I moved with God and my angels through the tunnel, toward the glowing entranceway. I knew exactly where we were headed, and I believed I couldn’t possibly feel any more joy than I did. But then I became aware of yet another presence in the tunnel, just ahead. This was the person God had brought me to meet.
This presence was smaller than my angels and also much more distinct. This figure had a body, and a face, and arms and legs.
It was a child.
It was a little girl.
I had the sensation of locking in on her and soaking up everything about her. She was small and no more than three or four years old. She had a white bonnet on her head and she was holding a small white basket – sort of like a wicker Easter basket. She wore a white frilly summer dress that had tinges of yellow, and this yellow was the first identifiable color I saw in heaven. But it wasn’t an ordinary yellow. These yellow tinges were beaming and sparkling like a prism, like they were reflecting the brilliant light around us and bouncing it back in an even more glorious way. The effect they created was just stunningly gorgeous, something I can’t even think about now without losing my breath.
The girl was skipping and prancing and laughing, just like little kids do on earth. She was bending and dipping her basket into the brightness at her feet and filling it up like she was filling it with water. She would dip the basket and scoop up the brightness and pour it out and do it again. And every time she dipped the basket and came up with it dripping this magical brightness, she laughed.
Every time she laughed, my spirit absolutely swelled with love and pride for her. I wanted to watch this little girl play for the rest of eternity. I wanted to run up to her and take her in my arms and tell her how much I loved her. The love just kept building, endless and radiating waves of love so deep and so intense and so unstopping I truly, truly believed my soul was going to explode and I was going to cease to exist. And all the while the little girl just kept dipping her basket and scooping up light and laughing like little girls do. It touched me so deeply it was more than I could bear. I prepared myself to burst, to shatter into a million pieces, because I knew I couldn’t possibly contain all the love I felt for this child.
And then God lifted this feeling from me.
It was almost as if I had been wearing some kind of magic glasses that suddenly He took off me. And I knew it was God who lifted it, because as soon as it was lifted I looked back at the child and immediately understood who the child was.
The little girl with the golden basket was me.
And then another understanding passed between God and me, and I knew this is what He’d been trying to show me all my life. He’d been trying to show me how very much He loved me.
I knew God was allowing me to see myself as He saw me. And in His eyes, I was an absolutely perfect creation, and I always would be. All the things that happened to me on earth, all the bad decisions that caused me to hate myself – none of it mattered. I had believed God couldn’t possibly love me, not after what had been done to me, not after what I had done. But this was a lie, and God blasted the lie by showing me the intensity of His love for me.
Seeing the child was the most profound and powerful thing that ever happened to me, because it did something I didn’t think was possible.
It made me whole.
In that moment chains that had bound me all my life fell away. Chains of shame and secrets and lies and pain. Chains too heavy for anyone or anything to free me from on earth. Chains that simply dropped away in the presence of the truth.
This was the key sensation – that the truth of all truths had been revealed to me. I was imbued with this penetrating understanding that God had always loved me, like He loves all His children. And so, for the first time ever, I was filled with love for myself. How could I not love myself? I was God’s perfect creation! It is a lesson we all learn in Sunday school, but I guess I wasn’t paying attention that Sunday.
So God gave me another lesson.
What’s more, God chose to show me myself at the age of three. This was not a random age. I was three years old when the abuse began. That was the turning point in my life, the point where my innocence was taken from me. Though I had many happy times as a child and many moments of love and goodness, the truth is that from the age of three on I was trapped in a life of shame and secrets, of self-doubt and self-hatred – of believing I didn’t deserve God’s love, of believing God had abandoned me.
So God took me back to when I was three years old, and He freed me from all that. All those dark and difficult years, every crisis and heartbreak that made me turn away from Him – all of it, every bit of it, was washed clean by the awareness that God’s love for me is boundless. Burdens I had been shouldering for decades were lifted. Seeing myself through God’s eyes made me whole and set me free.
Yet even as I was filled with God’s love, I knew I was only experiencing a tiny, miniscule grain of it. God’s love is so big and so vast and so powerful we can only contain a small part. That tiny grain of God’s love filled me so completely I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else but with Him.
Then I heard something in a way I hadn’t heard anything else in heaven. It wasn’t like the pure communication that had passed between God and me. It was a word, spoken by a voice.
‘Crystal.’
It was my mother’s voice. She was calling my name. The sound was so sharp and so abrupt that I knew she was screaming.
‘Crystal! Crystal! ’
For the first time I had the sensation of stopping – like the feeling of seeing a car coming at you and freezing in your tracks. And in that instant I realized my mother didn’t know where I was. She didn’t know I was okay. I felt sorry for what she had to be going through. The truth is, I hadn’t thought at all about my hospital room. I didn’t hover above my bed or see everyone clustered around me or anything like that. I had no connection to anything that was happening in that room or on earth. Even the vision of my children wasn’t earthly; it was an awareness, like everything else I was experiencing in heaven. But that all changed when I heard my mother yell my name. All of a sudden I knew I had to let her know where I was.
‘I need to tell my mother I’m okay,’ I said.
And God responded. ‘The choice is up to you.’
I didn’t want to leave God. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I just wanted to let my mother know I was okay. I had the sensation of turning around and, for the first time, focusing on what was beneath me. It was a floor of what looked like shimmering water crystals, shining like a billion perfect diamonds. I could not see through it, but I knew that my mother’s voice was coming from somewhere beneath it. As I turned away from the entrance to heaven, there was another communication from God – the last and most powerful thing He said to me.
‘Tell them what you can remember.’
‘I’m going to remember everything,’ I answered. ‘I’ll be right back.’
I focused my full attention on the water crystals again, and in that instant I knew I was back in my human body.
And that’s when I opened my eyes.