Pastor recalls visit to heaven’s gates
Like Ricky Gervais’ character in “The Invention of Lying,” Baptist pastor Don Piper says he knows what happens to you after you die.
But unlike in the movie, Piper says he isn’t making it all up as he goes along.
He says he knows from firsthand experience after surviving a horrific automobile accident in 1989 in which an 18-wheeler hit his red Ford Escort head-on, crushing him inside.
One leg was all but severed, and one arm was found in the back seat, he says. He had severe head injures and multiple broken bones, his chest was pinned against the steering wheel, and several paramedics couldn’t find a pulse. Officials called for the coroner.
“I didn’t have a near-death experience; I was dead. I died,” Piper says in a telephone interview. “They covered me up and were waiting for the medical examiner. It was over.”
But while he was “gone” – for 90 minutes, he says – Piper claims that he was drawn to the gates of heaven, where he was met by spectacularly luminous people he knew who had already died.
They were all people he had loved or who had loved or mentored him spiritually. And although he didn’t go inside the gates or see Jesus or God face to face, he describes an even brighter area on a hill inside the gates where he believes they were present.
After the crash, the resident of Pasadena, Texas, says he was unwilling to confide his experience to anyone. But some fellow pastors persuaded him to talk about it, and now Piper travels around the country offering his message to the faithful and skeptical alike.
More than 2,000 people are expected when he speaks Sunday morning at Hope Missionary Church in Bluffton and Sunday evening at First Mennonite Church in Berne, says the Rev. Don Liechty, a retired First Mennonite pastor and a visit organizer.
Piper, 60, says he kept his tale a secret “for a long time because I didn’t want to talk about it. I called it a sacred secret.”
Part of the reason, he says, was that talking about the crash meant reliving his recovery, which he calls “agonizing.”
He had 34 surgeries, including skin and bone grafts, spent more than 13 months in the hospital and completed more than two years of physical therapy before he was able to walk again.
Both his leg and arm were reattached, and he now walks unassisted.
“Don’t ask me to run,” he says with a laugh. “Just walking up on that stage … will be remarkable for a lot of people.”
After the crash, Piper says, a pastor who’d been traveling from the same religious conference he’d just attended came upon the wreck and prayed and sang to him for about an hour even though everyone thought he was dead.
He says he came to singing “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” with the man, with whom he has kept in touch.
He says he also suffered from a period of depression, which he attributes in part to having glimpsed a better place.
Piper, who has written two books about his experience, says he’s now glad that he didn’t see God or Jesus.
“If I had seen that and had that taken away from me, I don’t think I could function at all,” he says. “It’s the thing that will complete things when I return.”
Piper says people in heaven appear ageless, and their bodies are restored, regardless of how they left them on Earth. He says he could talk with the people, “but in a language we’ve never heard here.”
“And when I say something in heaven, you understand everything it meant and ever will mean. You’re not having to explain yourself. People get the whole thing,” he says.
Piper says he urges listeners to make “reservations for heaven” by coming to the Christian faith and adds he knows that the Bible offers the promises of Jesus himself about heaven for believers.
But some people want more, he says.
“I get a lot of e-mails from people serving over (in Iraq and Afghanistan). They want to know about buddies, and they want to know what happens to them should they not make it back,” Piper says.
“There’s this percentage of people who just want to hear it themselves, that want to talk to somebody who can say, ‘Look, this is real. I saw it with my own eyes.’ ”
Several years ago, a guidance counselor at the school where I taught stopped by my classroom. Janice spent most of the afternoon counseling a student, whom I’ll call Kara.Kara was in my fifth-period English class.