Kevin’s Afterglow Eulogy

In the summer of 2019,
early on a June morning,
Kevin and Kristen and I and a whole lot of other teenagers and their parents climbed onto coach buses and headed south,
down into the mountains of West Virginia for that week of hard work called the Appalachia Service Project.

On our first morning there, a Sunday morning,
I gathered everyone together for worship,
outside, in the early morning sun.
I invited them forward one by one to have their hands blessed for the work that they would do that week.

And then I read this prayer to them, the prayer of St Teresa:

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
No hands but yours,
No feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of
Christ is to look out on a hurting world.
Yours are the hands with which He is to bless now.”

You, I was saying, are now to be the presence of Love to others.

There was at least one young man there who didn’t need me to tell him that.
Didn’t need me to tell him to be God’s hands and heart.
Because Kevin already knew a whole lot about how to be the presence of Love to others,
about how to lift others up.

And he proved that right away on that Appalachia service trip.
I don’t just mean that he worked hard to fix houses for the poor —
though Lord knows he did —
I have a picture on my phone of Kevin putting siding on a trailer home with care and concentration, absolutely soaked with sweat.
So yes, his hands were God’s hands at work on that home.

But there was another moment on that trip
that those who witnessed it will never forget.
His work crew, traveling down the highway in their van,
spotted a man lying by the side of the highway,
bleeding, clearly in grave trouble.
They pulled over — of course — and the first person out of the van was Kevin. Kevin ran over to him faster than I think I've ever seen anyone run, his leader Todd Jones told me later.
He took off his shirt on the way to use as a compress.
And Kevin continued to care for that man until the EMTs arrived.

So Kevin didn’t need me to tell him how to be the presence of Love.
He already knew how, in the deepest part of his soul.

Over these past few days,
kids whose lives were touched by Kevin’s life
have been stopping by to talk, and texting me.
And what I have been so struck by is how many of them felt cared for by Kevin.
Just like that unknown guy on the side of the road,
they have felt Kevin’s compassion, felt tended to by him.

Kevin noticed I was having a bad day,
one person wrote, and he just kept talking to me until I was smiling again. He was so thoughtful, they told me.
If I had to put it in just one word, another person said,
it would be selflessness.
He made sure everyone else was happy.
One person said to me simply, Kevin was a kind soul.
He made people feel better.

So that prayer about being God’s eyes, and God’s heart, and God’s hands?
Kevin just lived that. He lived it.

In one of the letters that was written by our teens to Kevin’s family,
one young person said
Kevin’s afterglow will last forever.
Kevin’s afterglow will last forever.

Yes.
And it will look like this:
That afterglow will be in every moment of kindness that someone offers to another because they remember Kevin offering it to them.
It will be in every selfless act that someone does because they witnessed it in Kevin first.
It will be in that moment when someone refuses to leave another until they’ve seen them smile,
because they remember Kevin’s persistence with them.
It will be in someone pulling over to help because they remember Kevin sprinting down the roadside to tend to a hurting man.

Kevin’s afterglow will be seen when each of us loves a little harder,
cares a little deeper, holds a little tighter.
When each of us looks out for one another in the ways that Jim spoke of,
when he stood in front of that candlelit gathering of hundreds on Saturday and asked us to open our hearts to each other.
The afterglow of Kevin’s life
will be our lights shining that much brighter. Our lives shining that much brighter.

Our lives shining bright enough
to be seen in that place beyond our sight,
where a young man who taught us a lot about Love is now himself held by that greatest of all Loves. May he, now, know how much he taught us.
For Kevin, now, we shine.

Amen.