#71 - On Meeting God

June 1968 - 16 years old

WHILE SHARING one of my stories with a friend, she interrupted, “And you still believe in God?”

Belief is my story. A story that began the day I died—August 3, 1969.

I was seventeen years old that sunny Sunday just outside Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The Chicago Cubs were about to defeat the San Diego Padres, Elvis Presley was playing in Las Vegas; and two weeks before we’d all watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin make their historic moonwalk. Nothing in my own world suggested anything out of the ordinary. True, my asthma was troublesome. But my parents had left me in care of my uncle, a doctor, before taking off for short-term mission work. That sunny Sunday I woke to the usual racket in the house, my five cousins stirring, Auntie Anne hollering to hurry up, breakfast was ready. I showed up but begged off church. I just couldn’t breathe.

I retreated to an upstairs’ bedroom. My lungs began to tighten. I struggled to draw air and was grateful to hear the car pull up just after noon. Car doors slammed, hinges squealed. Five kids tumbled through the front door and up the half flight of stairs. My uncle came to check on me and with a worried look told eight-year-old Patti to get me a spoon. “A tablespoon,” he told me, handing me a bottle before leaving on a house call.

Almost immediately I was in trouble. Tight lungs tightened, an iron grip climbing into my throat, leaving only a wee sliver of airway. I couldn’t call for help, and in mounting panic I focused on making each tiny breath count. Vision closed in. Sound came to me as though submerged. Patti popped her head around the corner. Freckles jumped in her face and she fled. Within seconds, my aunt arrived. I lost grip of the bedpost, and Auntie Anne struggled to keep me sitting while I hung to life by a thread of air, and in full-blown panic.

A funny thing, time. Ticking away, a steady beat but petering out as the mind whirls in a kaleidoscope of tumbling thought and fear and madness for oxygen, each belabored breath a countdown. Sharp, twinkling pricks began to plague, and I felt my body to be a universe of stars blinking painfully out one by one and in rapid clusters, and I knew myself to be dying.

Uncle Stan returned. I had no sense of sound, though I felt him heft me into his arms. I flopped like a thing already dead, legs swinging, banging into the doorjamb, down the stairs, out to the car. Somehow I was sitting on Auntie Anne’s lap in the back seat. I could see the leaves of the trees, tiny and bright, ever so green and oh-so-lovely while we rocketed downhill on the pitted, gravel road of 6th Avenue to 56th Street, the main drag out of town. How can I see them? I didn’t have my glasses.

Moments later we pulled into my uncle’s office on 56th. I felt a sting and jab to my thigh. Epinephrine? Fear surged, each breath cruel disappointment. Don’t let me die! Please, dear God, don’t let me die! But I was dying. No matter my begging, I wasn’t going to make it to the hospital. Was there sunlight in heaven? Do trees grow? Did birds sing? Could I walk a beach with waves at my ankles? Don't let me die!

Yea, through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.

A verse surfaced in the storm—a buoy on waves. I will fear no evil. I will fear no evil. We approached the George Massey tunnel that ran under the Fraser River, the hospital ten minutes out. Sunlight rippled through the stretch of overhead slats. I will fear no evil. We descended into the yawning cavern. I will fear no evil. I fear evil! I was going to die in that tunnel! In a rising tsunami of terror, foot braced beneath the front seat, I pushed up for a last desperate breath. For thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Next verse surfacing, we shot into the tunnel. Peace (all pain and panic gone) swept me into the darkness.

George Massey Tunnel

“I think we just lost her,” said my aunt. My uncle whirled, face white.

How can I hear Auntie Anne if I’m dead? How can I see my uncle’s face?

A light began to grow in the distance. I emerged from darkness into a butter-yellow brilliance that held in its core a more brilliant light yet, white, more dense but transparent, luminous and shimmering. No one had to introduce us—and for a moment I stood surprised by the radiating love of God.

Over the years, I’ve struggled to find words to name what I felt in those brief moments. Bliss, harmony, a oneness with the source—more than this. Serenity, connection, grace, inclusion, love. More still. A holy wonder far outside the gamut of love we so poorly know and experience here.

But I was to go back.

I don’t understand.

You have a purpose to fulfill.

I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to die again. I didn’t. I wasn’t a fan of the process.

You’ll go back to Abundant Life.

Have I been healed?

You have a purpose.

Richmond Hospital

The Light of God gave way to sunlight, and I saw large red letters spelling EMERGENCY, bobbing ahead at an angle impossible to see from the backseat of a car. I floated up through the roof, the letters below me. I trailed behind like a kite attached to the bumper—though I had no sensation of speed. The car wheeled left, juddered to a stop at the hospital curb. I swung pleasantly around to a different position as if by centrifugal force, ending up in front of the car, facing it, though much higher up and no longer tethered. I hovered like a hummingbird. My uncle jumped out, ran around behind, and came up the other side to pull me from my aunt’s arms. He couldn’t get me out. A flurry of hospital staff appeared. Curiously, I watched the frenetic attempts. No one seemed to understand my foot was stuck, wedged beneath the front seat—jammed when I’d pushed up for air I couldn’t find.

“My foot is stuck!” I hollered down.

The anxious staff circled. Someone else tried. I shouted again, this time using my hands to megaphone. I had no hands—but I did. I could move them, I could feel them on my cheeks. I had no cheeks. I looked down. No body. A void, without shape or form but curiously alive. My thoughts whirled and a thousand things flitted through my mind. But the commotion below unnerved me.

"MY FOOT! MY FOOT IS STUCK!”

“Her foot is stuck,” said Auntie Anne.

They pulled me loose and lay me on the gurney, looking like nothing more than a heap of summer clothes. But then I was back—a brutal, horrifying shock. One minute floating, free, the next incarcerated inside my ribcage, trapped by skin and bone. Claustrophobic, crammed into close quarters, confined, no escape—and again in a roaring thrum of terror and madness for air.

Breathing eventually returned, and I recovered. But I had not been healed.

Summer over, my family returned to the Midwest where we lived at the time. I spent more days out of school than in, and again was in the hospital. Late October, family friends suggested I go live with them in Arizona. My mother took me down, enrolled me in high school, and on Veterans Day, November 1969, put my fragile life in the care of a Christian doctor in nearby Scottsdale, a Young Life leader at Scottsdale High.

She waited for me in the waiting room. More than hour later I wobbled out, pale and shattered and unable to speak. I still don’t speak of what happened. In three months’ time I’d gone from the gates of heaven to the gates of hell. Life derailed—a different trajectory, and I bumbled along as happens to the abused.

So much for Abundant Life. Yet Jesus warned of thieves who come to steal and kill and destroy. He told us, too, He’d come to give life—abundantly. I was confused. Fifty years later, I understand. God resurrects our lives and restores our souls, over and over and over again, and as many times as it takes. The summation reveals abundance too easily missed.

“So you still believe in God?”

I do. He is. I met him, and I understand better than others of His love. Perhaps this is my purpose for which I’ve been sent back, to simply bear witness to Love Divine, a holy wonder outside the gamut of love we so poorly know and experience. Love so sacred it pulls us through the profane.

Anne and Stan Wilbee
Mercy et merci.____  

Two years ago I asked Uncle Stan and Auntie Anne what they remembered of that day so long ago, on August 3, 1969. My aunt says she doubts that she'd ever have said, "I think we just lost her." 

"I wasn't going to give up hope," she told me. Yet I clearly remember and wrote about it within days of the event. 

Uncle Stan said she sang from the tunnel to the hospital, and I suspect this was the music I heard as I slipped from darkness into Light. My aunt has the voice of angels and I like to think they sang together, seeing me safely through the valley of the shadow of death and back.

I am grateful that neither gave up. 

NOTE: While the medical profession prefers to call experiences like mine "near death experiences," many of us prefer "back from death." We've gone through the process of death and might as well name it. Interestingly, scientists are beginning to understand we don't really come back; we remain different, one of the most documented is our inability to wear watches. We kill batteries, our electrical circuits taking a hit. Furthermore, how we die also affects how we come back and what we're like. Death alters us in ways science has not yet come to terms with.

#70 - A Little Girl and Her Dad

“How about one last toboggan ride, Brenda, before we call it a day?”

Winter 1963, we lived at Laurentian Lodge, an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship ski resort seventy miles north of Montreal. College kids came up on the weekends. Mum cooked. Dad ran the ski hill and other things. I was ten years old, and in the mountains of French Canada night came on quickly. To go for one last ride with my father before tromping down to the lodge was all a little girl like me could ask for. Yes, yes! I hopped up and down on toes gone cold. He looped the toboggan rope around the towline in an easy slipknot, and I scrambled aboard the aluminum sleigh, grasped him around the middle, and waited for the jerk. There it was, we were moving, and I pressed my cheek against Dad’s cold woolen jacket.

It wasn’t a smooth ride up. The toboggan lurched, slacked, then jerked into motion. I fell into the rhythm of Dad’s arms stretching and pulling in, and I heard his occasional grunt more by the vibrations coming through his jacket than with my ears. The forest fell away to the right as we ascended, the evergreens dark and snowy white in the gathering gray, the larch and elm skeletal. I breathed and shivered and hung on tight, and I smiled in the sheer pleasure at the sensation of the snow beneath me.

“John!” Dad hollered, lifting an arm to wave at Mr. Hardy skiing downhill past us. “This’ll have to be your last run.” Mr. Hardy nodded and whizzed on by. The toboggan gave a lunge, throwing me back. “Daddy!” I shrieked.

He threw back an arm to snag me but missed, and the snow gave a snatch and flung me into its lap, belly down. I pulled a mitten off to dab at the snow in my eyes, then quickly stuffed my frozen hand back into its icy cocoon. It was really cold out. I clambered to my feet and peered uphill, stomping a bit to try and dull the burn in my toes.

Gray shadows crept over the hillside, the forest-green trees bruising into black, the other trees disappearing. Lamplight from the towrope posts glared down; at the bottom of the hill, where the machine shed stood, the last few colors of the day remained. All around, however, the sky closed in. I could feel the air shift into deep freeze.

Seven to ten poles lined the trail, each with a pulley three-quarters of the way up, with the towline feeding from one to the other. I watched the rope loop, pulley to pulley, on its way back down the mountainside to the shed where, inside, an immense machine kept the hefty cable circling, sending it back up to me. It circled past at my waist, and I cupped my hand around it to feel the heft slip through my palm. I could still get to the top, I realized, and flung myself belly first over the rope and grabbed on, expecting a wobble and slow crawl. But the frozen snow on my mitts let the rope slide on. I chewed at the ice clumps, spit them out, fur in my mouth. I tried again. This time I caught and, rope slithering beneath me, started sliding up to where Dad would be waiting.

“Get out of the way!”

I looked up. Dad was plunging downhill straight at me! I rolled, spinning sideways. I hurried to my feet, but the snow was soft and I floundered. Dad tore past, toque flying. What in the world? 

I looked uphill and gaped, even as I heard the crunch and ping of the metal toboggan high up. There it was, shiny in the lamplight. It hadn’t come loose but was riding back downhill, riding over each of the pulleys, its cheap metal twisting and buckling, dislodging the rope, and I crawled in disbelief from the deep snow onto the beaten path just as the contorted toboggan hit the post nearest me, metal screaming as it slammed into the pulley. The rope bounced out and with a whoosh through the air, landed at my feet with a thud. Overhead, the toboggan continued its steady course, the tin of it pinging and screeching, more rope crashing through the air and dropping. What if it went through the window into the machine shed?

At the bottom, Mr. Hardy frantically clawed at his feet, trying to kick aside his skis so he could get in and flip the switch. I snatched up my father’s toque and ran after him. “You lost your toque!” I hollered, slipping, standing, sliding again, stunned by the speed at which everything was happening. A quiet, slow world thrown into chaos.

One more pole to go before the toboggan rammed through the open window of the shed—then what?

I watched in disbelief as Dad, going too fast to stop, smacked right into the building, bounced, caught himself, then right-angled into the door. He stumbled over Mr. Hardy, disappeared. And then…suddenly…quiet.

I descended down into the stillness, darkness pressing in and stars coming out. Outside the shed, the twisted toboggan hung in the air, glistening in the eerie light, so mangled it was beyond recognition. A fantastical piece of tinfoil.

“Daddy?” I stepped into the shed. His back was to me on the other side of the ginormous engine with its fan belts and knobs, his elbows resting on the open window that fed the rope in and back out. He turned and I saw weariness play across his eyes. He smiled, though. Blue eyes, marble blue in the cold light.

"Why don’t you go down to the kitchen?” he suggested. “Help Mum with supper. We’re going to be here a bit.”

I offered his toque. “What happened?”

“The knot froze.” He chuckled softly. “Looks like we're going to have to fix this mess.” He laughed again with an off-hand phooey and took his hat and patted it down around his ears.

“Do you have to do it now? It's so cold."

“It might snow tonight. Or ice over. Best do it now. By morning, it might be too late.” He tucked his head back through the window and leaned, twisting his neck to better see the toboggan. “So much for my slipknot,” he told Mr. Hardy with another chuckle. To me, he said, “It’s getting too cold. You better go on.”

I pulled a hand out and sucked on my stinging fingers. The warmth made it worse. I shoved my hand back into the mitt. I walked to the door and looked down to the lodge where I knew my mother and sisters were setting the tables. On Friday nights Mum made the visiting college kids a dinner of roast beef and potatoes, with peaches for dessert. My sisters and I had to make sure the peaches were dished out with their round sides up. “They’re more likely to eat them,” Mum told us.

“Do I have to?” I asked Dad.

“No.”

He and Mr. Hardy took the ladder from a corner. I scrunched up against the doorjamb to let them pass, then followed after them, shivering, chin bouncing.

How can he stand it? I wondered, watching my father set the extended ladder against the first post, give it a shake, then start to mount. He had to disengage the mashed toboggan before attempting anything else.

He and Mr. Hardy set to work and I huddled near the shed, hiding from the wind. Constantly I banged my feet against each other; sometimes I turned and kicked them into the building. The bright overhead light looked yellow and warm and I slid down the wall to sit in the pool of butter. The cold seeped into my bum like tiny ice picks. What was left of the toboggan finally fell with a puff. Its distorted shape scared me and I stood up, and stepped away.

Dad climbed down the ladder. He and Mr. Hardy moved to the second pole, looking strangely naked without its rope. Mr. Hardy helped Dad heave the towline onto his shoulder and up he went, ladder rattling. Balanced on a high rung and leaning against the post, he struggled with bare hands to lift the rope back into the pulley. Gusts of white fog escaped his lips as he labored, and I saw him wince as the frozen rope dug into his shaking hands.

Tresa On Saucer, Me On Top

How can he endure it? I wondered again, and looked longingly down to the lodge where its small windows cast wee squares of light into a world gone black. Oh to be home, I thought. To shed my coat and boots, my mittens and toque, to stand over the furnace grate, four feet by four feet, and listen to the icicles melt off me and sizzle into the fire below. Oh that I was there.

My stomach hurt from shivering, I banged my toes into the ground, and banged again. Incessantly. I forced myself to look away from the warmth of home and focused instead on Dad’s face. I could see it clearly in the lamplight that shone from each post, a face haloed by night. I winced with each grimace he made.

Determined to stay, I hopped foot to foot and up and down while Dad and Mr. Hardy took turns. Once Dad caught my eye and smiled. I tried to smile back. My cheeks wouldn’t move. I tried again, and shivered some more. Slowly up the mountain we pushed, the night stealing in darker and colder. Up to the next pole. Up to the next. I wanted to cry, I was that cold. Yet on and on they worked, Dad and Mr. Hardy. And me.

As night set in for real, ice began to sheet the ground. They sent me back to the shed for a hatchet. I was glad of the task. When I gave it to Mr. Hardy, he said, “This is no job for a girl!”

“Don’t chop the rope,” I told him.

“That’s your job,” he said. “To make sure I don’t.”

We were almost there! Two more poles to go!

But Dad and Mr. Hardy headed straight for the final post. Dad groaned as he fought to stretch what was left of the rope into place. I feared he'd lose grip and fling himself backward, off the ladder. Or teeter sideways. He didn't.

But they weren't done. Not yet. There was that one last post, one down from us. We backtracked. The rope had little play. Brute strength would be needed to wrangle it up and over the pulley. By now, I was without pain. No stinging burn in my fingers or feet, no shivers. I lifted my arms woodenly, bent over at the waist, knocked them against my legs. I checked to see if my feet were still there. They were, which almost surprised me.

“Finished,” my father called down.

Mr. Hardy tossed his hat up. I watched it spiral lazily down. Watched him catch it and put it back on.

I tried to help carry the ladder back down but couldn’t keep the pace. Instead I slipped along behind them, the newly formed ice catching my boots against the holes they'd gouged with each step. At the shed, Dad and Mr. Hardy put the ladder back in its corner.

“Want a ride down to the lodge?” Dad asked, snagging another toboggan and flipping off the lights. I must have nodded.

Outside the night was velvet—and filled with moonlight and stars. Dad dropped the sled onto the snow. I was so numb I couldn’t bend. “I can’t sit down, Daddy.”

He and Mr. Hardy helped me.

“Ready?”

"Yes."

Dad took the line in hand and I waited for the jerk and momentum, then settled in, happy with the sensation of riding over the undulating snow, slipping this way and that on the hilly descent, watching the window light of the lodge expand as we approached, listening to Dad and Mr. Hardy talk in the wind. A snowflake. Another. And another. I stuck out my tongue to catch them.

Down the hill we slithered. The wind picked up. The flakes thickened, fluffing up in front of us. The windows grew large enough to see the tables indoors, surrounded by cheerful skiers nursing mugs of hot cocoa, their peaches gone, the bowls empty.

A whisper in my ear. I felt Daddy lift me.

“She’s frozen through,” I heard him tell Mr. Hardy.

I hardly remember sitting on the four-by-four-foot grate, heat leaping up at me. I hardly remember anything that followed. Nothing, actually. Only that I had stuck it out. I had not abandoned my father. A sense of euphoria overwhelmed me.

Many years have passed since that cold, snowy night in the Laurentian Mountains of French Canada. Yet I often go back, the memory as crisp and clear as the night. A little girl in love with her father, and so full of wonder at how he could laugh at any upset—and always make it right.

Roy Wilbee  |   Brenda, Tim, Linda Wilbee 1963