Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again

by Crystal McVea

  And the greatest gift God gave me—the gift that shook my soul and changed my life—was the gift of letting me see how much He loves me.

  That first summer at home with my twins was when I began having those panic attacks. And just after they turned ten months was when I died.

  THE CHILD

  I MOVED WITH GOD AND MY ANGELS THROUGH THE TUNNEL, toward the glowing entranceway. I knew exactly where we were headed, and I believed I couldn’t possibly feel any more joy than I did. But then I became aware of yet another presence in the tunnel, just ahead. This was the person God had brought me to meet.

  This presence was smaller than my angels and also much more distinct. This figure had a body, and a face, and arms and legs.

  It was a child.

  It was a little girl.

  I had the sensation of locking in on her and soaking up everything about her. She was small and no more than three or four years old. She had a white bonnet on her head, and she was holding a small white basket—sort of like a wicker Easter basket. She wore a white frilly summer dress that had tinges of yellow, and this yellow was the first identifiable color I saw in heaven. But it wasn’t an ordinary yellow. These yellow tinges were beaming and sparkling like a prism, like they were reflecting the brilliant light around us and bouncing it back in an even more glorious way. The effect they created was just stunningly gorgeous, something I can’t even think about now without losing my breath.

  The girl was skipping and prancing and laughing, just like little kids do on Earth. She was bending and dipping her basket into the brightness at her feet and filling it up like she was filling it with water. She would dip the basket and scoop up the brightness and pour it out and do it again. And every time she dipped the basket and came up with it dripping this magical brightness, she laughed.

  Every time she laughed, my spirit absolutely swelled with love and pride for her. I wanted to watch this little girl play for the rest of eternity. I wanted to run up to her and take her in my arms and tell her how much I loved her. The love just kept building, endless and radiating waves of love so deep and so intense and so unstopping I truly, truly believed my soul was going to explode and I was going to cease to exist. And all the while the little girl just kept dipping her basket and scooping up light and laughing like little girls do. It touched me so deeply, it was more than I could bear. I prepared myself to burst, to shatter into a million pieces, because I knew I couldn’t possibly contain all the love I felt for this child.

  And then God lifted this feeling from me.

  It was almost as if I had been wearing some kind of magic glasses that suddenly He took off of me. And I knew it was God who lifted this feeling, because as soon as it was lifted, I looked back at the child and immediately understood who the child was.

  The little girl with the golden basket was me.

  • • •

  And then another understanding passed between God and me, and I knew this is what He’d been trying to show me all my life. He’d been trying to show me how very much He loved me.

  I knew God was allowing me to see myself as He saw me. And in His eyes I was an absolutely perfect creation, and I always would be. All the things that happened to me on Earth, all the bad decisions that caused me to hate myself—none of it mattered. I had believed God couldn’t possibly love me, not after what had been done to me, not after what I had done. But this belief was a lie, and God blasted the lie by showing me the intensity of His love for me.

  Seeing the child was the most profound and powerful thing that ever happened to me, because it did something I didn’t think was possible.

  It made me whole.

  In that moment, chains that had bound me all my life fell away. Chains of shame and secrets and lies and pain. Chains too heavy for anyone or anything to free me from on Earth. Chains that simply dropped away in the presence of the truth.

  This was the key sensation—that the truth of all truths had been revealed to me. I was imbued with this penetrating understanding that God had always loved me, like He loves all His children. And so, for the first time ever, I was filled with love for myself. How could I not love myself? I was God’s perfect creation!

  What’s more, God chose to show me myself at the age of three. This was not a random age. I was three years old when the abuse began. That was the turning point in my life, the point where my innocence was taken from me. Though I had many happy times as a child and many moments of love and goodness, the truth is that from the age of three on I was trapped in a life of shame and secrets, of self-doubt and self-hatred—of believing I didn’t deserve God’s love, of believing God had abandoned me.

  So God took me back to when I was three years old, and He freed me from that lie. All those dark and difficult years, every crisis and heartbreak that made me turn away from Him—all of it, every bit of it, was washed clean by the awareness that God’s love for me is boundless. Burdens I had been shouldering for decades were lifted. Seeing myself through God’s eyes made me whole and set me free.

  Yet even as I was filled with God’s love, I knew I was experiencing only a tiny, minuscule grain of it. God’s love is so big and so vast and so powerful, we can only contain a small part. That tiny grain of God’s love filled me so completely that I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else but with Him.

  Then I heard something in a way I hadn’t heard anything else in heaven. It wasn’t like the pure communication that had passed between God and me. It was a word, spoken by a voice.

  “Crystal.”

  • • •

  It was my mother’s voice. She was calling my name. The sound was so sharp and so abrupt that I knew she was screaming.

  “Crystal! Crystal!”

  For the first time I had the sensation of stopping—like the feeling of seeing a car coming at you and freezing in your tracks. And in that instant I realized my mother didn’t know where I was. She didn’t know I was okay. I felt sorry for what she had to be going through. The truth is, I hadn’t thought at all about my hospital room. I didn’t hover above my bed or see everyone clustered around me or anything like that. I had no connection to anything that was happening in that room or on Earth. Even the vision of my children wasn’t earthly; it was an awareness, like everything else I was experiencing in heaven. But that all changed when I heard my mother yell my name. All of a sudden I knew I had to let her know where I was.

  “I need to tell my mother I’m okay,” I said.

  And God responded. “The choice is up to you.”

  I didn’t want to leave God. I didn’t want to go anywhere. I just wanted to let my mother know I was okay. I had the sensation of turning around and, for the first time, focusing on what was beneath me. It was a floor of what looked like shimmering water crystals, shining like a billion perfect diamonds. I could not see through it, but I knew that my mother’s voice was coming from somewhere beneath it. As I turned away from the entrance to heaven, there was another communication from God—the last and most powerful thing He said to me.

  “Tell them what you can remember.”

  “I’m going to remember everything,” I answered. “I will be right back.”

  I focused my full attention on the water crystals again, and in that instant I knew I was back in my human body.

  And that’s when I opened my eyes.

  THE FIRST THING I SAW WAS A NURSE’S FACE. IT WAS right over me, only a few inches away. Her mouth was moving—she was yelling.

  “Do you know where you are? Do you know what day it is?”

  I looked to my left and I saw my mother, her face wet with tears.

  “Crystal!” the nurse screamed. “Do you know where you are? Tell me where you are.”

  I heard her questions clearly, but I didn’t answer right away. It was almost like talking was something foreign to me. I had just come from a place where there was no need to talk. I tried to speak, but nothing came out. The yelling continued. I tried again. Finally, I found the words.

 
“I am in the most beautiful light,” I mumbled. “I am with God.”

  And then I closed my eyes, so I could make my way back to heaven.

  THE NURSE YELLED again.

  “Crystal, I need you to look at me! What are your children’s names?”

  I opened my eyes, and I tried to say my kids’ names. I said the names of Payne and Sabyre but couldn’t come up with Willow and Micah, and that really frustrated me. And anyway it wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.

  I turned to my mother this time, and I said, “It’s okay. I’m in the most beautiful light. I am with God.”

  “I know, I know,” my mother said, “but I need you to get back here with me.”

  But I had no intention of staying. I closed my eyes again and tried to go back, but for some reason I couldn’t. It was like there was a blockage. I felt like all these people yelling at me were literally separating my spirit from heaven. I was frustrated. The nurses kept asking me questions, and I tried to answer them quickly so I could get back to heaven. I kept trying and trying to go, but I just couldn’t.

  And then I heard a man’s voice. I opened my eyes and saw a doctor holding a syringe.

  “Crystal, I’m going to give you a shot,” he said. “On a pain scale of one to ten, this is going to be a ten.”

  He leaned in and poked the needle into my arm. Instantly I felt my jaw clamp down and every muscle in my body clench tight. The pain followed after that. It was a great, surging pain that swept through my body, building and building and consuming me. It was almost like I could hear the pain—like a gigantic freight train rumbling through my body, getting closer, going faster, intensifying, tearing me apart.

  “It’s almost over,” I heard the doctor say.

  What was happening to me? Why was I trapped this way? “Once we get there, you cannot come back,” God had communicated to me, and I understood Him . . . but I hadn’t passed through the gates yet, so why couldn’t I go back? “The choice is up to you,” He had said. The choice had been mine! As the pain tore through me, I closed my eyes tightly, and I tried desperately to escape and to somehow, somehow, make my way to heaven.

  But by then I think I already knew I wasn’t going back.

  WE LIVE PRETTY MUCH IN THE MIDDLE OF THE United States, where the Great Plains meet the Bible Belt. We’re only a few hours south of the exact geographic center of the country in Kansas. The land where we are in Oklahoma is broad and flat and beautiful. We’re surrounded by thousands of acres of raw and rugged prairies, most of which probably look the same today as they did back when it all began. In the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, where we like to take the kids when we can, you can see so many of God’s great creatures—elk and longhorns, black-tailed prairie dogs and white-tailed deer, mallards and hawks and lizards, and of course the proud buffalo. The Native American poet N. Scott Momaday said that when you gaze out on this ancient land, “your imagination comes to life. And this, you think, is where creation was begun.”

  There is so much beauty on this earth, and in every bird and blade of grass we can see the hand of God. I know how lucky we are to be here, among His many gifts. But even so, there came a time when I forgot to be thankful for the amazing blessing of being here.

  You see, I’d been to a place even more beautiful, and all I wanted to do was go back.

  ALL IN ALL, I stopped breathing on my own for nine minutes. There were two minutes between when my face turned blue and when the first nurse rushed into my room, and another seven minutes during which doctors worked to revive me after my lungs shut down. I went into full respiratory arrest, and if my mother hadn’t been in the room with me when it happened, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t be reading these words.

  Why did it happen? It’s one of those things where no one can say for sure. The most likely explanation is that my pain pump wasn’t set up properly, which meant I was receiving more of the painkiller Dilaudid than my body could handle. What painkillers do is basically block the receptors in your brain that signal your body that you’re in pain. But too much medicine can shut down the receptors altogether, and your brain stops telling your lungs to function. And if your lungs stop getting oxygen to your heart and your heart stops pumping blood to your brain, all your organs quit.

  Did I actually die? That’s also hard to say. I couldn’t breathe, and I had no pulse. And certainly if no nurses and doctors had rushed in when they did, I would have died sometime during those nine minutes. But you aren’t considered clinically dead until a doctor officially calls your time of death, which usually happens five minutes after they stop trying to revive you. Some people say that when your heart stops beating and your lungs shut down, you’re basically dead, but as long as your brain is still functioning, there’s a chance you can be pulled back from the brink. That’s what happened to me. The doctors blasted my lungs with oxygen and got me breathing on my own before my brain, and I, were dead.

  Still, I always tell people that I died and came back. I’m not a doctor and I don’t know if technically that is 100 percent right, but I do know I was no longer in my human body. I know without any doubt that I passed on to another world. And, hey, it’s easier to say I died than start explaining patient-controlled analgesia and brain receptors.

  All things considered, my mother had a harder time in those nine minutes than I did. I was no longer in that hospital room, but she was stuck there watching her daughter turn ten shades of blue. My mom remembers one doctor climbing on top of me and pounding my chest, and she remembers all the doctors working so hard that they were sweating straight through their scrubs. It must have been terrifying. At first she stayed away from my bed and prayed quietly in the back of the room, but after a few desperate minutes she said, “This is all in Your hands now, God,” and found a spot where she could touch my hair and tell me she loved me. “Please, Crystal, stay with us; don’t go,” she begged me over and over. “If you can, please come back. Please come back.”

  My mother always says my nine minutes in heaven were her nine minutes in hell.

  The first good sign for my mom was when she heard a doctor say, “Her eyes fluttered.” That’s when she started yelling my name. As soon as the doctors saw I was back in my body, they sprang into action. They gave me a shot of Narcan, which is used to counter the effects of an overdose. It basically blocks any narcotics from reaching your receptors so that your lungs and heart get the signals to start working again.

  But it also frees up the receptors to start sending pain signals again, which is why my body was instantly racked with unbelievable pain. And once that pain subsided, I started to feel the really sharp pain of my pancreatitis again. They moved me to the intensive care unit and eventually put me back on painkillers, and I spent the next few days slipping in and out of a deep, medicated sleep. I was so out of it the nurses had to wake me up and force me to eat Jell-O; I lost something like fifteen pounds in ten days. I only vaguely remember everyone coming to see me—Virgil and my mother, of course; and Virgil’s parents; and JP and Sabyre; and my brother, Jayson; and even my father, who came down from Illinois. All of the people I had pushed away were the first ones by my side. But I was so groggy I don’t remember much about those visits at all.

  What I do remember clearly—and what lingered for a long time—was how I felt about being back in my human form. To put it mildly, I was pretty ticked off. I simply loved being with God so much and wanted to go back so badly that I came to resent all the people who saved my life. The doctors, the nurses, my mother, even Virgil—anyone who wanted me to come back had, in my mind, prevented me from returning to heaven. “Why did you make me come back?” I asked them over and over in those first few hours. “This was not my choice.”

  Now, some of you may say, “Hold on a minute, weren’t you thrilled to be back with your husband and your children?” Some of you may even wonder, How could you choose to stay in heaven when you knew your family would be so crushed to lose you? Those are good questions, and I’ve thought about
them a lot in the last three years. And the answer I come up with is always the same: more than anything, I wanted to be with God.

  Believe me, before this happened I could not understand how it was possible to love anyone or anything more than your own children. But that was before I found myself in the presence of God. Like I said, that changed everything. I understood instantly that the love of God is greater and more powerful than any other kind of love. And I didn’t only understand it; I felt it and heard it and saw it and tasted it with every fiber of my being. When I was in my spirit form, there was simply no other conceivable option for me but to be with God. I know it sounds funny to say, but not even my babies made me want to return to my human form. I’ve discussed this with my children, and, honestly, I think it hurts their feelings a bit. Once in a while they like to tease me about it, sort of how they tease me about being late to pick them up at school. “Gee, thanks a lot, Mom,” they’ll say. “Thanks for choosing us.”

  But in my first days back from heaven, that’s just how I felt. Even though I’d been blocked from returning, I still felt incredibly infused by God and by the whole miraculous experience. I still felt far more connected to my spirit form than to my human form. But beyond that, I just really, really missed God. I longed to be with Him again, and I felt like I was still bathed in the glow of His greatness. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai after speaking with God, his face glowed so brightly, he had to cover it with a cloth so the people wouldn’t be afraid of him. That is something like what I was feeling inside. I mean, it wasn’t like I had met the president or a celebrity or something. This was the Creator of the universe! The Lord God of Israel!

  That is not something you can just shake off.

  Gradually, over the course of a few days, I did begin to feel grateful I was with my family again. They all rushed to be with me, even the ones I had tried so hard to push away. I still missed God, but being around my loved ones made me realize again that life is a wonderful gift to be cherished and treasured. It wasn’t like a switch being flipped where suddenly I was thrilled to be back. It happened over time, as I got my human legs back and began to see glimpses of God’s guiding hand here on Earth. For instance, just a day after I was discharged from the hospital we celebrated Sabyre’s birthday in our home. We had a lot of friends over, and we served ice cream and opened presents. I sat with my tiny twins in my arms, first one and then the other, and right there in my living room I felt grateful to be back with my family again. I felt blessed to have such beautiful children and such a wonderful husband. For the first time since coming back, I felt happy.