Line upon Line

This is from Daniel C. Peterson’s “Sic et Non” blog on Patheos. 

This evening, I picked up my copy of a book written by one Reggie Anderson, with Jennifer Schuchmann, under the title of Appointments with Heaven: The True Story of a Country Doctor’s Healing Encounters with the Hereafter (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2013). At the time that the book was published, Dr. Anderson was a physician with the Frist Clinic in Nashville, Tennessee, while also serving as chief of staff of TriStar Ashland City Medical Center and as medical director of three area nursing homes. I presume that Dr. Anderson is not a Latter-day Saint.

Dr. Anderson grew up in a quite believing Baptist family in rural Alabama, and he himself was religious until a terrible family tragedy destroyed his faith. He describes at some length how, when he was very young, he was exceptionally close to his relatives Jerry and Jimmy Alday in Georgia, typically spending summers with them raising fruit and transporting it to market and helping them with their sales both. They were good men and devout Christians. The family tragedy is what he calls the “Alday Massacre” but what Wikipedia labels the “Alday family murders.”

Three convicts escaped from prison in Maryland in May 1973, picking up a fourth person on their eventually way to Florida. First, though, they killed a nineteen-year-old man in Pennsylvania in order to steal his car. Then they headed south. Near Donalson, Georgia, in Seminole County, they murdered six members of the Alday family – five men (Jerry, Ned, Jimmy, Chester, and Aubrey Alday) and one woman (Mary Alday), whom they raped repeatedly before killing her.

The young Reggie Anderson spent the next seven years not only rejecting the existence of a deity who could have prevented those appallingly brutal murders but didn’t, but also — paradoxically but, in psychological terms, understandably — feeling bitter anger toward God. During his first year of medical school, though, in (of all places!) his Gross Anatomy class, he began to dimly sense the remarkable complexity of the human body and, from that, to intuit the existence of a designer.

However, it’s an extraordinarily vivid dream that he has while camping in the woods during a break from his medical studies that really turns him around.  He recounts the dream on pages 79-83:

I opened my eyes to the most fantastical countryside imaginable: everything was vivid and radiant. All of my senses were finely tuned, like I had awakened in some enhanced version of reality. In front of me, a picturesque meadow was filled with vibrantly colored wildflowers. Pops of yellow, orange, red, blue, and indigo swayed with the breeze like living rainbows. The green was the lushest green I’d ever laid eyes on; the hue so saturated, it seemed like a new color to me. The spender before me was stunning! . . .

I inhaled the most fragrant scent, so light and pleasing — like a mixture of citrus and lilac . . . (79)

Everything felt so real, more intense and tangible than my ordinary life. My senses seemed to awaken and open like a flower to the sun. I could see, hear, touch, smell, and feel things as never before. I didn’t feel like I was in a dream; I felt like this was the real life I’d always been searching for. This was more real than my life. (80; italics in the original)

Caring for Dying Patients

With more than twenty-five years of emergency room and family practice experience, Reggie has been exposed to nearly every kind of death possible, including murder, suicide, death from old age, and death shortly after birth. His positive outlook and view that the next life is more real than this one has allowed him to hold dying and grieving patients’ hands, providing hope as he prepares them for the parting of the veil that separates this world from the next. (319)

Almost immediately upon beginning the book, I noticed a passage that I’m sharing with you.

Throughout medical school I had taken care of dying patients, but this was the first time that I, as the senior resident, would be the one in charge when a patient died. I didn’t know what to expect.

“Dr. Anderson,” the elderly woman began, her voice starting to fade, “Will you hold my hand? I’m going to see Jesus, and I need an escort.”

That night, I experienced the veil parting — the veil that separates this life from the next. As I held the dying woman’s hands, I felt the warmth of her soul pass by my cheek when it left her body, swept up by an inexplicably cool breeze in an otherwise stagnant room. I smelled the familiar fragrance of lilac and citrus, and I knew the veil was parting to allow her soul to pass through.

Since that first patient, I’ve walked with countless others to the doorstep of heaven and watched them enter paradise. On many occasions, as I held hands with the dying, God allowed me to peer into heaven’s entryway where I watched each patient slip into the next world.

I’ve sensed Jesus on the other side, standing in heaven’s foyer, welcoming the dead who are made whole again. I’ve glimpsed surreal colors and sights and heard sounds more intense than anything I’ve ever experienced in this ordinary world. I’ve inhaled the scents of lilac, citrus, freshly carved cedar, and baking bread — more fragrant than I ever thought possible.

Sometimes I’ve even witnessed patients leave this world and come back. As they’ve shared their stories with me, I’ve often remembered the time early in my life when God allowed me to step into heaven’s foyer, even though I no longer believed he was real.

The one thing these experiences have in common is the intensity of the sights, sounds, fragrances, and feelings that I sensed. Heaven is more real than anything we experience here, and the sense of peace, joy, and overwhelming love is beyond description. (4-5)