained her blood. She lost her shoes and never found her mother, but she kept on wondering at the beauty of the jungle. She did not succumb to self-pity or fear. She just focused, leaving room in her mind for whatever might happen next.

Of the twelve people that survived the initial crash, Julianne was the only one who made it out of the jungle alive. She eventually stumbled into a shack where some fishermen lived and they took her to a local doctor. All the other passengers who survived the crash followed the rules and waited to be rescued. And all of them died.

A few weeks ago, my son Max asked his dad a really hard question. "Dad," he said, "Who do you love more, me or God?"

JD came to me wondering if he said the right thing. This is what he said...

"Max, I love God more than I love you. That's what the Bible tells me to do. But the weird thing about loving God first is that it makes me love you more, not less.  Loving God doesn't take away any of my love for you. In fact, it gives me more love for you. It's like some amazing, mysterious mathematical equation."

Jesus tells us today that we must love God more than father or mother or son or daughter. To love anyone or anything more than God is to disobey God's great commandment. And to do so will throw your life and your relationships into turmoil and disarray. Son against father. Daughter against mother. Family members at war with each other, vying for who loves who the most. But how in the world can we put our family or our loved ones second?  It seems so cold. So hard.

That is the mystery of God that I would like to talk to you about today. You see, love for God is like no other love. It awakens the mind and expands the heart. To love God first is to put your life in the correct order. It is to awaken your consciousness to the supremacy of God above all else. The love of God does not compete with the love of others. It heightens all other love. It makes you love others even more.

Julianne survived the jungle because she kept awake. At the base of her consciousness, there was this awe, this awareness that comes from the love of God and of life itself. In his book, Deep Survival, Lawrence Gonzales looks at the minds of survivors. After extensive research, Gonzales comes to the conclusion that those who survive natural or man-made disasters possess a quality of awareness, a kind of humility. They do not think they know everything that there is to know about their surroundings or about nature. They remain humble, noticing that it is  God, or powers beyond their control, that will determine their destiny.

Jesus said, "Those who find their life will lose it and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." Julianne was willing to lose her life, to let go of her mother, to let go of her self-pity, her panic, everything she knew. She was somehow able to let go, step outside of her grief and pain, and trust in something, someone beyond herself. That was ultimately her salvation. The other passengers who survived the initial crash held onto the way that they thought things should go. They froze in panic and stayed put, waiting for someone to come and rescue them. And they all perished.

Your life belongs to God and God alone. If you cling to your loved ones as if they are your first priority, your relationships will suffer. In fact, you will never truly love anyone.  Let me say that again:  if God is not your first love, you will never truly love anyone. If you try to craft your life into the way you think it should be, you will lose it. Let go of control. Love God first and above all things. In every decision that you make, ask this:  "God, how can I best love you?"  Love is not a feeling.  It is a decision that you make, a setting of priorities, a way of listening.

This is what I like to call the Love God Survival Kit. It is the way to live life fully now and prepare yourself for the hereafter. It is simple, yet it is incredibly hard. Love God first. Love God above everyone else and everything else. It is the only way to survive the jungle of your life.  It is the only way to really live. 

Saying Goodbye

Linda loved spending time with her mom. They would bake brownies together, play games, dress up. Her mom was so much fun. She did not work and from the time that Linda was a baby, her mom was just around, laughing and playing with her. They would paint, draw, garden, cook and play the best games of hide and seek. Her mom was always laughing.

When Linda was nine, she came home from school to find her dad at home. She was an only child and never had her dad been home when she walked home from school. But there he was, with this terrible look in his eyes. He looked like a ghost. And then he told her what had happened. Her mom had gotten into a car accident and she was dead.

How does a child learn about absence? She had never been without her mother, without the laughter and the simple warmth of her presence. She would wake up in the middle of the night, crying for her mom and there would be her clumsy dad, patting her on the back and crying. Or sometimes he was so exhausted that he wouldn't even hear her cry and she would wake up, sweating and sobbing and alone. The silence was deafening. The emptiness felt like it would swallow her up. She was alone.

Today marks what, for me, is the strangest holiday in the Christian year. Today we celebrate the fact that Jesus left us. Jesus, who loved us so profoundly and walked among us and told us stories and cried and joked and played. He died but then he returned, changing the greatest tragedy into good news. After the resurrection, Jesus would appear from time to time to laugh and eat with his disciples. I am sure that the disciples longed too see his face and wondered when he would next appear. It must have felt like the best game of hide and seek ever, not knowing where and when he would pop up next. Jesus was so playful in the resurrected form. Just like Linda's mom, he seemed to play and laugh a lot. I love the way he just popped in from time to time.

And then Jesus brought them to a hill outside Jerusalem and he told them that he would give them the gift of his spirit and they had no idea what he was talking about. And then, he left. He did not die but instead his body was lifted up to heaven. And he was gone. And the emptiness returned. And they were alone. The disciples just stood there, gaping up at the sky, with no idea what to do next. How can you go on when the one you love is gone?

Why did Jesus have to leave us? Why couldn't he just keep popping in from time to time? What kind of a holiday is this, the Ascension? Why do we even celebrate this day? What could be so good about it?

In his book, Learning to Fall, Phillip Simons talks about getting Lou Gerig's disease. At 37, he found himself in a wheelchair and he was told that he had only a few years to live. And that was when he became aware of how precious life is, when he learned that he would die. He learned to be fully alive when he learned that he was going to die. Life became much more precious when he knew that he would have to say goodbye.

All of us who dare to love must one day say goodbye. In truth, we say goodbye whenever we go to sleep at night or get on an airplane or into the car. We say goodbye continuously because we can never be sure that tomorrow will come. All that we have is this day, this moment. The future is forever uncertain for all those who are willing to wake up to the fragility of life. We are always saying goodbye.

Of course Jesus had to say goodbye. Saying goodbye is part of the truth of human existence. It is something that we can't avoid. Jesus knew that we couldn't avoid goodbyes so he showed us how to do them.  Jesus taught us how to say goodbye. He said goodbye in a way that we could all remember. This is what he did...

He took his loved ones to a special place.

He told them that he loved them and told them the truth about saying goodbye.

He gave them the gift of his spirit.

And he blessed them.

Every day, we should follow his example. The time is now. Don't wait. Just a few days ago, our former parish administrator,  Monica McKenzie, lost her brother. He went in for emergency heart surgery and made it through the surgery just fine, but then something happened and he was gone, just gone. He was 57 years old.

The time is now. Don't wait. Step out of the fray of your busy lives and make sure that you tell your loved ones that you love them. Give them the gift of your spirit. Reassure them that you will always be part of them, and bless them. Yes, you can bless your loved ones. It is not just priests who can bless.

But in order to say goodbye, we must face our worst fear, the fear of losing our loved ones. To be truly free to love is to recognize that saying goodbye is part of the story, it is part of the joy of love itself.  Jesus said goodbye and we must do this too if we are truly to be free to love without fear.

It took years, but gradually, Linda's nightmares turned into dreams of thanksgiving. Linda came to understand that her mother taught her how to play and that she had her mothers laugh. She became a kindergarden teacher. And whenever Linda played with the children, her mother was there. Her mother's spirit lived on in her, in her laughter and in her teaching.  Linda became thankful to have known such love at all, and she realized that her mother never really went away. Her mother was inside her now, in her heart.

After Jesus left, his disciples worshipped him and then they acted as if they were him. They did just what he would have done. They became true ministers, children of God. They took his spirit inside of themselves and they were changed.

Goodbyes are hard but they make you powerful, for you hold the spirit of your loved one inside you. It is one of the greatest mysteries of life, but sometimes, when you say goodbye someone you truly love, you become more like them. And that will never change and it will never be taken away.