What Is Eternal Life? - Leonard Sweet
On Super Tuesday in Lafayette, Tennessee, James Kruger was watching the election results. Suddenly a warning appeared on his TV screen: A tornado was headed toward Lafayette, Tennessee. As soon as he read those words, the lights went out.
He put on sweat pants, grabbed a flashlight, "and then I heard this noise," Kruger said. He headed for a door, "and all of a sudden I heard the glass breaking and it was sucking," he said. "When I tried to shut the door, [it] seemed like the door was lifting up. So I just dove and I lay flat on the floor." Lying there, time stood still as everything in the house flew over him, scraping and banging his back, Kruger said. Then the chaos stopped. "I was laying in the dirt. There was no floor. No nothing."
The house was gone. But Kruger says he knows why he survived. "I think God was holding my leg, teaching me that I hadn't been doing everything he wanted me to do," he said.
There is an old saying that declares, "Nothing concentrates the mind quite like a hanging at dawn" (Often attributed to Samuel Johnson). In other words, when faced with the very real possibility of death, our typical multi-tasking, "scatter brain" consciousness both "zooms in" and "zones out." We "zoom in" to a finely tuned focus on what is most important, what our lives have meant, whom we truly love, and what we ultimately believe in.
We "zone out" of the temporal count-down we usually inhabit. The life threatening experience-whether it is a tornado landing on your house, your car careening off a cliff, or a bullet piercing your body--is not experienced in "real time." We can review and relive thousands of events as the crisis whirls about us. Seconds and minutes are no longer part of the count-down when we are accounting the meaning of our life.
Just as the few moments that make up a crisis situation can seem to move in slow motion, so also hours and hours can pass without our noticing them when we get "in the zone." Surgeons performing lengthy, complex procedures, athletes focused on the game, musicians practicing and composing, all regularly experience a surprising "time war" feeling that occurs when they finally step back outside "the zone." A twelve hour heart surgery, a three hour contest, a six hour jam session--none are recalled as a passage of minutes or hours. They are recalled instead as whole events, experiences in which mind, body, and spirit were working together so seamlessly, so harmoniously, that there was no real separate cognizance of "time."
Even if you are not a heart surgeon you know the feeling. Its also the same "out of time" togetherness that makes vacation days both stretch out forever, yet slip away so fast. Two days spent working, running errands, keeping up with "life as usual" move at a completely different pace than two days spent climbing a mountain, or two days relaxing at a seaside resort with your spouse, or two days spent entirely alone. All these experiences are momentary glimpses of what today's gospel reading defines as "eternal life"�