Best of the Program | Guests: Justin Barclay & Don Piper | 12/24/19

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Welcome back.

It's Justin Barkley today, and a special opportunity, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show, here we are.

Merry Christmas, Christmas Eve, and a special opportunity as

the hustle takes a break.

I know folks are out maybe finishing some shopping, and maybe you're finishing touches on the family get-together or the gatherings that you'll be having tonight, maybe going to church or maybe getting together tomorrow morning throughout the day.

But it's a special opportunity for us to come together as a people,

take a pause, and

really focus on what matters most.

Not the news, or in most cases, noise,

not what's happening in Washington, D.C.,

but maybe what's happening in your own backyard.

And even more importantly, at your own dinner table.

And

most importantly, maybe in your own heart.

Our next guest is Don Piper.

He's got an incredible story.

I'll let him tell it.

But he's the author of 90 Minutes in Heaven.

He died, and yet he's on the phone with us today.

Don, welcome in and Merry Christmas.

How are you?

Well, Merry Christmas to you.

Yes, I am alive.

I wasn't, but now I am.

And,

you know, the death rate here is 100%.

That's kind of a difficult thing to talk about on Christmas Eve, but it means that we need to be ready all the time for what happens next.

So I am excited to be here another Christmas.

This will be 69 Christmases for me.

and I'm still here, and so are you.

And why don't we make the most of it while we are?

Because

indeed.

You've got an incredible story, Don.

I'm going to let you talk about some of this, but there's a chance for us as we celebrate the birth in Bethlehem over 2,000 years ago.

A chance for maybe, yeah, we'll talk about death, but maybe a chance to talk about...

a rebirth that can happen.

New life.

I have been to that

church there, there, Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on a number of occasions.

It is a very special place.

It's a very humble place,

a very unlikely place for the Son of God to be born.

But when you're there, obviously, there's a presence and a knowledge of the fact that nearly 2,000 years ago

the Son of God came to dwell among us.

I was a pastor in 1989, still am, and I was on my way to church

to lead a Wednesday night service, and I didn't make it.

I was in East Texas, a very rural area, because I had been at a conference at a retreat center, and about 10 minutes out of the front gate in January of 1989, an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer truck crossed the center stripe of a narrow bridge and hit me head-on.

I never saw it coming.

It was a rainy, cold day, and it was just a horrific collision because he hit two other cars after he struck me.

Amazingly,

miraculously, really, none of those people were injured, the truck driver or the other two drivers of the car.

They were treated and released in this area, rural area, when finally first responders got there because it was

really remote.

And they discovered

the four paramedics who were now working on me since there was no one else to work on that I had been killed instantly.

They did try everything they could to try to revive me, resuscitate me.

They were unsuccessful, so I was the body, which was hideous,

was covered up with a tarp and they were waiting for a medical examiner to come.

and do the appropriate paperwork to take me away.

And

so I just lay there for quite a while and behind me were lots of other ministers.

One of them came up on the bridge, felt God say

to him to pray for me, even though I had been declared dead by several professionals.

And they discouraged him, not from praying, but from getting even near me because of all the wreckage and the danger.

He finally prevailed, got in the wreckage of the car.

put his hand on my right shoulder under the tarp.

I obviously didn't have any knowledge of this.

I was absent from that body and present with the Lord at the time.

In fact, the moment the truck struck me.

But he was praying because he was being obedient, and that went on for an hour and a half from 11.45 when he arrived on the scene until 1.15 in the afternoon, still waiting for the medical examiner.

He began to sing hymns over the body in the car.

And he was singing a great old hymn of the faith called What a Friend We Have in Jesus.

And suddenly under the tarp, as he sang that song, I began to sing the song with him.

And he got out of the car very quickly, ran over to the

EMTs and said, the dead man is singing.

Okay, so we've, I got to pause you here, Don, because people are just maybe tuning in and they're hearing that thinking, what, okay, now what happened?

This guy was dead.

Yeah.

And you were gone for, as the book says, 90 minutes in heaven.

You were gone.

Yeah, and it may be more appropriately titled, you know, book publishers,

they want to get a hook out there, but

I was really not here for an hour and a half

because in heaven there is no time.

It's a timeless place.

I could have been there for 90 years or 90 seconds.

It's linear, it's propelled forward, but there's no elapse of time.

So I was away from here for that length of time.

And

he and a lot of other people.

Now, granted,

they attempted to contact my family that morning when they found my identity.

They were unsuccessful because my wife is teaching school, and our children were at school.

It was a Wednesday morning.

And so

they called my church.

They did find my business card in my wallet.

They called the church, told the church that I had been in a terrible accident, but not that I was a fatality because my next of kin had not been notified yet.

So the church, of course, started praying after they heard I was a horrific wreck, and they called other churches.

They called other people.

Actually, by the time that I returned,

thousands and thousands of people were praying because they'd heard I'd been in an accident, but not that I had been killed because they did not want to tell that on the phone.

But the man in the car knew it, and he had some medical background himself.

So he was praying, and

he sang the song, and suddenly I found myself in the dark, because we were covered up with a tarp,

singing that song without knowing who he was

or why I was singing or anything having to do with what had happened to me

in the wreck.

It took me hours to be filled in on

the collision of the 18-wheeler, and I was transferred eventually to a level one trauma center in Houston.

And so consequently,

it was just an incredible experience for everybody involved.

When I got hit by the truck, my family got hit by the truck.

My church got hit by the truck.

Everybody who knew me, and I got asked about it so many times because it is such an incredible story.

I decided to write a book.

And in the book,

one of the first things I say is I wrote this book in self-defense.

And by that, I meant, well, if I write it all down,

can we just move on in my life?

You know, talking about this wreck, and I was hospitalized for 13 months, and I had 34 major operations to reattach an arm and a leg and overcome a lot of other injuries that were just

life-threatening.

And so I just wanted to put this behind me.

But God put it in front of me, and he does that sometimes.

This time of year is a good reminder because it is about new beginnings.

So I had a new lease on life at that point.

38-year-old man, married, three children, pastor of a church.

Things were going well, and I felt like I was making a difference.

And then one day, on the way to church, I got killed by a truck.

Don Piper's on with us right now, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven and what you just heard him describe.

And in a very condensed way, because I'm sure, you know, Don

talks about this now, and usually when he talks about this, and when you read the story, and matter of fact,

they made a movie about this.

Um,

it it takes a little more time to develop, but boy, you know, we don't have as much time on the radio, so we're going through it.

But what you just heard was that first miracle, and you know what they say when you're watching infomercials, but wait, there's more, because there literally is.

That's the first miracle.

Don is in an accident, horrific accident, where an 18-wheeler rolls over his tiny car, and

the pictures that I've seen in the wreckage

is absolutely unthinkable when you see this.

It's very gruesome to think about what he went through.

His body lay lifeless inside of that car, and the folks, the paramedics, the first responders there, took him a while to get there, but they did respond and found when he was there that he was no longer breathing.

He didn't have a pulse.

He was done.

Yet one man walked up upon that scene and said, I want to, I just feel the urge.

This was another pastor that I feel the urge.

I want to pray for Don.

And the police said, No, we don't, you don't, you don't want to do that.

You don't want to go up there.

Trust me.

They didn't want to let him anywhere near him, but

let alone inside that car, inside that wreckage, to lay his hand on you and pray for you.

And Don, I want to take a break here and we'll come back and talk about because as he began praying,

eventually, not only do you wake up, but you start to sing

the hymn that he was singing while he was praying for you.

Yes, I did.

And what happens next, I mean, that was the first miracle in a line of many, but what happens next is just

absolutely unbelievable.

If you're listening to this now, it did happen.

This has been recorded.

And of course, the book is 90 Minutes in Heaven.

We'll be back with Don Piper right after this.

It's Justin Barkley in for Glenn Beck today.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hi, it's Glenn.

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Thanks.

I'm with Don Piper, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven, and we just heard about how that horrific truck accident there on the highway in Texas, I guess about 30-some odd years ago now, left him dead inside that car.

Yet he's here with us on the phone.

And Don was just talking about that moment where he woke up.

I want to talk about what folks want to hear about because I'm sure many have questions about heaven, but we'll save that for a little bit later.

Don, first, I want to talk about

the next steps because when you come back,

you're not all out of the water yet.

I mean, you have quite a bit to go through, and much of that starts at that moment when folks realize this man is alive.

Right.

It does.

And the reason I was singing with him is because he was making me sing.

He kept encouraging me, and he was trying to keep me conscious.

He was trying to make sure that

I didn't lapse again.

And

the collision was in excess of probably 100 miles an hour ahead on collision.

So

anyone would have lost their life in this accident.

This is before airbags.

And so the steering wheel had become horizontal and went into my chest.

The dashboard collapsed on both of my legs.

My right leg was broken at the knee.

My left leg was severed just above the knee.

And

four and a half inches of my left femur, we all know that's the largest bone in the human body.

That part of my leg was ejected from the car and not found.

My left arm, which I apparently had raised, maybe I did see the car, the truck out of the corner by don't remember that.

But it took my arm, it separated at the shoulder and it just went over me into the back seat.

And from the middle of the left forearm,

it was just twisted and broken and missing.

And so I missed all the bones.

The muscles were gone.

The skin was gone.

Anyone would have bled out in this accident in a matter of minutes, maybe five minutes or less, had their heart been beating, but mine was not.

So I did not.

I did have blood coming out of my eyes and ears and nose and very obvious brain damage.

And so it was just, it couldn't have been, it could hardly have been more horrific than it was.

And I was dead, but

people prayed, and God said yes.

He doesn't always say yes when we pray for those kinds of things.

In my case he did.

But I did come back to

an incredible amount of

operations,

even some experimental surgeries and devices were placed on me to try to save my arm and leg that had never been used before in this country.

And so I went through a lot of

well, 13 months in a hospital bed and many operations and infections and isolation ward situations.

And it was just a roller coaster ride for almost three years before I walked into my own church on my own, unassisted, and began to resume ministry, which I was told would never happen.

So I do believe in miracles.

I don't feel very miraculous, but it is a miracle that I am alive today

on every level that one can possibly imagine, and that I have had any functionality at all.

So I believe in miracles.

I believe that God is still in the miracle business.

And really, Christmas is all about miracles.

A baby born in an area that has not distinguished whatsoever,

but that was predicted to happen.

The Bible says so.

All those things happen.

And so this is the time of year when we remember

a miracle occurred,

and some other incredibly brilliant people had heard about it, and they were looking for him also.

We call them kings.

And so many things happen that makes this story unparalleled in human history.

And so that's why this is such an amazing time of year.

If we focus on the Christ at Christmas, it certainly is.

And I'm reminded, I'm here for another...

I'm another Christmas.

I made another one.

It is something.

And each day is a gift.

And we look at that and think about the things if we really refocus on what matters.

Now, I think this is a great time of year to do that.

And today, because we have a pause in our day-to-day, we get a chance to see some of those things.

And Don, I'm here.

I don't want to just completely

just rush right over this

because some folks may think, well, this is great.

This is, you know,

sure,

maybe that did happen for you,

but I haven't seen any miracles in my life.

People are listening right now that are really really hurting.

Yes.

And I want to make sure that we address because you went through a long period of rehabilitation where you

maybe even asked the question of why, God, why?

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

I want to talk about the hospital bed asking that question every day.

Don,

we've got to take a break here.

Hang on.

I've got to take a break, unfortunately, and come back and answer that question.

And also, folks want to know, wait a minute, you went to heaven.

What was that like?

I don't want to miss that because, boy, that's a big piece of this story as well.

Don Piper, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven, what was that hell like

on earth after he came back?

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Our guest, Don Piper, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven, just talking about the story.

He died 30 years ago or so in Texas on a highway.

But yet he's on with us today and talking about how that happened,

how his life was saved, what happened, the miracle that took place in the wreckage.

Boy, what a metaphor for each of our lives as I say that.

I'm struck by the fact that miracles can happen in our wreckage, in our mess, no matter where we are, no matter how bad off we think we are.

Things can happen, and they do every day, Don.

They do.

If you can get killed in a car wreck on the way to church, you'd better be ready all the time.

Accidents do happen.

I never thought for a minute that this was some kind of,

I mean, I know this man didn't get in a truck that morning and say, I'm going to go out and kill somebody.

So it, you know, it just happens, and it's not what happens to you, it's what you do with it.

I lay there in the hospital bed for all those months, and I really became profoundly depressed.

You say, oh, well, you're a Christian pastor,

you know, they don't become depressed.

Well, they certainly do.

Maybe talking to some right now.

I was given very little hope.

I mean, they didn't think they would be able to save my leg.

They didn't think that they would be able to save my arm.

I was going to be

really maimed for the rest of my life.

As it turns out, they were able to do it through some very experimental procedures, but I really really descended into depression.

I wanted to talk to somebody who understood what I was going through, and the devices they installed on me, external fixators, had never been put on somebody on a femur before.

So I was in a unique situation where there was literally no one I could talk to about this because no one had experienced this.

And

that really set me back a great deal.

And so one morning while I was really talking to God, there was nobody in the hospital room

but me and him.

And I said to him, why can't you send someone here who understands how I feel?

If I could just talk to somebody that could give me some hope about the future, whatever it is, I can handle it.

But I'm living in such a period of uncertainty.

And I think Christmas time is a time when we reflect on that.

Maybe we've lost a loved one this year.

Maybe we are not in a financial situation where we could really provide for our family the way we want.

A lot of things may be going on, bankruptcy, divorce, all sorts of things.

And so I found myself in not a hopeless situation, but a helpless situation.

And God spoke to me that morning and said, it's not about you.

It's about what I can do through you now that I could not do before the truck hits you.

You need to turn your test into a testimony and your mess into a message and reach out to other people.

Instead of, you know, pleading with me, God speaking, about how I can help you, you need to help other people because now you're equipped in a better fashion than you ever were before the truck hit you.

You need to take the same hand you're shaking at me and reach out to other people and help them up.

And that changed my life.

I'm not a particularly outwardly emotional person, but I began to weep at that point and continued to do it until the sun came up the next morning.

And that was the first day of the rest of my life.

And so what I've been trying to do ever since is trying to get people into heaven, but also help them have a better trip on the way.

And we can all do that.

We could take our sum total of experiences instead of having a pity party, which I was having, and reach out to other people and help them through.

And then we'll understand why we went through that.

It was in preparation for ministering to other people.

That is what I gathered out of a lot of things that happened to me, including get hit by

head-aught by an A.T.

Wheeler, was to realize that we're really here to help everyone else get there.

And that's what I do every day of my life.

That's what I'm doing right now.

It sounds like you found your

calling and your purpose.

I did.

I had to hit my truck to figure that out, but I mean, I did.

And listen, God forbid that any of us have to get hit by a truck to figure that out.

But thankfully, you did, so you can tell us about it.

No, I wouldn't wish it on anybody, really.

But as I said earlier, it's not what happens to you, it's what you do with it.

And so, a lot of people have had a lot of things happen to us as we come to the end of another year.

And it's about the future, it's about what we can do now to be a blessing to other people.

And

if we focus on that and we determine to do that, God will help us do that, and then we'll know why we went through the things that we went through in 2019.

And hope for a better 2020 and beyond.

And that's something that I think

that's missing a lot from maybe

our conversation these days.

You watch the news, you turn on the T V, and everything seems like the sky is falling, but there is hope.

You're right, Justin.

It can seem like an awfully dark night.

And I went through a long series of dark nights even during the day.

And so I do understand what it's like to be

hit the bottom.

There's one good thing that can happen when you hit the bottom, you can push off.

And I did hit the bottom.

And,

you know, if I needed to, I know now why I'm here every day.

And

it is to help people get to heaven.

And on a day-to-day basis, help them have a better life now.

That really is what Christmas is about.

And as we turn the page on another year, and they are relentless,

maybe this is the year where

we can leave a lot of that stuff behind, the things that just bind us and

capture us and beat us down.

I believe in that.

I think it's crucial.

And hopefully, for a lot of people who are listening, this will be a turning point.

I want to talk about what it was like in heaven for you, but first,

Don, I hear you saying that one of the keys that you learn to having a better life now is shifting your focus from you, your mess, and your wreckage, and shifting it towards others in a way to serve and maybe help other people.

Is that what I'm hearing?

It absolutely is.

We can concentrate and focus on the wrecks in our life.

And let's face it,

there are going to be some.

If there haven't been any, there will be.

And I'm not trying to be pessimistic I want to be realistic But it's not it's not that it we can we can be devastated and we will be and we can be hurt and we will be and we can have a lot of things happen But if we stay there if we live in that kind of condition, then that is no life.

That is not a life

We but we start looking beyond ourselves and when we start looking at other people who have similar situations and hold their hand and say I understand how you feel they found somebody who gets it.

And that's all I ever wanted.

I just wanted to find somebody

who understood what I was going through.

We all go through terrible things, but

that's not the point.

The point is getting through the terrible thing and then looking around for opportunities where you can help someone else do the same thing.

And then you'll kind of understand, okay, now I know why I went through that.

It was to prepare me to help these people get through to the other side.

And when you do that,

it'll be a whole new chapter in your life.

It'll be a discovery that will give you hope.

And hope is really all we have in life is hope.

Hope that tomorrow will be a good day, that hope that we'll get the job that we're trying to get, hope that we'll pay the bills,

hope that we have a healthy existence.

There's no guarantees.

I mean, the one guarantee in life is that this ends.

And you need to be ready for what happens next.

But we can have a meaningful life on the way, even though it always won't be perfect.

If we have a goal and we're trying to look beyond ourselves and reach out to other people, then we really can make a difference when it's all over.

Don Piper's on with us right now, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven.

And that book, you can read more about the story in in-depth.

They actually did a movie about it as well.

But what was it like in heaven?

We talk about...

making this trip there a better place and how you can make this life a better trip on the way back.

Let me talk about that and what he experienced maybe in heaven, Don, when we come back.

We're going to take a quick break.

We're back in just a few minutes here with Don Piper, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven.

He died 30 years ago, but yet he's on the phone with us today.

He'll share the rest of his story right after this.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Talking with Don Piper, author of 90 Minutes in Heaven, DonPiper Ministries.com.

Well, we've talked about how he died on that road in texas all those years ago and how he came back what that road was like before him after he came back and the

and all the pain and

the wreckage he went through but

the most important part is that god brought him back and now a don you know people really want to know what it was like in heaven so i don't want to waste any more time We've only got a few minutes to describe this.

Can you give us five minutes in heaven?

Five minutes in heaven.

See, there's another book

for someone out there.

Well, I came back so I could be on the Glenn Beck show today with you.

I immediately, the moment the truck struck me, was standing at the gates of heaven.

The Bible tells us in Revelation that there are 12 gates in heaven, and we will be at one of them.

And

I was there.

I didn't go down a long tunnel to wind the bright light at the end of the tunnel.

I do think that's an authentic experience, but I think when you're in a hundred mile an hour collision, you're just there.

And I was surrounded by people I had known and loved in life and had preceded me in death.

I was somewhat shocked by that.

Not that they were there, but they knew I was coming.

I believe everyone in heaven knows who's coming.

The Bible says that

when we trust the Lord, when we give our hearts to him,

our names are immediately written in a book up there, like a registration book that they call the Lamb's Book of Life.

And so the people in heaven are expecting us, and they were.

And I was greeted by the people who actually helped me get there.

There were people who took me to church when I was a kid, before I was a believer.

They gave me a Bible when I didn't have one.

They certainly lived a Christian life in front of me, so I knew what one was, even though I wasn't one yet.

And so their influence on me, their witness to me, caused me to be in a position where I knew one day that's what I needed to do, and I made that decision to go at the age of 16.

I just wasn't planning to die at 38 on a lonely highway in East Texas.

Who knows when that day is?

We don't.

Jesus had the Last Supper.

We're going to have one one day too.

We just won't know what it is.

So I wasn't planning to die that day, nor were any of the people who greeted me, but they were prepared when the time came, no matter whether they were 80 or 18.

And some of them had been those ages when they were

tragically killed or died of an illness or old age.

So above them was this magnificent gate, looks like the inside of an oyster.

It is made of pearl.

Truly, it is a gate made of pearl.

I could see inside the gate, there seems to be a boulevard leading to the center of the city, and it is a city with high walls and

thick walls, as a matter of fact.

And I could see through down this golden boulevard to a pinnacle high lifted up.

There are thrones at the top of that pinnacle.

The brightest light I have ever seen is emanating from that throne.

I went through angels.

They're everywhere.

I could not only hear their voices, I could hear their wings actually flapping above me.

I believe they're the ones who bear us up to heaven.

I heard music unlike any music I've ever heard here,

and there was a lot of it, thousands of songs at the same time without chaos, because they were symbiotic.

They all fit together.

I experienced colors I've never seen before.

Heaven is a sensory explosion.

It is simply the most real thing that's ever happened to me.

And

I wasn't thinking about Earth.

I didn't miss people down here.

I expected them.

And so you don't miss them.

And since no time is passing, they'll immediately arrive for us

because

decades may pass here, but there are no decades in heaven.

So people in heaven don't miss you.

They expect you.

It was a glorious experience.

They greeted me.

We exchanged love for each other, sometimes verbally and sometimes without even speaking.

We did move forward because I obviously wanted to go inside.

That's what I was there for.

And I did go inside.

I approached the gate, which is not, the portal is not very big.

It's really just big enough for one person, and that is how we get into heaven one at a time.

And so I'm going in, the wall is very thick, and emerging on the inside and thinking, I want to move down this boulevard as fast as possible.

I want to approach that hill and fall at the feet of the great God of all creation and try to verbalize, if I could, thank you for letting me come but I

got a chance I know that there's far more to this story and if folks want to read the book they should get it it is a fantastic book 90 minutes in heaven they made a movie out of it too donpiper ministries calm I just want to thank you for being here with us today Don

and sharing some hope with us thank you my very best to Glenn and I'm delighted to be here Merry Christmas to everyone and certainly a wonderful new year hey it's Glenn, and I want to tell you about something that you should either end your day with or

start your morning with.

And that is the news and why it matters.

If you like this show, you're going to love the news and why it matters.

It's a bunch of us that all get together at the end of the day and just talk about the stories that matter to you and your life.

The news and why it matters.

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