Sightings of Heaven

Death

When death comes to claim our aging parent, what promises can we cling to? Here is a foundational truth: The path that we walk in life will be the same path that we walk into eternity.

No one expected Mom Voorheis to outlive her only son, Eldon. After early retirement from an industrial position in middle management, Eldon settled into the role of a full-time husband, father, grandfather, and son. A bout with emphysema put him in the hospital during his middle sixties, but only his wife and children knew about the panic attacks in the night when he would be choked awake for lack of breath. Otherwise, he appeared lean and young for his age.

   Eldon's retirement routine included weekly visits to the nursing home in Spring Arbor, Michigan, where Mom Voorheis "hung on" with a strong heart in a frail body and a failed mind. Janet, my wife, counted on those visits from her only brother to monitor Mom's condition because distance limited her to quarterly trips from

Page 100

Kentucky to Michigan. In between, she and Eldon communicated by telephone to make sure that all of Mom's needs were met.

   For more than half a century, Mom Voorheis had prayed for the salvation of her son. Eldon lost his first child and only daughter to an acute attack of leukemia, which took just three days to ravage a chubby two-year-old and cause her death. Eldon's faith never quite recovered from the shock. Outwardly, at least, he never professed his faith, even though he listened with full respect when his father preached or his mother prayed. Senility robbed Mom Voorheis of seeing prayers answered for the salvation of her son. Even when we took her to the college church where she and her husband had ministered for many years, no sign of recognition broke through as we entered the sanctuary, sang the hymns, uttered the prayers, heard the sermon, and greeted lifelong friends at the doors. As best we could tell, Mom's faithful prayers for her son had disappeared along with all other conscious memories in the dense fog of her senility.

   One act of providence taught us how wrong we were. It all began with a telephone ringing in the distance of our dreams. As the sound got closer and grew louder, Janet pinched me. "Dave, get the phone. It's Mom." She had told me about her premonition that we would hear of her mother's death by telephone in the middle of the night. Now we knew the time had come. I picked up the receiver, mumbled a sleepy "Hello," and heard the person on the other end of the line to identify himself as Eldon's son, Roger. "Dad just died" he reported with the bravado required of the oldest son when the cycle of the generations turns to put him on top. Bit by bit, the story unraveled. Eldon had died in his sleep. After surviving an attack of emphysema earlier in the night, he died from a weakened heart.

   Two days later, the remnant of a small family gathered for the funeral. When we arrived in Michigan, Janet asked me to take her first to visit her mother. A body diminished to less than ninety pounds and sustained by spoon-feeding lay motionless on the bed. Long ago, Mom Voorheis had lost the light of recognition from her eyes. When Janet bent down, kissed her, and said, "Mom, it's Janet," unseeing

Page 101

eyes gave no hint of response. Still, when I arrived at the room after parking the car, a resolute daughter greeted me with the declaration, "I'm taking Mom to Eldon's funeral tomorrow." I did not argue. Janet had inherited her mother's gracious but gritty spirit. Only once or twice in forty years had I heard either of them speak with the command of a military general. But when the order came, everybody marched — including me. So I could only watch in awe as Janet arranged every detail from finding Mom's missing glasses to assuring the nurse that she could help her mother walk up the stairs of the funeral home.

   Wind and rain added misery to our grief the next day. Janet countered with contingency plans for a raincoat, umbrella, and permission to enter the funeral parlor by the ramp at the side door. When she finished curling Mom's hair and touching her cheeks with a tinge of rouge — a taboo among Free Methodist preachers' wives in her generation — not even Mom's vacant stare could blur the beauty of the woman we had known. I pushed her in a wheelchair to the door and then held an umbrella overhead as she shuffled a few steps to the car, where I slowly turned her around, sat her down, and lifted her feet into the back seat. All of this went on without a word from Mom. A few months earlier, she would have asked incessantly, "Where are we going?" "Who are you?" and "What are you doing to me?" Now we sensed a major triumph to have her in the car, even if it meant attending the funeral of her only son.

   We arrived at the mortuary just a minute before the service began. All of the efforts to get Mom into the car were reversed to get her out. The rain continued to fall as Janet coaxed her step by step, helping her to shuffle up the ramp used for wheeling caskets to the hearse. When we entered the side door in full view of the seated mourners, an audible gasp of mingled surprise and joy could be heard. I knew then the reason for Janet's resolve. Mom Voorheis symbolized the family. Even though she did not know us, we needed her — to remember who we were, why we came together, and what we believed. Without the presence of Mom at Eldon's funeral, we would have

Page 102

floundered helplessly in our grief. But as we sat her down between us in the front row, we knew that we were ready to meet head-on the reality of unexpected death.

   The brief service began as all funerals do — prelude, prayer, obituary, and tribute. In closing, the pastor invited us to hear God's Word of comfort in the Twenty-third Psalm. The moment he began to speak the familiar words, "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want ... " another strong and clear voice took over the lead.

   It was Mom!

   I looked to my right and met Janet's eyes glistening from the left. In the middle we saw Mom, no longer slumping almost lifeless in her seat. With the posture of a queen, her eyes shone with beatific vision and her lips moved with the surety of a saint. By now, a crescendo of voices from a funeral chorus of rejuvenated mourners rose to follow her:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil;

For thou art with me;

thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,

United in new hope, we declare our faith together,

And I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

Amen. KJV

   With a blessing and a benediction, the simple service ended. Eldon's wife and two sons went first to the casket and wept together their farewell. Mom, Janet, and I came next. Holding Mom in between us, we waited while she sorted out the scene in front of her. Finally, her eyes fixed on the face in the casket.

   "Is that my boy?" she inquired.

   "Yes, Mom," Janet answered. "That's Eldon."

Page 103

   A reflective pause, then Mom asked, "Is he in heaven with Daddy?"

   Janet paused for a moment as if gathering her faith and checking with God. Tears almost broke her voice, but with certainty she spoke. "Yes, Mom, Eldon is in heaven with Daddy and Jesus."

   The last meaningful of words of Mom Voorheis's life were then spoken. With the same sense of closure that God gave to His creation on the sixth day, Mom simply said, "That's good." Reaching out her hand to touch the face of her son, Mom used that gesture to commend Eldon to the care of God with the assurance of answered prayer.

   Turning from the casket, Mom Voorheis instantly lapsed back into the sightless and senseless world of her senility. Friends who gathered around her expecting recognition received only an involuntary smile and a gracious nod. As quickly as we could, Janet and I took Mom out the door, into the car, and back to the nursing home. No words passed between us, and when we left her bedside to go to the cemetery, her fatigue had already put her into deep sleep.

   Mom Voorheis taught us a lesson in the funeral — one that can never be forgotten. We had assumed that her senility had robbed her of all her mental functions. Because she did not recognize us or respond to us on a conscious level, we concluded that the mom we knew no longer existed except in body, face, and memory. How wrong we were. The human brain is a mystery of countless cells that can store a lifetime of memories and a depth of functions beyond the reach of human probe. I now believe that somewhere in the unexpected realms of human thought there is a connector by which we communicate directly with God. Through the cultivation of prayer, the discipline of the Word, and the experiences of faith, we open communication lines with God that are premonitions of eternity. In fact, I also believe that our spiritual sensitivities sharpen as we grow old and especially when the conscious functions of thinking begin to dull through the natural processes of aging, the trauma of terminal illness, or the mysterious onset of senility.

Page 104

   Robert Fine served as senior pastor of the First Free Methodist Church at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, Washington, for sixteen years. Cancer cut short his ministry in his middle fifties. When I visited him in the hospital a few days before his death, he moaned with pain as he tried to lift his head and greet me. Still, despite the yellowing of jaundice, his eyes gleamed as he said, "David, I'm so glad that I cultivated the life of the mind. As my body gets weaker, my mind seems stronger than ever. I can think and dream better than ever. Cancer can't take that away from me."

   In Mom's case, we saw a momentary opening into the world of thought where she still lived. Sixty-three years as a faithful wife and forty-four years as a pastor's partner must have filled her hours with satisfying memories. Now, in that same world, only one thing mattered. She needed to know the answer to a half-century of daily prayers. Was her son saved? Beneath the confused world of her conscious mind, one can imagine the intensity of focus upon this one remaining question. If only Eldon's salvation was assured, Mom would be content at the center of her soul. From this perspective, we understand what happened in the funeral home that day. Her last prayer was answered, and her highest purpose in life was fulfilled.

   Since witnessing Mom's moment when the curtain on revelation rose so fleetingly, I've learned about other children of Christian parents who have had similar experiences. Audrey Hostetter, wife of President D. Ray Hostetter at Messiah College, tells of her father's stroke, which left him "brain dead." After several hopeless months on a respirator, the doctor asked Audrey and her sister if they wanted to make a decision on whether or not to disconnect the life-support system. They prayed, talked, and wept their way to the soul-wrenching decision. Because the father whom they knew and loved no longer seemed to live, they tried to respect his wish by asking the doctor to pull the plug. Entering their father's room for the last time to say good-bye, Audrey bent down close to her father's ear and whispered, "Daddy, now you can go home to be with Jesus." At the sound of her whisper, a teardrop appeared in the corner of her father's eye. For

Page 105

months he had not shown the slightest hint of a human response, and the monitor above his bed still showed the flat line of a dead brainstem. Yet at the mention of the name of Jesus, a teardrop revealed human understanding at a depth beyond the reach of the monitor. When Audrey reported the response to the doctor, he immediately reversed the decision. A teardrop had revealed a lively faith in a brain diagnosed as dead by the most sophisticated of human technology.

   While still reflecting on the meaning of Audrey's story, I listened intently while Dr. Billy Melvin, executive director of the National Association of Evangelicals, told about the final hours of his aged mother. She lay on the bed at home in a coma. Dr. Melvin's brother slept in the next room so that he could listen to her breathing and check regularly on her condition. Throughout her life, Mrs. Melvin had been noted for her singing. Old age had taken the quality of her voice from her, and she had stopped singing solos in church years ago. Who then can explain what happened on the night she died? Dr. Melvin's brother awakened to the distant sound of a singing voice. Although he does not remember the song or its words, he has no doubt about the voice. His mother was singing with all of the brilliance of tone and timbre that he remembered hearing as a youth. Before he could get to her, however, the singing stopped, and when he bent down to hear her breathing, she was gone. Not a shred of doubt exists in the minds of Dr. Melvin or his brother. Their mother's singing marked the moment when she joined heaven's choir! In another unforgettable moment of revelation, an aged parent in a coma reminds us that spiritual sensitivities are sharpest in the presence of death.

Stephen's Vision

Are we dealing with fantasy, coincidence, or revelation? If we take seriously the Word of God, we know the answer. In the Acts of the Apostles, Stephen the deacon evoked the murderous wrath of the Sanhedrin by preaching Jesus Christ and Him crucified as the only hope for their salvation. Death was imminent as the Jewish leaders

Page 106

were cut to the heart by the truth and gnashed their teeth in hatred. "But Stephen, full of the Holy Spirit, looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 'Look,' he said, 'I see heaven open and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.' " (Acts 7:55-56).

   Stephen's vision was too much for the Jewish leaders of the Sanhedrin. They covered their ears, yelled at the tops of their voices, rushed toward their victim, dragged him out of the city, and stoned him to death. Eyewitnesses attested to the event, including Saul of Tarsus, who later confronted the same Christ on the Damascus Road.

   Why not believe in "Stephen's vision" today? Medical specialists now recognize what is called "the Lazarus effect" for persons who come back from the dead with visions of life beyond the grave. Equally real are the moments of revelation for aging Christian parents who may appear to be dead or at the door of death. As in Stephen's vision, their mind clears, heaven opens, and Christ is seen in the glorious fulfillment of His promise. Although the experience is not guaranteed for all Christian parents who are approaching death, we must not deny them this privilege or discount its reality. On the contrary, I expect that a collection of true stories from other children of Christian parents would settle any doubt about eternity and cause us to think twice before giving up on our parents in the last moments of life. "Stephen's vision" may be far more common than we think.

Celebrating Eternity

From "Stephen's vision" we learn to celebrate eternity. Earlier we established the principle that old age is an extension of the life that we have lived. Now, with the knowledge of "Stephen's vision," we realize that eternity is also an extension of the life we have lived. Enoch, in the Old Testament, is our model. In Genesis, we read Enoch's epitaph, "Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away" (5:24). Like, Enoch, the path that we walk in life will be the same path that we walk into eternity.

Page 107

"Stephen's vision," therefore, is not an unnatural phenomenon. Rather, it is a window into the soul of the Christian and a preview of the glory of Christ. All of us have quoted the phrase, "As we live, we will die." Now we can add the corollary, "As we die, we will live."

   Another lesson we learn from the "St. Stephen's vision" is to be alert to the sharpened spiritual sensitivities of elderly parents as they approach death. In my clinical training as a hospital chaplain, I was taught that any one of the five senses can be acutely sharpened as the body weakens. In fact, an elusive "sixth sense" may take over. I recall an occasion when the son of a dying father whispered some instructions into the ear of his sister in the far corner of the hospital room. None of us standing around the bed heard what he said. Their father, however, roused from his semicomatose state and repeated every word. Another time, a patient who had not been informed of her terminal condition picked up all of the cues of body language from her family and announced, "It's over, isn't it?"

   We must not forget another side of the story. Dr. J.C. McPheeters, esteemed second president of Asbury Theological Seminary, suffered a debilitating stroke at the age of ninety-four. Until the stroke, he traveled for the seminary, preached in churches across the country, quoted Scripture by chapters, and worked out daily with barbells. The stroke, however, left him crippled, and speechless. One of the saddest pictures in my memory was to see Dr. McPheeters sitting in the dining room of the rehabilitation center with a huge rubber bib covering his chest. I helped him put a spoonful of peas into the good side of his mouth. Then his eyes requested a drink of milk. I put the straw into the good side of his mouth and he took a strong sip of milk. When he did, milk and peas ran out from the sagging side and down on the bib.

   Never would I rob Dr. McPheeters of his dignity. The story is told only to draw the contrast with the glory of a moment that followed. In the annual Wilmore Camp Meeting that summer, friends took Dr. McPheeters in a wheelchair to the Sunday morning service for what they knew to be the last time. Down in front of the tabernacle, Dr. McPheeters met Dr. E. A. Seamands, ninety-one, one of the great

Page 108

missionaries of the twentieth century. As a civil engineer, Dr. Seamands had complemented the evangelistic ministry of E. Stanley Jones in India by building over 175 churches in South India and earning the endearment of the Indian people by being known as "Tata" or "Grandfather" among them. When the two came together at camp meeting, they got into position for all the congregation to see and sang without hesitation every word of the beloved hymn.

It is joy unspeakable and full of glory,

Full of glory, full of glory.

It is joy unspeakable and full of glory,

Oh, the half has never yet been told.

   From such experiences, we learn how to minister to our aging parents as their spiritual senses are honed in their final days. Even if they are in a coma, victims of advanced senility, or suffering excruciating pain, our ministry is to say a simple prayer, quote a familiar Scripture, or sing a favorite hymn. Whether or not they hear us and respond is unimportant. For them, and for us, a deeper work of the Holy Spirit may be taking place.

   Still another lesson that we can learn from "Stephen's vision" is not to give up too quickly on the life of our aging parents. Contrary to common opinion, medicine is not an exact science. Physicians will be the first to admit their diagnoses cannot account for all of the factors that predict life or death. Certainly, they cannot diagnose the sharpening of spiritual sensitivities as death approaches. While none of us wants to suffer without mercy, perhaps the apostle Paul was right when he thanked God for the privilege of suffering as one of the ways that drew him close to Christ.

   Living wills, in which we state our wishes for the doctor and our family if we are terminally ill and incompetent, are fast becoming standard instruments for life-and-death decisions. In fact, Congress has passed a law requiring that hospitals receiving federal funds to provide counseling on the options available to patients in the event

Page 109

of incompetency due to illness. While recognizing the merits of living wills and hospital counseling on these matters, we dare not cheapen life or speed death. Christians must sound the alarm when a suicide handbook entitled Final Exit is a national best-seller, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian assists the terminally ill in dying. The sanctity and dignity of life from beginning to end must be held with biblical conviction. To assume that euthanasia is morally different from abortion because one involves conscious choice while the other involves an innocent victim is to ignore the fundamental fact that life itself is a divine gift, which we cannot devalue or destroy without sinning against God. So, as our parents age and need us to help make life-and-death decisions, the evidence of "Stephen's vision" prompts us to err on the side of life.

   Finally, "Stephen's vision" confirms for us the reality of heaven. If we are honest, each of us has uncertainties about heaven because our human nature cannot fully comprehend its spiritual nature. As fully as we believe the Word of God and anticipate being in the presence of Christ, our humanity reminds us that we have no eyewitnesses who have been to heaven and back. Perhaps we are wrong. If we listen and learn from our aging Christian parents, we will see all of the reality of heaven that we need.

Chapter Thirteen  ||  Table of Contents