90 Minutes in Heaven_ A True Story of Death & Life - Don Piper [67]
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.
18
THE WHY
QUESTIONS
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.
1 CORINTHIANS 13:12
Many 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