My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life (4 page)

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. (Isa. 6:1–2 NASB)

Cherubim, I learned, not only have four faces (one of each: a man, an ox, a lion, and a griffin), they also have four conjoined wings covered with eyes. After the fall, they guarded the way back to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life. They also attend the throne of God. St. Thomas Aquinas had a theory that Satan was a fallen cherub.

Seraphim also serve as caretakers to God’s throne as they continuously shout praises to him. I find it fascinating that their name,
seraphim
, means “the burning ones.”

Was it the cherubim or seraphim whose wings brushed against my arms and face and head as I stood at the gate of heaven? I couldn’t see the creatures that brushed against me, but they felt like the flutter of wings against my skin. To be more specific, the feathers felt soft yet sturdy, like that of a large bird, a Canada goose, a swan, or yes, a stork. The feeling wasn’t that of a fluffy, downy baby chick at all.

Peggy’s angel story was also told to me after my heaven trip, and when I heard it, I was instantly reminded of how those angels’ wings had felt brushing against me.

The Touch of Angels’ Wings

Peggy, a Canadian mother of five children, was the kind of mom who always prayed for her kids before they walked out the door to school each morning. One day, Peggy was praying for her two little girls as they were about to leave for school. Immediately after she finished praying for them and opened the door to let them out, she felt a rush of wings graze her head gently. It felt as if a large bird had flown past her, out the door behind the girls. But as Peggy spun around to see what it was, she saw nothing behind her. Still, whatever it was had flown
out
of the house and not into the house. She looked out to the sidewalk where her daughters were walking toward school and saw nothing. No large birds were anywhere to be seen. Suddenly, she knew in her heart of hearts that what she had felt was an angel, following her children and watching them every step of their way.

Isn’t that a wonderful, heartening story of God’s watch-care for his little ones?

Angelos

I am leaning toward my two heavenly visitors being the most “ordinary” order of angels, simply
angelos
, or messengers. They are the angels most concerned with the affairs of people on earth, and fulfill lots of jobs and undertake all kinds of missions, including flying me to heaven on that incredible night.

As I said, my flight was as smooth as could be, a gliding sensation I’ll never forget, because it was like no other flight I ever took on earth. We flew upward at first, for a few seconds or maybe a full minute. Then, I noticed two things: my angels all at once changed course slightly, veering to the right a little bit, before beginning our descent.

Yes, it was a descent, definitely a distinct drop and no longer a climb.

I’m absolutely sure of it. We were gliding downward on an angle when I realized something else. I looked down and saw that my dangling legs had pants on, and that somewhere midair, between this world and the next, my clothes had changed. When my angels picked me up, I had been wearing my blue hospital gown. In the air, I saw that I was now wearing a light brown golf shirt, tan pants, and shoes, the kind of thing I might wear to take my wife out for dinner.

Later, when I would get a glimpse of my precious mother, grandparents, son-in-law, and friends, I would notice that they too were dressed very similarly to what they wore as they lived their lives on this earth.

There’s something else I want to tell you about the way I was set down in heaven. Ruth and I are fortunate enough to live in a condo with a bunch of older folks like us as neighbors. I like to relax from time to time in a deck chair by the man-made lake right below our sliding doors, watching the migratory birds that flock to the banks of the lake.

If I’ve watched one, I’ve watched a thousand Canada geese come in for a landing by the lake, their brownish-gray wings alight as they coast smoothly toward solid ground.

When I “came ashore” to heaven’s gate, I felt like one of those Canada geese, gently gliding toward the ground.

As soon as my feet touched down, my two angels disappeared and I never saw them again.

I had landed in another realm, in the very kingdom of heaven, where I was to see and hear and feel things beyond my wildest imagination. Already, in those sacred seconds in the cloudless sky, I was enjoying myself very much.

T
he colors and lights in heaven were simply sublime. Of course they were. Would you expect anything less?

They were the deepest, richest, most gloriously lush colors I had ever seen, and some I had never seen before. Heaven is a dream-come-true for those who love all things colorful, and our home there is lit by the Father of Lights, who dropped the sun and moon into the sky. Like the apostle John said in his Revelation of heaven: “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
” (Rev. 21:23).

The lights I saw were far beyond descriptions such as “radiant” and “luminous,” soft and delicate shimmers that were somehow robust, and bold and vigorous beams that were somehow gentle to my eyes.

I simply don’t think those colors and lights exist on earth.
Now Marvin
, you may be thinking,
that doesn’t help me out in the least
.
Can you be a little more descriptive?

Well, I’ll give it my best shot. I know “indescribable” is a frustrating word, but I promise you, it fits the situation. But I will try to relate to you the colors I saw in heaven.

I did not see streets of gold. Mind you, I didn’t get very far, only to the gate and then a brief peek inside the gate. I like to tell people it’s as if you were from Nepal or Congo or someplace, and you were dropped via helicopter into Estes Park, Colorado, and picked up by the same helicopter twenty minutes later. Your impression would be that America was one big mountain range with jagged, snowy peaks because that’s what you happened to see during your limited time there.

Other heavenly travelers have seen different sights than I had, and credible witnesses to heaven
have
seen golden streets and people with wings (not angels). Colton Burpo, the precious little boy whose story is told in
Heaven Is for Real
, even saw a magnificent rainbow horse. They are not making up their journeys any more than I am making up mine; we simply were given our own short previews based on what God wanted us each to see.

I did see some phenomenal things, though. The colors and lights were just two of those sights.

The Greenest Green and Bluest Blue

I saw babies and children and grown-ups of all ages playing and talking and laughing on grass that was the greenest green I’ve ever seen. I’m a golf nut, and I love to settle in each year and watch the crème de la crème golf event, the Masters Tournament, held in Augusta, Georgia. I’ve only been able to see the grass on which the world’s greatest golfers play on high definition TV, but that flawless, emerald-colored carpet is the greenest surface I have ever seen in my lifetime. An acquaintance was privileged enough to attend the Masters Tournament, and his wife teased him because he came home with all these snapshots of the grass. “Check out this turf,” he had told her, all excited as she rolled her eyes just a little bit. “See how perfect it is, how incredibly green.” Picture the verdant, luscious grass at the Masters and then try to imagine grass far greener and more deluxe. That’s how green the grass is in heaven.

The sky in which I flew to heaven, and the firmament surrounding the heavens, were a wilder and bluer yonder than you would ever believe. The atmosphere was soaked in color and light, and the blue was again outside of any tint we can brag about down here.

The closest shade I can associate this otherworldly blue with is the surreal tones of the water in the Caribbean or off the coast of Hawaii at sunset. It’s a blue to marvel at, to appreciate and admire wholeheartedly. Imagine the ocean or a tropical bay at its bluest, and then think about the fact that a blue far from that color is waiting for you and me on the other side. And if blue is your favorite color, you’re in luck. From what I saw, blue is the second-most prevalent shade in heaven. (Can you take a stab at what the first was? Stay tuned.)

The thing about the colors in heaven is that they are all shot through with a brightness, a luster that seems to incorporate the sun’s rays, the moon’s beams, a fire’s flicker, and a star’s glitter, stirred together by a master lighting director and splashed out over the canopy we will spend eternity watching.

How this Master loves to add glow and warmth to our dim paths with previews of the brightness to come!

The Light of My Life

It was 1956, a leap year, the year I took a leap of faith and love that would improve my life beyond measure since that blessed day in June when I laid eyes on Ruth, the light of my life.

Elvis Presley had just hit it big on the radio with “Hound Dog,” Rodgers and Hammerstein came out with
The King and I
at the movies, and General Electric introduced a nifty new gadget called “The Snooz-Alarm,” the first alarm clock that allowed you to whack it over and over again before you finally came to.

I was twenty-one years old, just out of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, where I had graduated with a degree in economics and business. It was a summer of endless possibilities, as I was courting the girls, sometimes properly and sometimes with all the charm of a nervous wreck. Girls confused me and confounded me; being the oldest of three boys, I really couldn’t begin to fathom their mysterious ways.

That summer day, when I was set up on a blind date with a nursing student named Ruth, I wasn’t expecting my world to flip on end. I just thought we would enjoy some gooey pizza at Fricano’s pizzeria, and maybe I would get the chance to flirt a little with a pretty girl.

I thought she was beautiful. (I still do.) I can’t remember how the pizza was that night, but I will never forget those shining blue eyes and her quiet maturity. She was, I thought, one of the most interesting women I had ever talked to. I still think so, after all these years.

However, the draft board was sending me ominous notices. Ruth says I took a month to call her, and I think it was more like two months. It wasn’t that I lacked interest, but I was immature and didn’t know where my life was headed. Still, a month or two later, I called her, and that was that. There was no one else for me but Ruth from that day on.

So, off I went to basic training with her loving words. In my mind, I knew it was the first time a woman had offered me words like that so sincerely.

We wrote letters back and forth, and those letters lit up my days in basic training. She was a young nurse, just getting started, and her job entailed so much serious business, matters of life and death. Ruth poured out her heart to me in those letters, and I tried to do the same with mine. Once you put it on paper, you can’t take it back. I’m so glad we committed to paper our feelings for one another, and got to know each other so thoroughly as the mail flew back and forth from Grand Rapids to Colorado Springs, where I was stationed.

When I came home on leave, we spent every spare minute together. Ruth moved in with my parents to save money, and one day soon after I returned to Colorado, my dad took Ruth to the jewelry store to pick out her engagement ring.

On her next visit to Colorado, she was faced with a miserable sight: her strapping Army beau, feebly lying in a hospital bed, with red, puffy eyes and a hacking cough. At least I was clutching a diamond ring—I had that much going for me.

I was so sick with pneumonia I couldn’t even get out of bed to get down on one knee to pop the question. It popped in spite of this, and she took pity on me and said yes. She said yes! At that moment, sick as I was, I felt my soul fill up with brightness.

Dance of the Spirits

Heaven exhilarated me with its greens and blues, but the number one color there seemed to be white. White! I’m not talking about the famous tunnel with the white light. I never saw a tunnel like that, although others have seen it, so I’m keeping an open mind.

White is one of my favorite colors—white and red. We’ve never owned a vehicle that wasn’t white or red.

The white in heaven was—forgive me!—like none other I can compare. From a brilliant white to an opal stone to a milk glass moon color, the white shades clustered in the sky like a huge bridal bouquet, white on white on white, yet all distinct tinges and tones, including some whites God is saving for us to see in Glory. The multitude of whites included brighter whites and lighter whites—they were all gorgeous.

There are three reference points on earth to which I can compare the variations of color and shades in heaven. The most down-to-earth example is the sugary swirl of cotton candy you might enjoy at the circus or the state fair. As cotton candy has lots of different colors spun into it, the colors in heaven would meld from whites into blues and reds and purples and greens. The multiple colors would change and shift and move constantly, twirling and twisting and floating.

The many lustrous varieties of white were, like every heavenly color, infused with glowing light. Now we “see through a glass darkly,” and we screw a lightbulb into the wall so we can see to read newsprint and iron our clothes and pay the bills. The lights in heaven are not bolted to any wall. They are constantly moving and shape-shifting in a way that fixated and enthralled me. The closest I can come to describing what that light show was like is probably the aurora borealis, or the northern lights.

About ten years ago, Ruth and I flew to Anchorage, where we rented a motor home and rambled around the great state of Alaska for a couple of weeks. More than once, our Midwestern mouths hung open as we gawked at the spectacle and pageantry of the northern lights.

The Cree Indians call these lights the “Dance of the Spirits,” as they two-step around the polar skies, leaping and twirling in patterns of reds, greens, purples, blues, and pinks. And what place is more filled with spirits—real spirits—than heaven?

There the lit-up colors come together, pull apart, do-si-do . . . they jump and spin and twist and spiral and pulsate, kind of like a dance, sort of like the northern lights.

Then again, if I compare the light show in Alaska to the light show in heaven . . . it’s not even close.

The Answer Is No

Ruth said yes to the first question and no to the second.

We were weeks away from getting married when I got orders to ship to Germany for two years. Well, that threw a wrench into things. A fellow finds the perfect girl to marry and then the Army comes along and everything gets stalled. I knew Ruth wouldn’t be happy about this piece of news. The date was set, Ruth had sewn her dress, and the cake was ordered. She and my mother had already stuffed a couple hundred engraved invitations, licked the envelopes shut, and crammed them in the mailbox. I didn’t know much about women, but I did know this news was going to go over about as well as the Hindenburg. Still, what are two years when a man and a woman are in love?

Nervously, I dialed Ruth’s phone number on a payphone at the base in Colorado. “Will you wait for me for two years,” I gave my halting delivery, “until I get back from Germany?”

“No,” she responded curtly. I literally dropped the phone, I was so shocked.

No?
Well, that wasn’t the answer I was hoping for. As it turned out, though, Ruth was saying no to the two-year-wait, not to me. The Army, in a flash of kindness, permitted me to return home to be married just before being shipped to Germany. I had recently been promoted to company clerk after fifteen weeks of infantryman training.

We telephoned every single person invited to the wedding and told them it had been moved up. On July 9, 1957, Ruth became my wife and has been with me every step of the way, through thick and thin, richer and poorer, in sickness and in health—and literally, through heaven and earth.

The honeymoon was brief and fumbling, the blunders concealed behind a façade of hopeful yearning.

Then, quicker than you can say “gesundheit,” we were packed and off to Germany. We were young and full of promise for what was to come. I was married to someone in whom I saw mountains to climb, valleys to explore, and new wonders beckoning off in the distance.

And together, over half a century, we have climbed mountains, more than I can count, but first we had to stumble over a couple of molehills. I am almost embarrassed to tell you what sent me into tantrums regarding Ruth’s behavior within the first month. You see, I suddenly discovered to my horror that this beautiful creature to whom I was married had a horrendous habit: she squeezed the toothpaste tube in the middle rather than carefully rolling it from the bottom!

Marv and Ruth, family dinner, 1998

She also had a new mother-in-law who spoiled her three boys beyond belief. So it was news to me when I found out Ruth wasn’t about to iron my undershirts and undershorts like my mother always had. “I’m sorry,” she said, in a tone which indicated she wasn’t very sorry at all. “But I just don’t do that.” Well then, that was that. It was either iron my own shorts or wear them wrinkled.

We settled into our new lives in Heidelberg and found some new friends at a little church on the base. Soon after we arrived, I was promoted to chief clerk for the US Army in Europe, which meant I was in charge of 30,000 soldiers’ whereabouts. One of these soldiers, by the way, was one Pvt. Elvis Aaron Presley, who was also stationed in Germany during my time there. Were these men and women on field or off? On sick leave? Our biggest concern at the time was Russia dropping the A-bomb, and I took my responsibilities very seriously.