15th February, 2005

CAROLE ADAMS

"'90 Minutes in Heaven' is a compelling read and hard to put down. Despite the difficulty Piper found in putting his experience of heaven into words, what he has written is an encouraging testimony to its wonderful reality and the power of God in our lives."

90 Minutes in Heaven
Don Piper with Cecil Murphey
Published by Fleming H Revell (Fifth Printing, January 2005)
ISBN: 0-8007-5949-4(pbk)

We’ve all heard miraculous stories of survival in which someone has survived against all odds only by hanging onto God. 90 Minutes in Heaven is not such a story. Rather, it’s the tale of a man who tasted heaven and didn’t want to come back to earth. Despite the miracle of his survival, Don Piper tells of his despair at having to battle incredible pain and his strong desire to give up, begging God to take him back to heaven. The answer was ‘no’.

The book opens with an accident on a highway just out of Houston, Texas, in 1989. Piper, a church minister, was on his way home from a Baptist Church conference when his car was crushed by a semi trailer that crossed into his lane. Declared dead by medical personnel at the scene, he was covered and left while they dealt with the injured drivers of the other cars involved.

About 90 minutes later another minister, Dick Onerecker, and his wife Anita arrived at the accident scene. They were also on their way home from the conference. Onerecker enquired if he could pray with anyone and was told that one person was dead, and the others only slightly injured and shaken. He heard God tell him to pray for the man in the red car, which seemed ridiculous as he had just been told that man was dead. However Onerecker persisted in asking to be allowed to go down and pray for him, and was finally permitted to go. What followed was amazing, and no-one at the accident scene, including Onerecker himself, could comprehend it.

Don Piper knew none of this - he had gone straight to heaven. Trying to describe what he experienced there, Piper finds it a very difficult experience to put into words and admits he still gets frustrated trying to describe what heaven looked, sounded like or felt like. He felt complete and had no anxieties or needs and knew he never would again. In fact this experience felt so real, intimate and sacred that it took nearly two years before he could fully share it with anyone, even his wife Eva. He finally wrote three different manuscripts trying to describe his experience of heaven, but none of them satisfied him, so instead he turned to Cecil Murphey to partner with him in writing this book.

Piper gives a very honest account of his battle to recover physically and emotionally. He tells of the incredible pain he experienced, and of how he cried out to God to allow him to return to heaven. As he slowly recovered, Piper also found he couldn’t cope with his total dependence on others, the effect all the trauma was having on his wife and children, or with all the people who came to visit him. Depression took hold and he found it very hard to share his true feelings with others. Close friends often stepped in with some straight-talking and it was this which eventually helped him to adjust to the fact that his life would never be the same again. He had to look forward, not back.

The book includes a list of questions at the end which Piper admits he has no answers to. Why did he die? Why did he go to heaven? Why was he sent back? Why does he have to continue to live in constant pain since the accident? He does know that God is always with him even in the darkest times; that heaven is very real; that those who prayed so constantly for him have been blessed by the incredible answer to prayer; and, that many people have been encouraged by his shared experience of heaven. He also knows that he is only alive because God’s purpose for his life is not yet fulfilled, and once it is he will return to heaven - the place where he still longs to be.

90 Minutes in Heaven is a compelling read and hard to put down. Despite the difficulty Piper found in putting his experience of heaven into words, what he has written is an encouraging testimony to its wonderful reality and the power of God in our lives.