Waking up in Heaven?

I’m writing a memoir, so when I was at the library a couple of weeks ago, I browsed the newer book section for memoirs.  I found two intriguing ones: the first To Heaven and Back was written by Dr. Mary C. Neal, an orthopedic surgeon, who was kayaking the rapids in Chile and drowned, having been caught in her kayak wedged under the water.  Though her body was pulled from the water, it was only after she had been dead for many minutes.  Her book recounts what happened after she died and how it changed her from a nominal Christian to a believer.

The second, Waking up in Heaven by Crystal Mc Vea had a greater impact on me.  She also died, in the hospital, was clinically dead for nine minutes – we are into brain damage time, but was remarkably returned to life.  Her book recounts her life before and after this event.  I want to share one and a half paragraphs from this book – these are her words about part of what she experienced after her death.

Many people who describe dying talk about finding themselves in a pool of light, but that description doesn’t cut it for me.  For one thing, a pool suggests it was somehow confined, but in fact it was vast and endless, with no beginning and no end.  For another, it wasn’t just light - or at least not light as we know it.  It was the closest to the color we call white, but a trillion times whiter that the whitest white you’ve ever seen or could imagine.  It was brilliant and beaming and beautifully illuminating, and that’s why I call it a brightness.  In the words of the apostle John in Revelation 21:23, “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.

                But there was another dimension to it.  There was also the sensation of absolute cleanliness.  It was a feeling of absolute purity and perfection, of something completely unblemished and unbroken, and being immersed in it filled me with the kind of peace and assurance I’d never known on earth.”(p13)

This morning as I was reading II Corinthians 5: 8-9  “We are confident I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.  So we make it our goal to please him, whether we are at home in the body or away from it,” those words from Mc Vea’s book came to me.  I wondered how many of us read those words, and say we believe them, that they are true of us, but maybe not really.

How many of us fear or dread death?  How many of us don’t even want to think about it?  Mc Vea’s description of what she experienced, for the first time, seemed to capture what it might be like.  Certainly it is like nothing we have experienced, to be with God where there is no sin. 

If the book(s) do nothing else, they cause us to think about what we really believe about life after this one, and more than ever before, I am looking forward to it.