90 Minutes in Heaven (16 page)
“I was thinking that I came upon the scene of the accident and I asked the officer if I could pray for you—and I thought of it as just something any Christian would do. Although he said you were dead, I knew—I just knew—I had to pray for you. I could only think that you were hurt, and I wanted to make you feel better. I didn’t do anything unusual.”
“But you did. When the officer told you I was already dead—”
“Listen to me, Don. If you saw a little kid run out in the street, you’d dash out there and try to save the child’s life. Human nature is like that. We try to preserve life, and I will do that any time I get the opportunity. So would you.”
We were sitting in a restaurant, and he paused to look around. “Yet here we are sitting in this place, surrounded by people, many of whom are probably lost and going to hell, and we won’t say a word about how they can have eternal life. Something is wrong with us.”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. “We’re willing to save someone in a visible crisis, but a lot of folks are in spiritual crisis and we don’t say a word about how they can get out of it.”
“That’s why I was crying. I’ve been convicted about my silence, my fear of speaking to people, my reluctance to speak up.”
Dick said then, and again later, that hearing my experience and his role in my coming back to earth had set him free. After that he felt a boldness to talk about Jesus Christ that he hadn’t had before.
He is your God, the one who is worthy of your praise, the one who has done mighty miracles that you yourself have seen.
D
EUTERONOMY 10:21
I
was privileged to share my story in Dick’s church, Klein First Baptist, a little more than a year after the accident. His wife, Anita, was there, and so was my own family. Because I still wore leg braces, two people had to help me walk up on the platform.
I told everyone about the accident and about Dick’s part in bringing me back. “I believe I’m alive today because Dick prayed me back to earth,” I said. “In my first moments of consciousness, two things stand out. First, I was singing ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus.’ The second was that Dick’s hand gripped mine and held it tight.”
After the morning worship, many of us went out to lunch together at a Chinese restaurant. Anita sat across from me. I remember sipping my wonton soup and having a delightful time with the church members.
When there was a lull in the conversation, Anita leaned across the table and said in a low voice, “I appreciated everything you said this morning.”
“Thank you—”
“There’s just one thing—one thing I need to correct about what you said in your message.”
“Really?” Her words shocked me. “I tried to be as accurate as possible in everything I said. I certainly didn’t intend to exaggerate anything. What did I say that was incorrect?”
“You were talking about Dick getting into the car with you. Then you said he prayed for you while he was holding your hand.”
“Yes, I remember that part very distinctly. I have a number of memory gaps, and most of the things I don’t remember.” That morning I had readily admitted that some of the information I gave came secondhand. “The one thing that’s totally clear was Dick being in the car and praying with me.”
“That’s true. He did get in the car and pray with you.” She leaned closer. “But, Don, he never held your hand.”
“I distinctly remember holding his hand.”
“That didn’t happen. It was physically impossible.”
“But I remember that so clearly. It’s one of the most vivid—”
“Think about it. Dick leaned over from the rear of the trunk over the backseat and put his hand on your
shoulder
and touched you. You were facing forward and your left arm was barely hanging together.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Dick said you were slumped over on the seat toward the passenger side.”
I closed my eyes, visualizing what she had just said. I nodded.
“Your right hand was on the floor of the passenger side of the car. Although the tarp covered the car, there was enough light for him to see your hand down there. There was no way Dick could have reached your right hand.”
“But . . . but . . .” I sputtered.
“Someone was holding your hand. But it wasn’t Dick.”
“If it wasn’t Dick’s hand, whose was it?”
She smiled and said, “I think you know.”
I put down my spoon and stared at her for several seconds. I had no doubt whatsoever that someone had held my hand. Then I understood. “Yes, I think I know too.”
Immediately I thought of the verse in Hebrews about entertaining angels unaware. As I pondered for a moment, I also remembered other incidents where there was nothing but a spiritual explanation. For instance, many times in the hospital room in the middle of the night, I would be at my worst. I never saw or heard anyone, but I felt a presence—something—someone—sustaining and encouraging me. That also was something I hadn’t talked about. I couldn’t explain it, so I assumed others wouldn’t understand.
This was another miracle, and I wouldn’t have known about it if Anita hadn’t corrected me.
Five years after my accident, Dick and I both appeared on Pat Robertson’s
700 Club
. A camera crew came to Texas to reenact the accident and then asked me to talk about my visit to heaven’s gates. The
700 Club
aired that segment many times over the next two years.
In one of life’s great ironic twists, Dick died of a heart attack in 2001. I confess that I was saddened to hear of his passing, but delighted that he is in glory. Dick saved my life, and God took him to heaven first. I was glad he heard me share about my journey to heaven before he made his own trip.
Since that experience with Anita a little more than a year after my accident, I’ve been more convinced than ever that God brought me back to this earth for a purpose. The angel gripping my hand was God’s way of sustaining me and letting me know that he would not let go of me no matter how hard things became.
I may not feel that hand each day, but I know it’s there.
“I will give you back your health and heal your wounds, says the Lord. Now you are called an outcast—‘Jerusalem for whom nobody cares.’”
J
EREMIAH 30:17
S
ome things happen to us from which we never recover, and they disrupt the normalcy of our lives. That’s how life is.
Human nature has a tendency to try to reconstruct old ways and pick up where we left off. If we’re wise, we won’t continue to go back to the way things were (we can’t anyway). We must instead forget the old standard and accept a “new normal.”
I wasted a lot of time thinking about how I used to be healthy and had no physical limitations. In my mind, I’d reconstruct how life
ought
to be, but in reality, I knew my life would never be the same. I had to adjust and accept my physical limits as part of my new normal.
As a child I’d sit on a big brown rug in my great-grandparents’ living room and listen to them talk about the good old days. After hearing several stories, I thought,
Those days weren’t that good
—at least the recollections they shared didn’t seem so great. Maybe for them they truly were the good old days, or perhaps they forgot the negative parts of those days. At some points in our lives, most of us want to go back to a simpler, healthier, or happier time. We can’t, but we still keep dreaming about how it once was.
In my twenties, when I was a disc jockey, we used to play oldies, and people who called in to request those songs often commented that music used to be better than it is now. The reality is that in the old days we played good and bad records, but the bad ones faded quickly from memory just like bad ones do now. No one ever asked us to play the music that bombed. The good songs make the former times seem great, as if all the music was outstanding. In reality, there was bad music thirty years ago or fifty years ago—in fact, a lot of bad music. The same is true with experiences. We tend to forget the negative and go back to recapture pleasant events. The reality is, we have selectively remembered—and just as selectively forgotten.
Once that idea got through to me, I decided I couldn’t recapture the past. No matter how much I tried to idealize it, that part of my life was over and I would never be healthy or strong again. The only thing for me to do was to discover a new normal.
Yes,
I said to myself,
there are things I will never be able to do again. I don’t like that and may even hate it, but that doesn’t change the way things are. The sooner I make peace with that fact and accept the way things are, the sooner I’ll be able to live in peace and enjoy my new normalcy.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
In early 2000, I took a group of college kids on a ski trip from Houston to Colorado. Skiing is one of the things I’d always loved doing. Unable to participate, I sat in a clubhouse at the bottom of the hill, gazed out the window, and watched them glide down. Sadness came over me, and I thought,
I made a big mistake. I should never have come here.
As happy as I was for them, I mourned over my inability ever to ski again.
Then I thought for the thousandth time of other things I would never do again. When I was a senior pastor, most of the adults greeted me at the door following each morning service.
“Enjoyed your sermon,” they’d said. “Great service.”
Kids, however, behaved differently. They’d race up with a picture they’d colored for me. Before my accident, I loved the kids flocking around me; I’d kneel down and talk with them. After my recovery, I couldn’t squat down and stare at their smiling faces the way I used to before as I said, “Thank you very much. I really like this picture. This is very nice.”
After my accident, the best I could do was lean forward and talk to them. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like a big thing, but it is for me. I’ll never squat again; I’ll never be able to kneel so that I can be at a child’s level again, because my legs won’t give me the ability to do that.
Here’s another example: When I go to a drive-through fast-food restaurant, I can’t reach for the change with my left arm. The best I can do is reach out across my body with my right arm. It must look strange, and I get a few odd looks, but it’s the best I can do.
While neither of these examples is particularly dramatic, they are nonetheless reminders that sometimes things we take for granted every day can be taken from us permanently and suddenly, and we’re changed forever.
During my long hospitalization, somebody gave me a magazine article about a young man who lost his sight. He went through an incredibly bitter, depressive time. He wrote that he got so demoralized that a friend who cared enough about him to tell him the truth said, “You just need to get past this.”
I paused from reading and thought,
Yes, that sounds like the way I was after my accident.
The article went on, however, to tell the practical instructions the blind man’s friend gave him: “I want you to make a list of all the stuff you can still do.”
“Now what kind of a list would that be?” the angry blind man asked.
“Just do it for me. You can’t write it, obviously, but you can get a tape recorder and dictate it. Just make a list of all the things you can still do. And I’m talking about simple things like ‘I can still smell flowers.’ Make the list as extensive as you can. When you’re finished, I want to hear that list.”
The blind man finally agreed and made the list. I don’t know how much time passed, but when the friend returned, the blind man was smiling and peaceful.
“You seem like you’re in a much better frame of mind than the last time I saw you,” the friend said.
“I am. I really am, and that’s because I’ve been working on my list.”
“How many things are on your list?”
“About a thousand so far.”
“That’s fantastic.”
“Some of them are very simple. None of them are big, but there are thousands of things I can still do.”
The blind man had changed so radically that his friend asked, “Tell me what made you change.”
