The very moment I closed my eyes on earth was the same moment I opened them in heaven. It happened in the same instant, which is how things are in heaven. Everything happens at once.
When I talk about it now, there’s a sequence, because we can only understand things one at a time. This happens, then that happens. But that’s not really how it was. Everything happened at once – yet with no sense of rush or urgency. In a way, it didn’t even ‘happen’ – my awareness of everything was instantaneous, as if it was ancient knowledge that had always been a part of me. It wasn’t like I experienced something for a minute, then moved on to something else for two minutes. In heaven, there are no minutes or hours or days. In heaven, there is no such thing as ‘time’.
Do events unfold differently in heaven? Or is it just the way we perceive them that is different? I don’t know. But in heaven, everything happened in the blink of an eye.
The instant I came out of my deep sleep, I was aware I no longer had a body. I had left it behind. No arms, no legs, just a vaguely human-like shape. I was now in spirit form.
But even without a body I knew that I was still ‘me’ – the same me that had existed on earth, the same me that had just told my mother I loved her before I died. At the same time, though, I had the stunning realization that I was the ‘me’ that had existed for all of eternity, long before my time on earth.
Unlike on earth, where I was plagued by doubts and fears, in heaven there was nothing but absolute certainty about who I was. This was a far more complete representation of my spirit and my heart and my being than was ever possible on earth, a far deeper self-awareness than the collection of hopes and fears and dreams and scars that defined me during my life. I was flooded with self-knowledge, and all the junk that cluttered my identity on earth instantly fell away, revealing, for the first time ever, the real me. ‘Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,’ God says in Jeremiah 1:5. And now I knew myself.
Imagine that – the first person we meet in heaven is ourselves.
When I came out of my sleep I was also immersed in what I call a brightness.
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 a light – or at least not light as we know it. It was closest to the color we call white, but a trillion times whiter than 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 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. It was like being bathed in love. It was a brightness I didn’t just see, but felt. And it felt familiar, like something I remembered, or even recognized.
The best way to put it is this: I was home.
And so immediately I found myself in this otherworldly brightness, I realized I no longer had a body and I became aware of the actual me – three incredible experiences you’d think might have blown my mind a bit. But in fact, I just absorbed them without ever being conscious of doing it, and they all made utterly perfect sense to me. So no matter how amazing and mind-bending something was, I had no problem processing it. Not once was I ever confused by anything in heaven.
And that includes the other realization I had – the realization that I wasn’t alone.
What I experienced next was the most profound and beautiful and miraculous experience imaginable. My spirit still soars at the mere memory of what I discovered. God, in His infinite wisdom, gave me a gift that was so glorious, so perfect, I can hardly write about it without crying tears of joy. It was a gift that utterly transformed everything that came before it … and everything that would follow.
But to understand just how soul-shaking God’s gift to me was – to appreciate the full power of what He showed me – you have to understand the terrible events that preceded it. You have to know the reasons why I struggled so much to believe that God loved me, before you can appreciate the wonder and the glory of what He did to show me that He does.