My Glimpse of Eternity (10 page)

“I wanted very much to go inside because it looked so beautiful and the music was, well, so heavenly.”

“But beauty and music are here, too, Bets. Plus so much more. I’ve always heard that heaven was beautiful with wonderful music. What else did you see?”

“The Person of Jesus. His Presence excited me more than anything I had ever known. I felt I could learn from Him the answers to every question I ever had. I felt that He knew me better than anyone in the world and loved me completely in spite of my faults. It was His love that really got to me. I wanted so much to go inside and be with Him and worship Him.”

John’s eyes were now shining. He was more relaxed, and I sensed he was beginning to feel some of the intense love of Jesus I had felt.

Early the next morning before John was awake, I slipped out of bed, put on a warm robe, picked up my Bible and crept out on the balcony. The pink rays of the early morning sun filtered through the trees onto the dew-covered Florida campus. As I took deep breaths of the morning freshness, I thought back to John’s and my conversation the night before. John’s determination to know every detail of my walk with the angel had both stimulated me and made me uneasy. Did he feel he was going to die? He was facing a serious operation, but the doctors were optimistic. No, I concluded, John just yearned to be healed. He wanted his vitality back again.

Yet I needed to provide every possible kind of reassurance for him. I closed my eyes and sought again the Presence. “Jesus, is there anything more you have to tell me?”

The Lord had given me total recall of every phase of my time in heaven, except one. I joyously sang a song that was rendered in many parts and in several different languages by many other voices. At the time I understood the words and thought I would never forget them. Yet later I could not remember either the words or the melody.

As I prayed for an answer to this on my motel balcony, these words flashed before me:

You see through a glass darkly.

Quickly I turned to the well-known thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians on love. Carefully I read it over in my King James Version. With rising excitement I wrote down certain verses and studied them, at the same time keeping up my prayer dialogue.

For now we see through a glass darkly
. . . . Our obvious condition in this world, Lord, is not to be able to see or understand the mysteries of the world to come.

But then face to face.
You have already shown me that at death we come face to face with You, Lord.

Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
We have partial knowledge now which will become full awareness in heaven. This must mean, Lord, that in Your City we will know everyone there, just as everyone there will know us. And in heaven we will have instant knowledge of all other languages (. . .
we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is
—1 John 3:2). When I stood at Your gate, Lord, I had this knowledge; I knew the meaning of all the different words in all the different languages! But this knowledge was withdrawn once I returned to this world. I suppose it had to be this way, Lord, otherwise having such wisdom in this world would give me an exalted status.

For an hour I prayed and read His Word and was enriched by the bits of knowledge He dropped into my mind and heart. Then John awoke and we sipped coffee and prayed together.

Later that day we were sitting on the balcony watching the shadows of trees and buildings lengthen as the sun sank below the western horizon. John had gone through some heart tests in the morning, then had slept several hours in the afternoon. He was rested, eager to continue his questions.

“Years ago, Bets, the pastor in our church preached that we make our heaven or hell on earth. That made sense to me then. But not now. I’ve come to believe there is a heaven after this life. I’m just not sure I’m going to like it. I’ll miss so many things. Sports, for example.”

“What makes you think there’ll be no physical activities in heaven?”

“What makes you think there will? I can’t imagine playing ball in long flowing robes.”

“The Bible says Heaven will be a busy, active place.”

“I don’t know that passage.”

It was in the 65th chapter of Isaiah:
Therefore thus says the Lord God. . . . Behold, I create new heavens and a new earth. . . . They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit . . . for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands
(Isa. 65:13, 17, 21, 22).

We talked at length about the kinds of work there could be in God’s City. John wanted to know other passages which promised life after death. I did some research and came up with the following:

Rejoice that your names are written in heaven
(Luke 10:20).

In my father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?
(John 14:2).

He [God] will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces
(Isa. 25:8).

To the thief on the cross, Jesus said: Today you will be with me in Paradise
(Luke 23:43).

And then there were those tremendous words I saw in block letters:
Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die
(John 11:26).

I could see that John had no real problem accepting the Bible promises. He just could not believe that the next world would be better than this one. What would there be to do?

“I can’t point out any more specifics than what the Bible tells us,” I replied. “In the singing I heard outside the gate I felt great joy, vitality, creativity, love, happiness, aliveness. It was anything but dull; perhaps peaceful in a way, but not a bland peacefulness. I had a definite feeling that the minute I entered those gates, I would begin a whole new learning process that would completely absorb every ounce of strength I possessed.”

John’s eyes were fixed on me intently. “I don’t think I quite believed you that morning there in the hospital when you said you had been given a glimpse of eternity. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t all of a sudden think kindly of something I had hated for so long. I was grateful that you were well again but I just could not believe that dying could be . . . well, good news.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t seem like good news to people here on earth who lose people they love,” I replied. “I love life as much as you do, John. That hasn’t changed. But I no longer see death as an end to life; it’s the start of a new life. Life on earth is short; eternity is a long, long time. I’m just so grateful that I’ve been given a glimpse of where I’m going to be in the forever. And every fiber of my being tells me that if you love God and believe His promises, you have absolutely nothing to fear.”

John’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. I reached out my arms and he held me like he could never let me go.

Later that night we were sitting out on our small balcony again, holding hands and drinking in the sweet aroma of frangipani blooms. John was relaxed and romantically attentive. I confessed to him that I had never felt right about following Dr. Bherne’s advice on contraceptives.

John was in quick agreement. “The Lord gave us His word on the subject before we had Brenda. He said He would pour His Spirit upon our seed, and His blessing upon our offspring. How much plainer can that be?”

I felt remorseful. “How wrong we were not to realize that God had an answer to this problem all along,” I replied. With my contrition there came the gentle but sudden awareness that He was preparing me again for motherhood.

The tests went smoothly for John and the four days turned out to be the most wonderful period we had ever had together. There was time to talk, to rest, for making love, for prayer, time for absorbing Scripture together, to explore seafood restaurants, time to rediscover how much we cared for each other.

At the end of our second honeymoon, John made the decision to go ahead and have the operation. A date was set for May 12th, two months from then.

Five weeks later I was sitting on a low brick wall, lined with swaying palm trees, at the back of our home in Clearwater. I was having my first cup of coffee and thought to myself, “What a glorious April dawn! Thank You, Lord, for the beauty and fragrance of Your out-of-doors.”

I now started each day with Jesus’ name on my lips. This morning while meditating I was aware of a strangely sweet sensation. Like the whisper of a wonderful secret, it dawned on me . . . I was expecting!

“Lord, how exciting; but is it all right?” I wondered. Did I have something new to add to the needles of worry in my spirit about John?

It was a fragile moment. The sun was warm on my body. The birds were singing. God seemed to be caressing my troubled spirit, flooding me with His love. I was to depend upon Him for everything and He would be with me. His Spirit would fill me with strength; the healing work in my body was continuing. I was not to worry about the new life in my womb nor think about Dr. Bherne’s warning; He would take care of it.

John was very sober when I went with him to the hospital; Mother and Dad were on hand, too, since they had moved to Florida earlier, Dad taking the pastorate of a small church in Palm Harbor nine miles away. Mother and Dad Upchurch were also present. Then the six of us had prayer together in John’s room before the operation.

After the surgery the doctor appeared to tell us that all had gone well. His reassurance was premature. The operation was a success, but the surgeon had decided to use a new process of thread-type valve instead of the longer method of suture. The new thread closure let a blood clot slip through, causing paralysis on John’s right side.

For days John lay in his hospital bed depressed, wanting to come home. Then through a registered nurse who lived next door, we equipped a bedroom in our home with the medical equipment John would need. The hospital approved our setup, and plans were made to bring him home.

At 9:30 on a Monday morning, Brenda and I arrived at the hospital to engineer the triumphant homecoming. As we entered the room, John was propped up in bed looking toward the door.

Brenda ran to him, “Daddy, you’re going home.” There was no reply. Something was wrong. John’s eyes were open, peaceful, but glazed. Brenda tugged at his robe sleeve, “Daddy, it’s really true . . . you get to go home.” In a panic, I ran to the nurses’ station to get help.

A doctor and a nurse soon rushed into the room with emergency equipment. It was too late. My thirty-six-year-old husband was gone. I was numb, plunged into darkness, only dimly aware of Brenda beside me, sobbing silently.

[
2
]. Harriet E. Buell, “A Child of the King.”

10
All Things Come Together

I
t is hard for me to understand the blackness that came over me after John’s death. I though I was prepared for this possibility. John and I had been given a beautiful time together at Gainesville where we saw clearly that God had permitted me a glimpse of His City so that I could share it with John.

Instead of acceptance and looking to God for further illumination, I became obsessed by post-mortem what-ifs. What if we hadn’t moved to Florida? What if he had gone in for the operation two years earlier as the doctors advised? What if he had had it done at the Miami hospital? What if the doctor had not used the new nylon valve technique? The list went on and on, but nothing changed the medical fact that John had died and the cause of death was ventricular fibrillation.

The time with John’s parents at the funeral was devastating. Oscar Upchurch—sad, dignified, courteous, distant. Dorothy Upchurch—grief-stricken, emotional, as always sharp with questions. She never put it into words, but I felt the accusation in her sorrowful dark eyes: “You never believed me, Betty, but I warned you this could happen.”

At the grave site Mother Upchurch wept uncontrollably. I felt I could almost read her thoughts. “Why did it have to be Betty who recovered and my John who was taken?”

Brenda was sobbing too, a lovely blonde young beauty with a colt-like appearance, soon to enter her teens. Why did she have to be deprived of a father at such a crucial time in her life?

Gary, beginning to shoot up at twelve, hovered about me in a protective manner. “I’ll come stay with you, Sis, and help out around the house,” he said, his hand patting my arm just like John was always doing.

The reassurance of my parents and my brothers was strengthening, but no one could help me at the point of my greatest need. I felt deserted by the Lord. Let down. Yes—I’ll admit it—betrayed. Ever since I had been cleansed and restored in His light, I had felt His Spirit dwelling in me. It had been a glorious, indescribably beautiful period. During the tornado He was there to guide me out of danger; in a hundred small daily crises He had been my rock and strength. But now, an expectant mother, I felt alone, desolate, abandoned, rebellious, angry.

John died on June 15, 1965. For two weeks I carried the grief, going no place, hiding at home. Instead of seeking strength and assurance from the Lord, I remembered the composure of Jackie Kennedy at the funeral of President Kennedy and was determined to put on a duplicate of her act. Pretending to be someone else, of course, never works.

It was Brenda who jolted me out of my self-pity. I had finally left home to go shopping one day at the supermarket. A teenage boy had carried two heavy sacks of groceries to the car for me. When I arrived home Brenda met me at the carport. I was sliding from under the steering wheel holding one of the overloaded bags.

“Mother, you should not lift that much weight. Let me carry it for you,” she called.

“Don’t fuss over me,” I snapped back. “I’ll do it myself.”

“Mother, let me help. You must think of the baby.” She grabbed one side of the sack and tried to pull it from my arms. I resisted.

Brenda suddenly became very stern. “Mother, let go of the sack! I can’t carry it for you if you insist upon holding onto the sack!”

The dam broke inside me. Light poured into my mind. I let go, ran into the house, into my bedroom, dropped onto my knees and for the first time since John’s death the tears came. For His Word once again flooded my heart, sparked by Brenda’s sharp rebuke. There it was in bold letters:

Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows
(Isa. 53:4).

“Oh, Jesus, I will let go of my heavy sack. Forgive me for holding it so tightly that I couldn’t hear Your word or feel Your presence. I’ve let it all go right now, Lord. I am so tired of the burden. Please take it. Please come back to me. Please . . . please, Lord.”

When I got up from my knees, the weight of depression was lifted. For the first time I began to see how completely John and I had been prepared for his passing.

Being able to share with John the beauty of death had helped my husband go into the next world unafraid. He would be met and escorted to the King’s palace. There would be music which John loved, people he knew, unlimited time and space to be and do all he had ever dreamed about. Greatest of all would be the teaching and fellowship and love of the Lord Himself.

The suddenness of John’s passing had temporarily blinded me to the gentle and loving way we had been brought to the moment of his death. Invalidism would have been agony for John, agony for those of us who loved him. God had been merciful. Now I fully understood John’s rapt attention to my experience on the other side, his coming back to it again and again. “You say, Betty, that there was such a feeling of vigor and lightness. . . . You really did want to go inside that gate, didn’t you?”

Several nights later God completed this healing by sending a special message to me through a dream. I was walking down a dusty path leading to a crude stone shed. I noticed the door was open and walked inside. There an elderly man wearing a cobbler’s apron was molding some damp red clay into cups, urns, and pots. Behind him on the shelf were pieces of beautifully decorated pottery.

Suddenly a plain jar fell to the floor. The man, paying no attention to me, bent over and picked up the cracked vessel. While holding it gently, he reached into an urn nearby, dipping his fingers into warm molten liquid, and began to seal the broken vessel with the wax. He finished mending it and placed it back on the shelf behind him.

Then he saw me and smiled. “It is better to be a broken vessel, mended and sealed by the Holy Spirit and thus ready to serve, than a vessel without flaw, ornate and beautifully decorated, but unwilling to serve.”

I awakened. Any doubts that I could ever be used of God again because of my flaws were gone. Tears of joy and repentance began to flow freely. I felt the warm wax of the Holy Spirit pour over my wounded spirit in healing power!

The crack that had come into my broken heart had been mended. Once again I had peace and joy in my heart. Everything was right again between me and the Potter. I was ready and eager to be poured out for others in the Lord’s service.

Filled with assurance that the block between myself and the Lord had been removed, the next morning I was on my knees determined to bring to His attention some of the unresolved matters that had been on my heart. I had scarcely begun my few words of petition when I felt His gentle correction:
You have always been a controlling woman, Betty. Now stop trying to manipulate Me and listen.

This quieted me and the Holy Spirit began His teaching:
You have learned, Betty, how pride and resentment can cripple you. You have been freed of your ill feeling toward people like Art Lindsey, your prejudice toward the blacks, your love of material possessions. I cannot answer your prayers now as long as you hold unforgiveness toward your mother-in-law.

Shortly thereafter I wrote a long letter to Dorothy Upchurch, parts of which I’ve reconstructed here from memory.

Dear Dorothy:

Ever since John’s death I’ve been wanting to write you a letter and try to say some things that have been on my heart. The Lord is telling me that now is the time; that He wants to do some healing work in our relationship.

First of all, I want to confess that from the beginning of our marriage I felt very jealous of John’s closeness to you and I resented the fact that you knew so much and I knew so little. But I was a stubborn and proud woman and felt that I was quite able to run our home, be a loving wife to John and a good mother to Brenda. The Lord has shown me in recent years that I need to depend much more on Him and much less on myself.

I was too grief-stricken to try and talk to you at the time of the funeral. I did not understand why the Lord spared me and took John. Lately I’ve stopped trying to understand theological issues and am content again to trust that God knows what He is doing. There is the wonderful assurance that John is with the Lord being more fulfilled than he ever was here on earth.

Please forgive me for the resentment I’ve held against you all these years and for every hurtful thing I’ve done to you. Since we both loved John so much I do feel the Lord wants us to heal our differences and bring our two families closer together.

Thank you for hearing me out. May God bless you and prosper your family.

With love,

It was several months before Mother Upchurch answered. Then she did, a sweet note. The relationship was restored.

As the seed which John planted in my body during our Gainesville honeymoon grew and developed, I fastened again unto God’s promise that He would “bless our offspring” and overrule the gloomy medical prognosis. When John passed away, my faith had wavered. John had ignored the warning of his doctor and the doctor had been right. John had paid the price of living at an accelerated tempo.

Since John and I had gone against the advice of my doctor and I had become pregnant, would the doctor be proven right again? Would I bear a deformed baby?

When the dark cloud lifted, thanks to Brenda’s sharpness with me, faith and hope returned. Dad, Mom, Brenda and I began to prepare for a happy blessed event sometime around the middle of December. The four of us began the countdown. “It will be born on Christmas Day—our gift to Jesus on His birthday,” predicted my mother.

But in November our doctor began to doubt that it would be a full-term baby. Just before John’s death I had nearly suffered a miscarriage. The early pregnancy months had been filled with such tension and hyperactivity that the doctor became increasingly uneasy as the weeks went by.

On November 27 he entered me into the hospital in Dunnedin, Florida. Labor began the next day. At 5:28 p.m. on November 28, a five-pound, two-ounce baby girl was born three weeks prematurely. We named her April Dawn because of my awareness early one April morning seven months before that God had created her.

November 28 was also Thanksgiving Day. Again, what a perfect timing He has! And how much we had to be thankful for! April Dawn was as normal and healthy and perfect a baby as this mother, with overflowing heart, could ask.

I can see now that all along God had been preparing me for new life. He did it by bringing me close to death so that I could view firsthand what a joyous experience it was. He restored my body and brought new life out of it in the form of a beautiful baby girl. God will always bring life to every situation.

Why God chose me—a selfish, proud, unloving person—for this unusual experience I’ll never know. Perhaps, just as Joshua and Caleb went out to spy the land and brought back the grapes of Eschol (Num. 13:23), God let me spy out the heavenly city so that I could come back and tell everybody how great and beautiful it was. Perhaps he spared me so that I could reassure John that there is no reason to fear death, that he had a glorious adventure ahead of him, that Jesus was waiting to greet him with loving, open arms.