#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.