It Was 23 Years Ago Today That I Died

It was August 4, 2000, as I lay on an operating table having emergency double bypass heart surgery. At age 50, nearly 23 years of Marlboros and Coors had caught up with me because the artery cardiologists call “the widowmaker” was 90 percent blocked when they opened my chest.

“You are the 50-year-old guy in seemingly perfect health who drops dead while walking his dog in the neighborhood,” they told me.

I’ll never forget the moment I first became conscious after the surgery. When I awoke, I had this irresistible urge to get on my feet and stand up beside the bed. There were multiple IVs in me, and the horrified nurse nearby did everything she could to restrain me but stand beside that bed and thank God that I could I did.

It was a week or so later that I began to understand what had happened. Claudia and I were talking to my surgeon and the first thing he said was “we thought we had lost you!” Turned out that I was dead for four minutes before they got my heart pumping again.

No, I didn’t see Heaven, didn’t see Jesus during that four minutes, either. In fact, I didn’t know that it had happened until the surgeon told us afterwards. But after hearing the surgeon’s description, I knew why that irresistible urge to stand up was so over-powering.

It was God showing me that He had restarted my heart. He had a purpose for me that was in that year not yet fulfilled. He gave me a second life here on Earth nine years after giving me eternal life at 9:15 AM on the morning of March 1, 1991, after my last drinking spree.

My sweet wife Claudia reminded me earlier today with a Facebook post that it was 23 years ago today. He has blessed me in so many ways in those 23 years, especially in giving me a woman beyond compare as my wife (See Proverbs 31:29).

God is so good all the time and all the time God is beyond good.