WHY I WAITED
Why it took me nearly fifty years to write To Heaven and Back in the Blink of an Eye.
I was eighteen years old when I slammed into a tree on my motorcycle while traveling at about 80 miles an hour. One second, I was flying down the road. The next, I was out of my body and soaring up a dark tunnel.
What happened next lasted only seconds, but something changed in me and never changed back. I encountered Jesus, experienced a kind of love and peace unlike anything I had ever known, and then found myself judging my own life in a god-awfully painful life review.
Then I got sent back, and that's about when all hell began to break loose. I didn't want to come back. Not at all. In fact, for much of the life that followed, I was pissed off at God for sending me back.
Nearly fifty years later, I finally wrote the book I had started and stopped writing more than once: To Heaven and Back in the Blink of an Eye: Why I Can't Unknow What I Know.
Which raises a question.
So why did I wait nearly fifty years to tell the whole story?
The truth is, I'm not sure I could have told it any sooner.
It's not like I forgot what happened that night. Much of it remains as clear to me today as anything from my past. You just don't forget something that big. I talked about it on rare occasions over the years, questioned it, and fought like hell with the experience itself and much of what it seemed to suggest. A few years ago, I even started writing about it again, but I never finished.
Maybe I couldn't. Or maybe I hadn't lived enough of the story yet.
Because what happened to me when I was eighteen turned out to be only the beginning.
I had a life to live
I came back here and got on with living my life.
I worked for decades, built businesses, raised children, loved people, lost people, went broke, had a few sweet successes, made some big mistakes, and got my ass handed to me more than once.
And somewhere in the background, I still carried around what happened that night.
Once you've experienced something that no longer fits what you've been taught about God, religion, and reality, you've got a problem. At least I did. So I spent decades reading, researching, arguing, challenging people and institutions, writing books, and trying to make sense of a world that in large part made no sense to me whatsoever.
I questioned religion. I questioned God. I questioned authority. I questioned myself. But no matter how much I questioned everything else, there was one thing I could never quite take apart: what happened to me that night.
God knows I tried.
Now what?
About a year and a half ago, I was sitting on the back deck of my home in Minnesota. My children were grown, much of the life I'd spent decades building was behind me, and I found myself asking a really simple question.
Now what?
I wasn't interested in retiring or spending the rest of my life slowly disappearing into some comfortable version of old age. Quite the opposite. I wanted to find out just how great my life could still become.
Around that same time, my construction business came to a screeching halt for no apparent reason, and my attention turned to three unfinished books sitting on my desk.
Why, I have no idea, but those unfinished books wouldn't leave me alone. It was almost like something was pulling me back to them.
To Heaven and Back in the Blink of an Eye was one of them.
I finished the other two first. Then I came back to this one.
And that's when something began to happen that I hadn't expected.
I wasn't trying to prove that Heaven exists or convince everyone that what happened to me was real. I didn't particularly care whether anyone believed me. I'd already spent enough of my life arguing with people about what I believed to be true and trying to make sense of what had happened to me.
I just wanted to tell the story as honestly as I could. And maybe somewhere along the way, it would help someone else.
What I didn't expect was what would happen to me while I was writing it.
As I worked my way through the book, I started going back into parts of my life I hadn't looked at this closely in years. And the deeper I went, the more I began to see how much of the life I'd lived since that night had somehow been connected to what happened to me when I was eighteen.
Some of those connections were hard to miss once I saw them. Others were a lot harder to look at.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, something else happened that I never saw coming.
Even my relationship with the God I'd spent much of my life fighting began to change.
And thank God for that.
Somewhere in all of this, it finally made sense why I couldn't have written this book in the years following the accident.
There were still more chapters to live.
