Jesus Christ Blog

If you should see someone alone and crying on a bus — or anywhere else, for that matter — you might want to consider asking that person what’s wrong. That simple act of concern may be enough to save a life. It would have been enough to keep John Kevin Hines from jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge six years ago. As it turned out, he lived to tell about it anyway.

Halfway through his four-second, 220-foot plunge into 50° water, with his nineteen-year-old life flashing before him, Hines found himself thinking, “What did I just do? I don’t want to die.” His youth and excellent physical condition were what helped him be one of the few to survive the popular suicide leap — that, and his newfound determination to live.

A struggling bi-polar mental patient, he had been in the severe grip of depression a number of times, as he has since his jump, but his survival has given him a newfound sense of purpose in his life: to help prevent others from trying what he calls “a permanent solution to a temporary problem.”

“I was supposed to die,” he said. “I wanted to die. Every day that jump prompts me to ask, ‘Who am I? Why am I?’” For John Kevin, having a purpose in life is what keeps him alive now.

A most revealing part of his story is what we would do well to reflect upon today. He relates that on the morning of his attempt, he kissed his father good-by and boarded a bus to the bridge, crying most of the way. On the bus, he told himself that if anyone asked him what was wrong, he wouldn’t jump.

No one did.

He had only one human encounter on that fateful trip, and it was on the bridge itself just prior to jumping. After 40 minutes at the railing, crying and wrestling with his demons, a tourist stopped and asked if he would take her picture. He did, and as she walked off he thought, “That’s it. I’m going. Nobody cares.”

I didn’t last long at this game, however. Didn’t have the stomach for it. It was fun getting a hit and watching the bird fall from a distance — “I got one!” I can still hear myself crying out excitedly to the others in our “hunting” party — but it wasn’t fun walking up to it and seeing the poor thing flopping around on the ground with a small bead of blood just above the wing. How tiny it was when you got right up to it! It seemed so much bigger with its wings out soaring free in the sky. And when my friend’s older brother choked it to death to put it “out of its misery” (he was the more experienced hunter in our party) that’s when I realized it wasn’t fun at all. No more bird hunting for me, I decided right then and there.

I don’t know how young I was, but I was young enough to bring the bird home in an empty milk carton, have nightmares about it all night, and wake up in the morning hoping I could bring it back to life by running tap water over its beak.

“Drink, birdie, drink!”

I think that was when I first realized the finality of death. When you’re dead, you’re really dead. No getting you back.

Until Al brought up his own BB gun experience, I hadn’t connected this incident in my life to the verse about the sparrows falling. I hadn’t considered that I had brought one of those sparrows down myself. And yet that little sparrow didn’t come down without the Father, even though I caused it.

The scriptures teach that when we sin we bring death into our lives and into the lives of others. Not physical death, but spiritual death. We would be hopelessly trapped in this negative cycle of cause and effect were it not for the resurrection power of Christ. That power is not just for when we die — as great as that is — it is also for reversing the death spiral of sin in our lives now.

Jesus told the woman at the well He had better water to offer than the water she was pulling from the well. “Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4:14)

The water I tried to pour over a dead bird’s beak was powerless to change anything. But Jesus has water that brings life out of death. Jesus has water that can reverse the effects of sin. Jesus has water that can turn the bad we have done into ultimate good. “Look, I am making everything new,” said the one sitting on the throne. (Revelation 21:5) It’s what He started at the cross, is doing right now in us, and will bring to completion at the last day.