90 Minutes in Heaven by Don Piper

As I mentioned in a previous post, I began reading 90 Minutes in Heaven last week and finished it earlier this morning. The book chronicles the accident, death and recovery of Baptist Minister Don Piper, and recounts his visit to Heaven on the day he died.

The book begins, "I died on January 18, 1989." Don Piper was in a terrible car accident on his way home from a conference. A prison inmate driving a tractor-trailer, lost control of his semi while crossing a narrow bridge and hit Don's car head-on, slamming it into the bridge railing. In effect, the semi drove OVER Don's car, crushing it. The time of the accident was 11:45am. The force of the collision was measured at 100mph. Don died instantly. Paramedics on scene failed to get a pulse and draped his mangled car with a tarp.

At 12:45, Baptist Minister Dick Onerecker and his wife approached the scene on foot, abandoning their car now in the long line of traffic unable to navigate through or around the scene. Despite receiving information that Don was deceased, Dick insisted on praying for him, saying that he heard the voice of God urging him to do so. At 1:15, paramedics were still unable to find a pulse and pronounced Don dead at the scene. Dick positioned himself inside the wreckage, placed a hand on Don's shoulder and began to pray.

The time between 11:45 and 1:15 is, I think, what Don refers to as his 90 Minutes in Heaven. He describes the gates of Heaven, the lights of Heaven and (most remarkable in his opinion) the sounds of Heaven. He says in the book that he gets frustrated trying to describe Heaven with words because there are none that adequately convey what he experienced.

He was pulled from the wreckage later that afternoon and taken to several different medical facilities. As he was wheeled into hospital emergency units, the trauma teams would just shake their heads, say that they weren't equipped to deal with the severity of his wounds, do what they could to stabilize him, then sent him to another hospital. Don frequently lost consciousness from the pain and would continue to do that through the weeks ahead, even as he began to heal.

I won't go into more detail. If you want to learn more, you can read the book. It is an interesting story. The whole point, however, is Don's experience with death and Heaven and his reluctance to discuss it or share it until several months after his accident. The fact that he was a Baptist Minister, I suppose, is intended to boost his credibility.

I'm not sure myself. I have always held to the notion that you get what you expect. If you think you deserve Hell, then you get fire and brimstone...or whatever your own idea of Hell may be. If you think you deserve heaven and angels, then you get the streets of gold, the company of others...or whatever you had envisioned you would experience on your day of delivery. If you believe in nothing...well...then it's over. You get nothing. The big sleep. No reunion with the departed, no shackles by a boiling lake of lava, no heavenly orchestras giving praise to the Lord in glorious fields of flowers. Just a casket or a crematorium and nothing more.

It's personal, I think. Believe or don't believe. Seems to me though that the happiest, most successful people I know believe in something. I don't think I know very many people that don't believe in anything at all. Everybody's idea is a little different but, whatever that idea may be, it seems that the very light of that idea, shines in even the most darkest moments of our life.

Truth is, it's just easier to make our way through this life believing in something.