90 Minutes in Heaven_ A True Story of Death & Life - Don Piper [45]
“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.
14
THE NEW NORMAL
“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.’”
JEREMIAH 30:17
Some 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