Lightning Lookup Component – <aura:if> workaround

For those of you having tried to implement the Lightning Lookup from my post: https://meltedwires.com/2015/10/31/salesforce-lightning-lookup-component-v2/ You may have experienced what appears to be a platform bug surrounding <aura:if> that results in the friendly, yet uninformative error: “Something has gone wrong. Cannot read property ‘childNodes’…