My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life (11 page)

You want to talk about an emotional night? Tell your daughter where her husband is and that he’s waiting for her. I’ll never forget that evening, the intensity and sorrow of it mixed with joy and awe.

Amy was in deep grief over losing Steve, and she was grappling with a jumble of emotions, like anyone who has grieved a dear one’s death. She was very angry and felt so alone. And now her dad was telling her he had seen Steve with his own two eyes in heaven? It was confusing for everyone to know how to feel, especially Amy. She probably wanted to feel as if Steve was one way or another still in tune with her, aware of her struggles on earth. When she heard that Steve was joyful and radiant, blissfully unaware, it seemed, of her mourning and her loneliness, it was not completely great news. In some ways, it made her feel even more detached from him and even more alone.

I tried to be as sensitive as I could. It didn’t help matters that I told my kids that all I wanted to do was go back to heaven. “Don’t be in such a hurry, Dad,” they said, looking worried. From their perspective, it was astonishing news, yes, but also hurtful. Didn’t I love them and want to be with them?

Oh yes. Those kids and grandkids are my heartbeat, and I’d move mountains for them if need be. But had they seen and heard what I did in that glorious world, they would understand that no one who sets foot in heaven would ever want to come back.

Steve did not want to come back, of that I’m sure. When I saw him beyond the gate, just fifteen yards away, so close and yet still unreachable, I was thrilled. We made eye contact, and both of us had huge smiles on our faces. He looked as cheerful as could be, as if he had just caught a world-record bass and was on his way to weighing the thing. The sickliness that had settled around him like a gray blanket those last months was gone, and Steve appeared as strong and vigorous as any man would ever want to be. He was jumping up and down, waving to me enthusiastically. Jumping up and down! The guy who had been living half a life that last year, cautious and constrained, not up for so many of the activities and pleasures he had taken part in when he was healthy, was now bouncing like an exuberant child. The chains of this earth—sickness, weakness, and worry—were gone.

What a sight for sore eyes. My dearest friend, valued son-in-law, cherished gift from above, was free. Steve was free!

I
t felt like forever while Peter went to check with God to see if I could stay or had to return. In reality it was probably only a matter of minutes, maybe five to ten, although it’s hard to judge exactly. I wasn’t wearing a watch, nor would I have checked it had I been wearing one.

I saw such magnificent sights in those minutes—perfect, contented babies, a divinely beautiful lake, sublime colors, the smiling faces of six loved ones, and so much more. Just to state the obvious, these were the most awesome (in the true sense of the word) moments of my entire life.

As far as I was concerned, the most important thing to me was getting through the gate to join my dear ones and meet the God I loved, whose love I could feel so strongly in that place, warming my soul like a fire.

Peter came back at last, slipping through the imperceptible gate with a slight smile on his face. He had a look in his eyes like he might have a secret for me.

“Marv,” he said firmly, looking at me with those intense eyes, “I talked to God, and God told me to tell you that you had to go back, that he still had work for you to do on earth. He still has work for you to finish there.”

I was about to start arguing again, but it was too late. The decision had been made, and I had no choice in the matter. The next thing I knew, I was back in my hospital bed at the University of Michigan Medical Center, hooked up to a web of tubes.

“I Want to Go Home”

Back in my hospital room, it was like an attack of lights coming on—harsh, glaring lights assaulting me like a bucket of ice water on a hot day. It was infinitely brighter in heaven; after all, it’s lit by God himself, yet there my eyes had no trouble adjusting to the brilliance.

I was attached once more to all of those tubes—and the pain! I hadn’t realized how blessedly free of pain I had been in heaven. Now the throbbing and the hurting was back, full throttle.

Two nurses came rushing in to check on me. Ruth told me that it wasn’t standard procedure for two nurses to come in. Usually, she said, a nurse will be assigned to a patient and check that patient all by himself or herself. As for why they were rushing in like that, I just don’t know. Something on my monitor must have alerted them that I was in trouble.

I think I was crying even before they came hurrying in, checking my blood pressure and oxygen levels and the tubes and IV.

Once they realized I didn’t need medical attention (at least, not in the way they were worried about), they noticed I was bawling like a baby.

“Why are you crying?” one of the nurses asked me. I can’t remember if she was nice about it or not. Nothing or nobody seemed particularly nice to me at that moment.

“I want to go home!” I wailed.

“You have to go back. He has more for you to do. . . .”

If I could have, I would have stomped my feet like a ticked-off four-year-old. I didn’t care one bit if there was in fact “more for me to do.” I wanted to be back in that perfect, gorgeous, painless place, not lying there in misery, covered in tubes.

The nurse’s answer was kind and well meaning. “It will be awhile before you get to go home, Marv,” she said, peering down at me. The lady had no idea I was talking about heaven, and not Byron Center, Michigan.

How could I even begin to explain this to my nurses? Were they believers? I had no idea. I didn’t want to take the chance that they weren’t. Obviously, the one nurse already thought I was acting like a dotty old man, confused enough to think I could walk out of there a few hours after major surgery. If I told them which home I was really referring to, they would have thought I had totally cracked up. I could just imagine the snickers at the nursing station!

I really don’t remember the next day very well. I was still in horrendous pain no matter how often the nurses upped my pain medications, and Ruth says I was shaking all over.

Apparently, I had some visitors, friends from Grand Rapids. I knew for sure these friends were believers, yet something stopped me from telling them too. Who would believe a story like mine? I didn’t want my friends to think I had slipped a cog mentally.

And a spark of resentment had begun to burn inside of me. Why did God pick me to have that experience, and then make it so fantastic and incredible I couldn’t even tell anyone? Was he trying to play a joke on me, to transport me to that place of endless wonders—and then send me back?

Why me—Marvin Besteman, retired banker? Why not pick someone flashier and more eloquent? I’ve wondered that a thousand times. (Later, my spiritual advisors said, “Why not you?” And they had a point.)

He has more for you to do. . . .

Probably a thousand times or more, I thought,
I wonder what he has for me to do?
For months after my experience, I wondered over it like a dog worrying a bone.

After spending five days in the hospital, I went home to Byron Center.

When I had entered the hospital to have my surgery, it had been winter. But when we left, it was the very beginning of springtime; the air had warmed, with blue skies and budding trees.

We were eager to be out of the hospital and outside again. Yet there was no comparison to the beauty and comfort of heaven. As we drove west toward our home, I knew beyond any doubt life as I knew it could never be the same.

Letdown

After settling in at home, first on the couch and then slowly up and about in my normal, everyday life, the thought that I would never tell anyone, not even Ruth, kept getting stronger.

I hoped maybe that the experience would somehow pass away, like a glorious dream, and I wouldn’t have to tell anyone. I had no desire to discuss it with one single soul.

But the opposite happened. It didn’t fade away at all. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I had seen in heaven and the people I had seen there. My time there started to become a kind of obsession.

I became quite depressed, struggling daily with the letdown of coming back from heaven to this dark world. Wrestling constantly with what had happened and why it happened made my depression worse. I was lethargic and apathetic about life, and Ruth began to worry about my mental health.

Then one day, without warning, the dam burst. Five months after my trip to heaven, in the last week of September, I finally broke down and told Ruth. I don’t know what made me tell her, at long last, but suddenly the story just poured out of me.

She’s a terrific listener, my Ruth, and never have I appreciated that quality of hers more than when I was recounting my time in heaven.

I cried. She cried. We would dampen our hankies, and start boo-hoo-ing all over again. It took hours to tell her everything, and then all at once I was done.

“Marv,” she said decisively, when she could finally get a word in. “You have been truly blessed.”

We decided together the best course of action would be to tell our children and swear them to secrecy. And that would be it. (Can you believe I still thought I could get away without telling people about heaven?)

We told the kids shortly after I had spilled the beans to Ruth. They weren’t jumping for joy, and they weren’t calling me a liar, either. I would say their reaction was somewhere in the middle.

Like kids do, even middle-aged ones, they said, “So, now what?” They were naturally shocked and maybe in some disbelief at first. They knew I would never make something like this up, but perhaps they thought I had been dreaming or hallucinating. It would take everyone awhile to process this unbelievable news.

With that load off my chest, I went back to thinking I could sit on this episode for the rest of my life until those two angels came back for me and carted me off to heaven, this time for keeps.

The only problem was, this was really a terrible plan; God knew it and deep down, I knew it too. The Lord decided I needed a shove in the right direction, so he gave me a hernia, of all things, and sent me on my way to the doctor. And not just any doctor would do. No, God handpicked the physician who would be more than a healer to my body, he would be a healer to my troubled, stubborn soul.

Two One-in-a-Million Cases

It’s almost impossible to pull one over on Ruth when it comes to my health and well-being. So, as much as I might have liked to hide the mysterious bulge in my stomach that appeared one day, she was having none of it.

The bulge was an abdominal hernia, she announced, in her crisp nurse voice. She made an appointment with a gastroenterologist that day and also shared her view that it was quite possible that in light of this hernia we were not going to go to Arizona for the winter after all. That’s what I was afraid of. After forty-plus years with a woman, you can read her mind, and unfortunately, she can read yours.

So I had no option but to go to the gastroenterologist to have my hernia checked out. I chatted with the doctor about this and that—the weather looked like it was going to storm, they were calling for the coldest winter on record, and so on and so forth.

He examined me and agreed with Ruth on two counts: I did have a hernia, and golfing amid palm trees was probably out of the question in my condition.

Oh, I was going to Arizona, alright. “Just try and stop me,” I said, stubbornly.

“Oh no, you’re not,” he replied, cheerfully.

We bantered back and forth, or was it bickering? Have I mentioned I’m hardheaded?

I was sitting on the examining table, dangling my legs while the doctor sat in his swivel chair, pondering my case.

He wanted to know what happened to me in Ann Arbor; apparently he thought maybe there was a connection between my surgery there and the hernia now. I told him I had been operated on to remove a rare pancreatic tumor called an insulinoma. Had he ever heard of it?

The doctor paused a little too long. “I’ve never had a patient with insulinoma,” he said slowly. “But I know someone who had it.”

“Well, who could that be?” I said lightly.

“My brother.”

Now it was my turn to pause. I was totally amazed. After all, insulinomas are less than one in a million, and here my doctor’s brother had also been stricken with one. I was very curious about his brother’s case, and started to ask questions when I noticed he had tears welling up in his eyes.

He told me that when they had opened up his brother to perform the surgery, they found advanced cancer, and the doctor’s brother had died three months later.

I began tearing up too, out of compassion for my grieving doctor, and also because I had become so emotional after my heaven experience.

Looking back, I can see now that the incredible “coincidence” of me having experienced the same rare illness as his brother had formed an instant bond between me and my doctor. Suddenly, the boundaries of patient and doctor fell away and we were talking intently about personal things, as though we had known each other for many years.

“Are you a Christian?” he asked me, out of the blue.

When I answered in the affirmative (although somehow I think he already knew the answer), he and I delved into a really meaty conversation in regard to Christianity, the church, theology—you name it.

“Two things I’m concerned about most are heaven and hell,” he said after a while. “What do you know about hell?”

“Well, I don’t know much about hell,” I said, “only what the Bible says about it, which isn’t too much. I think it’s a terrible place, and basically it’s life in the absence of Christ.”

By now, the doctor had stopped watching the clock entirely. My appointment had by then taken far longer than a normal visit to the doctor ever should take. I wonder what those poor nurses and receptionists told the doctor’s other patients, waiting way too long in the reception area.

His next question, though, blew the lid off everything, and practically guaranteed that anyone waiting to see this doctor might have to wait all day: “Tell me, then, what you know about heaven.”

Uh-oh. I was in big trouble. What did I know about heaven? I didn’t have a clue where to start. I wasn’t planning to tell anyone except for my close family members, and here my doctor and new friend had asked me about it, point-blank. What could I possibly say in reply?

Then God made it perfectly plain, obvious enough for even a hardheaded Hollander to understand. “Marv, this is one of the reasons I sent you back,” he said to me in an audible voice. Yes, I heard God’s voice, out loud. And he wasn’t messing around.

His words were spoken like an order, a direct command from him to me.

Well then, there was no turning back from God’s voice. I told my doctor everything, start to finish, ending my story about an hour later.

I believe the Holy Spirit had prepared his heart to receive my story—he was so receptive to every word. Some other physicians we’ve told my story to have brushed it off, but this doc was completely ready to hear about my heavenly trip.

The doctor and I finally emerged from his office, and we walked over to the nurse’s desk to schedule my hernia surgery. We both had red eyes, and we had been in his office for an hour and a half. The look in the nurse’s eyes seemed to say, “What in the world just happened in there?”

So much had happened, for both of us. I had been searching since April 28 for the reason I was sent back from heaven. Unexpectedly, through the course of an appointment with my gastroenterologist, I had the answer I was looking for. That conversation, and God’s instruction to me, was an important part of why I sit here today, telling you my story.

Sometimes—and Ruth will gladly attest to this—you have to explain something to me once or twice before I get it. God in his graciousness had revealed to me what he wanted me to do: Tell as many people as possible about my time in heaven.

The next time I visited this doctor for a follow-up appointment, he introduced me to one of his nurses. “This is the man who saved my life,” he said, not elaborating one little bit.

I smiled at the poor bewildered nurse. “And this is the man who saved my life.”

We were both telling the truth. The doctor never really explained what he meant by it, but if I were to guess, I’d say that hearing my story of heaven gave a man who was unsure about the afterlife all the belief and security he was craving.