My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life (2 page)

I
had never heard of insulinoma before I was diagnosed with it. As diseases go, this wasn’t one of the famous ones that cause people to cluck their tongues, grimace, or shake their heads in sympathy. When I told people I had insulinoma, they looked at me like they didn’t know what I was talking about—which they didn’t.

But, have it I did, and that’s what led me to the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in April of 2006.

It all started in 2003, three years before my diagnosis with this strange illness. Ruth and I were in Florida for a few months, basking in the sun and trying to beat each other at golf (at the time, I could still beat her, but barely). It was there I had my first “episode.”

Apparently (I have no memory of this), one night we were sitting around the condo, and suddenly I just zoned out. According to Ruth, I just stared into space for an hour, not knowing who she was, completely disoriented and confused, and a little bit agitated. One bonus of having a nurse for a wife is that she can often tell what’s wrong with me, or at least she knows what to do to help the situation. She thought it seemed like a case of low blood sugar, and she shoved a bit of chocolate in my mouth to get my blood sugar evened out. Ruth told me I couldn’t even shut my own mouth to chew it, that’s how out to lunch I was. She shut my mouth for me, something she probably wishes she could have done a long time ago.

Ruth took me to the ER for tests the next day and they couldn’t find anything wrong.

For the next three years, I was fine—no more “episodes” to speak of. Since I hadn’t even remembered what happened, I didn’t think much about it. Ruth, though, being a nurse and my wife both, tucked it away in the back of her mind, wondering if it would ever happen again and why it happened in the first place.

We were vacationing up north in Boyne Mountain, Michigan, with two of our grandchildren, when I had another spell. It was the same kind of thing as in Florida; I woke up sometime in the night, dazed and incoherent, and had no idea who Ruth was or where I was. When Ruth woke up, she saw that I had pulled my legs up in the fetal position, and I was staring at her without really seeing her. I moaned and moaned, but didn’t appear to have any pain.

Ruth got me up to go to the bathroom, and she had to hold me up the whole way because I was so shaky.

She made me eat some more chocolate, but somehow kept me quiet. Our granddaughter was sleeping in the same hotel room, and she didn’t want to scare her.

The next morning, I felt perfectly fine, once again, and had no memory of anything happening the night before. We took the kids to the water park, went out for lunch, and drove home to Grand Rapids, where it happened again.

I had fallen asleep on the couch, and when I woke up, once more I didn’t know where I was or who Ruth was. According to Ruth, I was acting anxious and a bit crazy, my heart racing and my limbs shaking. I was moaning again, and repeatedly beating the couch cushions.

This time, she was freaking out too, on the inside. I began crawling around on the floor, trying to get out of the condo, trying to get away from poor Ruth. She was grabbing me by the belt, attempting to physically slow me down so I couldn’t get out. She finally managed to lock the doors and dial 911. Nurse or no nurse, my wife was definitely alarmed, but her training helped her stay calm and take command of the situation.

“What’s he doing?” the 911 dispatcher asked her.

“He’s crawling around on the floor, and he has no idea who I am.”

The ambulance got there about five minutes later, loaded me up, and took me to Spectrum Health hospital in downtown Grand Rapids. I was at Spectrum for ten days, where I was poked and prodded within an inch of my life. Finally, they diagnosed me with insulinoma, a rare tumor of the pancreas that shows itself as being the exact opposite of diabetes. My pancreas was generating so much insulin it was eating all the sugar in my body, hence the strange spells. I had a blood sugar level of 31, which is apparently very bad news.

I had the dubious honor of being the first case of insulinoma they had ever diagnosed at this hospital, one of the top hospitals in the United States. Literally, less than one in one million people are diagnosed with it each year. Around 200 cases are confirmed annually in the whole country. I was one of those lucky people.

The doctors at Spectrum recommended that I see a very specialized surgeon, either at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor or at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. I had attended U of M for a short time in my college days; I even laced up skates and played hockey for them back in the day. I figured they already had some of my money, so I might as well give them more of it.

I had to lie around and wait for a couple of days for a bed to be free in Ann Arbor. Ruth had left the hospital for the night and returned to our home, just twenty minutes away, so I was alone when abruptly I was told they had a bed ready at U of M. They packed me in an ambulance and off we sped to Ann Arbor, two and a half hours away. Ruth decided to come the next day, in the daylight, so she could find the place more easily.

Once at U of M, I found out just how special I was. There at the hospital, doctors wouldn’t come in my room one at a time; it always was three to five at a time. I guess my condition was so rare the doctors were swarming me so they could inspect this extraordinary guy and his exceptional ailment.

They had diagnosed me with insulinoma in Grand Rapids, but those doctors and the new ones in Ann Arbor still didn’t know exactly where the tumor was located on my pancreas.

This was crucial, because apparently a surgeon can’t just go in and poke around someone’s pancreas. Evidently, you can bleed terribly if they go in without knowing the exact spot they are trying to reach. But finding the right spot was turning out to be easier said than done.

A young doctor at the U of M hospital had a brilliant idea: she would pass a pediatric scope through me to find the exact location of my tumor. It worked, thanks be to God. Ruth and I were so relieved that she had found the tumor. We didn’t want to face the possibility of excessive bleeding in surgery.

My surgery lasted for five hours. Dear Ruth had already been through such a roller coaster, wondering what was wrong with me, and knowing there was something way off, but not knowing what it could be. My “episodes” were stressful too, and then the drama of my being diagnosed with this extremely rare illness and the worry over whether or not the doctors would find the site of the tumor.

She says God gave her deep comfort throughout those five hours as she waited to find out how things had gone on the operating table. As it turned out, things had gone well, in terms of the doctor’s goals for the surgery. They had found the site of the tumor no problem, and my blood glucose went from a low 80 to 180 and quickly to a normal 115 once the tumor was out. The only problem was that I awakened in more pain than I thought was humanly possible.

According to Ruth and our family and friends, plenty of loved ones stopped by to visit me after my surgery. But I didn’t know and didn’t care who was in that room. Phil Mickelson could’ve stopped by to get some golf tips from me, and I wouldn’t have cared.

A doctor whose sole job was to control people’s pain spent three hours in my hospital room, adjusting my pain medications. From about five p.m. to eight p.m. that evening, she tried to get my pain under control. Whatever she was doing wasn’t working one little bit, though it wasn’t for lack of her trying.

I’m not being a big baby when I tell you it was horrible. I’ve been told the reason why I hurt so bad is because the pancreas is behind the stomach, so the surgeon had to move my other organs around to get to it. Plus, with a major surgery like this, the nerve endings are apparently severed, and then later they have to reattach and regenerate. At that point, my nerve endings hadn’t regenerated yet, to say the least. Oh, and I almost forgot: the epidural stopped working during the surgery and I had to have a new one midway through the procedure. “Ouch” doesn’t begin to cover it.

Nurses like to say, “How’s your pain on a scale of one to ten?” This was way beyond a ten.

I was in and out, dozing, coming to and from that fiery pain. I remember just jabbing my pain control button over and over but nothing seemed to work. Ruth says that because it was my first night, post-op, the nurses would have been in about every half an hour to check on me. Ruth wasn’t familiar with Ann Arbor, and she wanted to get back to her hotel before it got too dark outside. She kissed me on the cheek, told me she loved me, and walked out of the room. She left at about eight o’clock, just after the pain control doc had given up for the night and left my room.

I lay in my bed, miserable and terribly restless with the pain. There was a clock in my room, but I couldn’t see it (and I didn’t care what time it was, either). That’s why I didn’t know exactly what time it was on the night of April 27, 2006, or early in the morning of April 28, when two strangers entered my room and I instantly forgot about all the pain.

D
on’t ask me how I knew the two strangers who had just walked into my hospital room were angels; I just knew they were. Beyond any doubt, these were angelic visitors, come to take me home.

I wasn’t one bit worried about it, either. A feeling of deep calm washed over me as these two men approached my bed, one on either side of me. They were smiling and quiet. My angels looked like regular guys, except regular guys usually don’t wear white robes. Both looked in their mid-forties and stood about 5
′
8
″
to 5
′
10
″
. One had longish brown hair, and the other one had shorter hair.

Everyone has a mental picture of angels, and so did I. When I had thought of angels before I actually met one, I pictured them as younger than the beings I saw. I also thought angels were men and women both, but maybe that’s just because of that old TV show,
Touched by an Angel
.

And no, actually, neither one of them had wings. (I know that’s what you were wondering, because that’s one of the top questions I get about my experience: Did my angels have wings?) A little while later, I did have an encounter with winged creatures, but we’ll get to that part in due time.

The angels were as tender as tender could be, peaceable and silent as they unhooked me from my tubes. (I was attached to about five different tubes—IV, gastric tubes, etc.)

Now, just hold on a minute. Why would angels—with superpowers that make Spiderman and Superman look like wimps—bother to detach me from the tubes holding me to my hospital bed and this earth? Couldn’t they just beam me up to heaven, like the Starship Enterprise’s chief engineer, Scotty, used to propel Captain Kirk back to the ship?

Of course they
could’ve
beamed me up, blasted me off like a rocket, floated me like a balloon, but they didn’t. My angels chose to carefully and gently unhook each and every tube before we took off, and I’m not totally sure why.

Naturally, I have some theories. They knew, because God told them, that I was a Dutchman, a retired banker, and a Midwesterner to boot. I’m a man who likes my t’s crossed and my i’s dotted, so perhaps they felt it best to unplug me from planet Earth in an orderly fashion.

My gut tells me they were preparing me for what would come next, easing me into transition from this life to the next.

My angels each put their arms around one side of me; then I had a sudden upward-trend feeling, and the three of us began to fly to heaven. My angels were carrying me with their arms around me. I wasn’t at all afraid; just the opposite. I felt perfect serenity, yet also a sense of excitement for what was to come. It was smooth and wonderful, I can assure you, not like some commercial airline, bumping along the skies.

I couldn’t say how long the trip took—a few seconds to a couple of minutes, at the most. My angels and I flew through a brilliantly blue sky, and I had a profound sense of lightness and calm.

There was just so much peace.

“Ministers of the Divine Bounty”

Before I met the two angels who came to take me to heaven, I hadn’t thought too much about the topic. I knew angels were with me when I was born, and that they would be with me when I died. I had believed in angels as long as I could remember. When I met my two angels, though, and flew with them to heaven, it got me thinking later about all the ways in which angels are with us and for us, in between birth and death.

I can count on one hand the number of good, solid sermons I’ve heard in my lifetime on the topic of angels. When you’re Dutch, you’re stoic, proud of the dose of skepticism that runs through your “orange” veins (orange, for those who don’t know, is the color of the Dutch Royal Family, the House of Oranje-Nassau). I’m not royalty, but I am Dutch and proud of it. What I’m trying to say is that Dutch Calvinists aren’t normally too big on angel sightings.

Even John Calvin, who founded reformed theology, was cautious in discussing the topic of angels. Too much talk of angels, he once said, is apart from the Bible, and therefore not verifiable. (Good thing Calvin wasn’t around in the mid-1990s, when angels were all the rage and there seemed to be fluffy, chubby heavenly beings floating behind every bush.)

But even Calvin, with his reluctance to fall into the silliness that can occur when people obsess about angels, said they are “ministers and dispensers of the divine bounty towards us.”

There’s no doubt the way my angels picked me up in my hospital room, with all the respect and kindness in this world and the next, why, that was a kind of “bounty,” or gift, to me.

I bet Lazarus felt the same way, when angels carried him to “Abraham’s bosom” in the parable of the poor man and the rich man in Luke 16:22: “Now the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom; and the rich man also died and was buried” (NASB). Caring for believers at the moment of death is just one of the many jobs angels fill, according to the Bible.

I always knew, since Sunday School days, that angels were workers of Christ, like Christ, watching over what we say and do.

After my time in heaven, I was much more fascinated with angels than ever before, and I decided to study the Bible and find out as much as I could about the two strangers who entered my hospital room and their fellow beings. Plus, after sharing my heaven story with others, folks started telling me their own incredible angel stories, some of which I will pass on to you.

But first, may I share with you some of the fantastic things I learned about angels in the Bible? I think you’ll be as intrigued as I am.

Angels 101

• Angels are referred to 196 times in Scripture
  , 103 times in the Old Testament and 93 times in the New Testament. These references are scattered throughout the Bible in at least 34 books from Genesis to Revelation.
  
• Angels are celestial messengers.
  The Hebrew word for angel is
  mal’ach
  , and the Greek word is
  angelos
  . Both words mean “messenger” and describe one who carries out the goals and commands of the One they serve.
  
• Angels were created
  before
  the earth.
  In the book of Job, when God is questioning Job, we are told that angels were already there when the earth was created:
  

Where were you when I created the earth?

Tell me, since you know so much!

Who decided on its size? Certainly you’ll know that!

Who came up with the blueprints and measurements?

How was its foundation poured,

and who set the cornerstone,

While the morning stars sang in chorus

and
all the angels shouted praise
?

Job 38:4–7 Message

• Angels live in heaven but can travel anywhere in the cosmos and creation.
  In the book of Mark, Jesus spoke of “the angels in heaven,” which strongly suggests that angels have a home or center there for their activities. However, they have many missions to accomplish, and therefore have access to the entire universe, both heaven and earth. In the Bible, angels have served on earth, as in the case of the angel who flew in and brought Daniel an answer to his prayer, and in heaven: four angels described in Revelation stood at the four corners of earth, “standing steady with a firm grip on the four winds so no wind would blow on earth or sea, not even rustle a tree.” From the Milky Way to Milwaukee, from the throne of God to the porch swings of earth—angels have access to the whole universe.
  
• Angels are superheroes.
  But make no mistake, they are not as powerful as God. In fact, the Bible tells us they are limited. Still, compared to us humans, angels are much smarter and wiser and possess astounding powers. For starters, they can fly, with or without wings (remember, my angels were wingless), and they can turn into a human or heavenly being in the twinkling of an eye. But so often, as the stories later in this chapter illustrate, angels can show up at any time, and then vanish into thin air. They are incredibly strong too. The stone covering Jesus’s tomb, for example, weighed an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, the same heft as a midsize car. An angel rolled it away like it was a bowling ball. In Acts, an angel broke into a jail, snapped iron chains with his bare hands, and let the imprisoned apostles go free. The apostle Peter says it all: Angels are our “superiors in every way” (2 Peter 2:11 Message).
  
• Angels are on a mission.
  Their main job seems to be worshiping and praising God in heaven (I heard their phenomenal voices when I was at the gate). But angels also reveal God’s will to his children, like the angel Gabriel revealed to Mary that she would be with child. They guide and instruct us, giving instructions to Joseph, the women at the tomb, Philip, Cornelius, and many others in the Bible. God used angels to provide physical needs such as food and water for Hagar, Elijah, and Christ after his temptation. They protect us, keeping us out of physical danger—like they protected Daniel in the lions’ den—and deliver us from danger once we’re in it. Last but not least, one of the angelic duties is to strengthen and encourage us, such as the way an angel encouraged Paul in Acts 27 by telling him that he and everyone else on the ship would survive the impending shipwreck.
  
• Angels are spoken of as men in the Bible.
  Now, I know in Christ there is no “male or female.” Both men and women are made in his image and he loves them equally. My angels were men, and so are the vast majority of angels mentioned in the Bible, at least the ones that took on the appearance of humans. Of course, it’s possible that since angels are spirit beings, they can take on the appearance of women, as well as men (see Gordy’s story below). There is one exception in the Bible, in the book of Zechariah, that contains a clue that there might be female angels: “Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork” (Zech. 5:9 KJV). A stork, huh? Now that hit a nerve for me, for reasons I’ll get to in just a bit. Anyway, it’s possible this verse lends some credibility to the existence of female angels. Some theologians think the winged women here are indeed celestial beings, but not necessarily angels. I’ll let them work out the fine tuning on that particular point.
  
• Angels are invisible, unless God opens our eyes to them or they take on the appearance of real men.
  Since they are spirit beings, we usually can’t see the angels that are here with us, taking care of us, ministering to us, and fighting on our behalf. But sometimes God gives us the ability to see them, like I was lucky enough to do. Balaam, the donkey man, could not see the angel standing in his way until the Lord opened his eyes (Num. 22:31), and Elisha’s servant was blind to the crowd of angels surrounding him until Elisha prayed for his eyes to be opened (2 Kings 6:17). Over and over again in Scripture, angels were mistaken for men because so often they looked exactly like men! Abraham thought the three angels who approached his tent in the desert were regular visitors, and he offered them food and drink. His nephew Lot thought the same thing when, soon after his uncle’s angelic encounter, two angels showed up at his house in Sodom. He invited the angels to wash their feet and stay the night. I don’t think he would have thought of clean feet if they didn’t look like regular men.
  

My angels looked like men I might see on the golf course, or at a hockey game, except of course they were wearing long-sleeved robes. Their clothes were white and gauzy, almost filmy, but not quite see-through, and they hung about two or three inches from the floor. Both angels wore ropes or long rags belted around their waists.

Angels are sometimes described in the Bible as having faces like “lightning” and wearing blazing white, dazzling “raiment,” which is a ten-dollar word for clothing. At the sight of those angels, people fell on their faces in fear and wonder.

Angels Unaware

After my trip to heaven, I marveled at how many times in my life I must have been surrounded by angels and hadn’t known it. How often had I been teeing off on the same golf green as an angel, or sitting next to an angel at a hockey game, strangers who look and act as normal as can be?

So many people have asked me about what my angels were like, and some have even told me their own stories of encountering angels here on earth. I picked several of these stories to share with you, hoping and praying you’ll be as captivated, inspired, and encouraged as I was by them.

Janet’s Angel

Janet was the kind of lady people didn’t even see. Awkwardly lacking in social graces, Janet seemed to be about as unimportant a person as you could possibly imagine.

A worker on the assembly line of a cookie factory, Janet went home each night to a cramped and dingy apartment, where she would call her elderly mother, Millie, to chat, or else turn on the TV and heat up a frozen meal of some kind. Her life was about as dull as you could imagine.

But God, her heavenly Father, loved her so much that he would send an angel to her funeral to deliver a message so powerful that the handful of attendees would never forget it.

One day, when Janet was just in her late forties, she died suddenly of a massive heart attack. With few friends and even fewer family members, it fell to the members of her mother’s church small group to plan the funeral of a woman they barely knew.

For Millie’s sake, the small group members tried to make Janet’s funeral nice and meaningful. They ordered purple flowers for the service, because Millie told them it was Janet’s favorite color. Her best-loved songs were sung by a sparse crowd of about thirty people who dribbled into the five-hundred-seat sanctuary. The apples of Janet’s eye—her two little grand-nieces—cuddled up to their mother and great-grandmother in the front pew, nearly empty except for the four of them.

It was a risk, but Millie had responded favorably when asked if she thought there should be time given for people to share their memories of Janet. Their worst fears—that no one would walk up to the microphone with a memory—almost came true as an awkward silence fell over the small crowd.