Those near-death experiences continue to inform.
And fascinate.
Most recently, on a Christian network, a woman named Charlotte, Holmes of Gainesville, Missouri.
She “died” or nearly did three years ago — at the cardiologist’s office, where her blood pressure spiked to 234 over 134!
She’d had a previous stroke. And now, rushed to a hospital bed, her heart stopped for eleven minutes.
“They called a code and they come running in,” she told CBN. “I was above my body. I could see them doing chest compressions. I could see them, all the nurses around. I could smell the most beautiful flowers I’ve ever smelled. And then I heard music. And when I opened my eyes, I knew where I was. I knew I was in Heaven.”
As near-death experiences go, it was a standard as it was astounding.
From “above,” she saw the medical personnel working on her. She saw her poor husband Dan in a corner of the room. She encountered deceased loved ones and was handed a baby she came to learn was one she had miscarried at five-and-a-half months.
“I looked around at the beauty,” she said. “I could see the trees, I could see the grass. And everything was swaying with the music. Because everything in Heaven worships God. I can’t convey to you what Heaven looked like, cause it’s so above what we could even imagine, a million times.”
How often we hear that: how ineffable Heaven is. It was that sense of going home. It was how great those she knew looked — as if everyone, including saints of old, was in his or her twenties (and no one was wearing glasses). In their new bodies, “they looked wonderful.”
Check out 1 Corinthian 13:12 (“At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.” Many believe Saint Paul may have himself had a near-death brush.)
As a famed evangelist once said, “It’s true that our appearance will change, because God will give us new bodies, similar to Jesus’ resurrection Body. Those bodies will never grow old or tired, nor will they ever experience pain or suffering or death. But we will still know each other. When Jesus was transformed into His heavenly glory before the eyes of some of His disciples, ‘His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became as white as the light’ (Matthew 17:2).”
And yet, as with Charlotte — who also saw a tremendous light (behind her parents) — His disciples still were able to recognize Him, as was also the case with Moses and Elijah when, on Tabor, came from Heaven to speak with Him.
Fear of death?
That’s gone forever — for Charlotte and virtually everyone else who has glimpsed paradise.
Perhaps not so for those who have a different experience. And as the Missouri woman witnessed, there‘s the opposite experience — reaffirming Christian teaching and warnings. It was “shocking.”
“God took me to the edge of Hell, and I looked down and the smell –rotten flesh. That’s what it smelled like, and screams,” she says. “After seeing the beauty of Heaven, the contrast of seeing Hell is almost unbearable. And He says, ‘I show you this to tell you if some of them do not change their ways, this is where they shall reside. I heard my Father say, ‘You have time to go back and share.’”
Clear enough?
But Charlotte focuses on the main event: her “journey” to Heaven.
“I can look you square in the eye and tell you for sure,” she says, “‘Heaven is real.’”