Many funny stories have been told about people who died and went Heaven. Some of the stories, told in various ways, end with the same punchline, containing a certain password required before the gates can be opened. I’ll tell it my way, doing my best to keep it short.
Driving home from work, Julie met an SUV head-on, saw the light beyond the clouds, and then inspected the landscape through the closed gates. “This is more beautiful than I ever dreamed.”
“To go in,” Peter said, “you have to spell the password.”
“What’s the word,” she asked, “remembering the schooldays when she’d been among the first to be dropped from the spelling bee.”
“Love”
“Oh, I can spell that,” she said. “L-O-V-E.”
After enjoying her mansion for three years, she returned to express thanks for being admitted, when to her surprise, Peter asked her to monitor the gates while he left on a two-week vacation. “You know the routine,” he said, and she agreed.
The next day, Julie’s husband arrived.
“Hello, honey. I wondered when you’d be getting here. How have you been?”
“You won’t believe how blessed I’ve been. You remember Susie, my pretty young secretary. We got married right after I won the lottery, and we’ve been touring the world.”
“Oh, how wonderful,” Julie said. “To enter though, you must correctly spell the password”—she hesitated—”on the first try.”
“No problem, what’s the word?”
“Cze-cho-slo-vak-ia,” she said.
This story tells us that if we want to enter Heaven, and God is responsible for opening the gate, we had better make him our best friend. Then we won’t have any problem with passwords.