90 Minutes in Heaven (24 page)
We’re such victims of our human invention of time that we have to think in temporal concepts—it’s the way we’re wired. That’s an important point for me to make. My human inclination is to wonder what my welcoming committee is doing during these years while I’m back on earth.
As I ponder this, I don’t believe my greeting committee said, “Oh no, he doesn’t get to stay.” They’re still there at the gate. They’re waiting. For them, time is not passing. Everything is in the eternal now—even if I can’t put that into words. Even if ten more years pass, or thirty, in heaven it will be only an instant before I’m back there again.
Going to heaven that January morning wasn’t my choice. The only choice in all of this is that one day I turned to Jesus Christ and accepted him as my Savior. Unworthy as I am, he allowed me to go to heaven, and I know the next time I go there, I’ll stay.
I don’t have a death wish. I’m not suicidal, but every day I think about going back. I long to return. In God’s timing, I know with utter certainty that I will. Now I look forward to that time and eagerly await the moment. I have absolutely no fear of death. Why would I? There’s nothing to fear—only joy to experience.
As I’ve pointed out before, when I became conscious again on earth, a bitter disappointment raged through me. I didn’t want to return, but it wasn’t my choice.
For a long time, I didn’t accept that God had sent me back. But even in my disappointment, I knew that God had a purpose in everything that happened. There was a reason I went to heaven and a purpose in my returning. Eventually, I grasped that God had given me a special experience and a glimpse of what eternity will be.
Although I long for my heavenly home, I’m prepared to wait until the final summons comes for me.
Going through thirty-four surgeries and many years of pain has also helped me realize the truth of Paul’s words to the Corinthians: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Cor. 1:3–4 niv).
As long as I’m here on earth, God still has a purpose for me. Knowing that fact enables me to endure the pain and cope with my physical disabilities.
In my darkest moments, I remember a line from an old song: “It will be worth it all when we see Jesus.”
I know it will.
Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God knows me now.
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C
ORINTHIANS 13:12
M
any times I’ve watched people on TV who say they’ve had near-death experiences (NDE). I confess to being fascinated, but I also admit to being skeptical. In fact, I’m highly skeptical. Before and after those people spoke, I thought,
They’ve probably had some kind of brain lapse. Or maybe there was already something in their memory bank and they just re-experienced it.
I didn’t doubt their sincerity; they wanted to believe what they talked about.
I’ve watched many talk shows and read about victims who had died and been heroically resuscitated. Descriptions of their ordeals often seemed too rehearsed and disturbingly similar, as if one person copied the story of the last. One person who claimed to have been dead for more than twenty-four hours wrote a book and said he had talked to Adam and Eve. Some of the things the first earthly couple purportedly told him don’t measure up with the Bible.
Despite my skepticism—even today—of many of their testimonies, I have never questioned my own death. In fact, it was so powerful, so life-changing, that I couldn’t talk about it to anyone until David Gentiles pried out the information almost two years after the accident.
I have looked at the research on NDE and thought about it often during the years.
In December 2001,
Lancet,
the journal of the British Medical Society, reported research on NDE. Most scientific and medical experts had previously dismissed these dramatic occurrences as wishful thinking or the misguided musings of oxygen-starved brains.
The study, conducted in the Netherlands, is one of the first scientific studies. Instead of interviewing those who reported they had once had a NDE, they followed hundreds of patients who had been resuscitated after suffering clinical death—that is, after their hearts stopped. They hoped that approach would provide more accurate accounts by documenting the experiences as they happened, rather than basing them on recollections long after the event of resuscitation.
Their results: About 18 percent of the patients in the study spoke of recollection of the time in which they had been clinically dead. Between 8 and 12 percent reported the commonly accepted NDE experiences, such as seeing bright lights, going through a tunnel, or even crossing over into heaven and speaking with dead relatives and friends. The researchers concluded that afterlife experiences or NDE are merely “something we would all desperately like to believe is true.”
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Conversely, other scholars made conclusions based on their study of 344 people (ages twenty-six to ninety-two) who had been resuscitated. Most of them were interviewed within five days of the experience. The researchers contacted those same people two years later and then eight years after the event.
Researchers discovered that the experiences didn’t correlate with any of the measured psychological, physiological, or medical parameters—that is, the experiences were unrelated to processes in the dying brain. Most patients had excellent recall of the events, which, the researchers said, undermined the idea that the memories were false.
The most important thing to me is that those who had such experiences reported marked changes in their personalities. They lost their fear of death. They became more compassionate, giving, and loving.
The study really proved nothing about the reality of NDE. As had been the case before the studies, one group believed NDE were merely the psychological states of those dying; the other group maintained that hard evidence supported the validity of near-death occurrences, suggesting that scientists rethink theories that dismiss out-of-body experiences.
I have no intention of trying to solve this debate. I can only relate what happened to me. No matter what researchers may or may not try to tell me, I
know
I went to heaven.
I’ve devoted an immense amount of time to considering
why
it happened rather than
what
happened. I have reached only one solid conclusion: Before being killed in a car accident, I remained skeptical of near-death experiences. I simply didn’t see how a person could die, go to heaven, and return to tell about it. I never doubted dying, the reality of heaven, or life after death. I doubted descriptions of near-death stories. These stories all seemed too rehearsed and sounded alike. Then I died, went to heaven, and returned. I can only tell what happened to me. Not for an instant have I ever thought it was merely a vision, some case of mental wires crossing, or the result of stories I’d heard. I
know
heaven is real. I have been there and come back.
It comes down to this: Until some mere mortal is dead for a lengthy period and subsequently returns to life with irrefutable evidence of an afterlife, near-death experiences will continue to be a matter of faith, or at the very least, conjecture. But then, as one of my friends would say, “What else is new?”
One time I shared my experiences with a large congregation that included my wife’s parents, Eldon and Ethel Pentecost. They’ve been consistently supportive and made great sacrifices during my accident and lengthy recovery.
After the service, we went to their home. At one point, Eldon and I were alone, and he told me, “I was angry the first time you shared your story of your trip to heaven.”
I had no idea he felt that way.
“You finished by saying you never wanted to come back to earth.”
I just nodded in affirmation, not knowing where this was going.
“I didn’t understand it then, but I’ve changed. Now when I hear you talk about heaven’s beauty, I understand a little better why you’d willingly be separated from my daughter and grandkids for a while. You know—you really do know, don’t you—that they’ll join you someday?”
“Without a doubt,” I said.
Eldon’s revelation caught me off guard. He was right, of course. I had the distinct privilege of baptizing my own children and seeing my wife baptized as well. I knew that their professions of faith were authentic. By faith, I knew that they would be residents of heaven someday. Being separated from them had never crossed my mind while I was in heaven. People in heaven simply don’t have an awareness of who is
not
there. They do know who is coming.
Even today, I can say honestly that I wish I could have stayed in heaven, but my ultimate time had not yet come. After leaving heaven, if I had known that I would face two weeks in ICU, a year in a hospital bed, and thirty-four operations, I surely would have been even more disheartened from the outset. However, this was not my choice, and I returned to the sounds of one voice praying, boots crunching glass underfoot, and the Jaws of Life ripping through my shattered auto.
One question keeps troubling me:
Why?
It takes many forms.
Why did I die in that car wreck?
Why did I have the unique privilege of going to heaven?
Why did I glimpse heaven, only to be sent back?
Why did I nearly die in the hospital?
Why has God let me live in constant pain since January 18, 1989?
The short answer: I don’t know. And yet that single word,
why,
remains the consummate human query. By nature, we’re curious. We want to know.
All these years later, it’s still not easy for me to relate what happened. Several times I tried to write this myself but couldn’t. That’s why I asked my friend Cec Murphey to help me with this book—if it were up to me, this book would never have been written. The emotional trauma of reliving all the events is too difficult. Only with someone else actually writing it has it finally been possible to go through this ordeal.
I still don’t know why such things happen.
I do know God is with me in the darkest moments of life.
Besides asking why, there are other questions. I think they’re even more important for me to ponder.
Did God want me to know how real pain could feel so that I could understand the pain of others?
Did God want me to know how real heaven is?
What did God want me to learn from all my experiences, my death, and the long period of recovery?
How can my experiences be of the most benefit to others?
After all these years, I don’t have the answers to most of those questions either. I have learned a few things and realize that God still has reasons for keeping me alive on earth. I may never know his reasons, and God has no obligation to explain them to me.
