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<\/a>Book-length accounts of single near-death experiences are not my preferred means of gaining information on the subject, though I don\u2019t summarily dismiss them.\u00a0 I\u2019m much more inclined to credit short, modest, anonymous accounts provided to reputable researchers by people who didn\u2019t seek their attention and who don\u2019t stand to gain financial profit or notoriety from the reports that they give. \u00a0Extravagantly detailed narratives and exceedingly didactic or preachy discussions also worry me.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, I share with you a couple of passages from Marvin J. Besteman, with Lorilee Craker, My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life<\/em> (Grand Rapids, MI: Revell, 2012).<\/p>\n Marvin Besteman was a graduate of Calvin College in Michigan, a veteran of the U.S. Army, and a retired bank president.\u00a0 He died in January 2012, shortly after completing the manuscript of the book, having told the story of his near-death experience for six years or so after it happened in 2006.\u00a0 I never knew him, of course, but even the brief description of him that I\u2019ve just provided here suggests that he was, very likely, a person of soberness and probity, neither known for deception nor given to wild flights of fantasy.\u00a0 And, with that as a background, I think that some out there might appreciate a particular portion of Mr. Besteman\u2019s narrative, in which he tells of finding himself standing in a kind of otherworldly line before a large heavenly gate. Let this passage serve as a preface:<\/p>\n One of the darkest times in my life was when our baby son, William John, died after just ten hours of life.\u00a0 I will tell you more about William and all the babies I saw in heaven later on in my story.\u00a0 For now, I\u2019ll just say that anyone who has lost a child knows that our hearts were broken in a million pieces when William died. (67)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n [I know, too.\u00a0 We lost Lena Alaia, our first grandchild, in 2014.<\/a>]<\/p>\n Most of the people in line were around my age or older, which is the way things should be.\u00a0 Believe it or not, some were even much older than me.\u00a0 Most of the men in line were between fifty and seventy years of age, and most of the women were between seventy and ninety years of age.<\/p>\n There were three children in line, each of them around four or five years of age.\u00a0 These little ones were not standing still, but moving around, wiggling in their spots in line, like children do.\u00a0 They all had big smiles on their faces.<\/p>\n It\u2019s terribly sad, I know, to think about children dying, and of course these precious kids had died or they wouldn\u2019t have been in that line.\u00a0 Their loved ones were experiencing the heartrending loss of a child \u2013 perhaps the worst and deepest loss anyone can ever experience.\u00a0 I wish I didn\u2019t know how awful that is, but I do.\u00a0 So what I\u2019m about to tell you is said from a heart that has felt the wretched loss of a child.\u00a0 I don\u2019t share this piece lightly.\u00a0 But I promise you, dear one, those children were delighted to be in that place.\u00a0 Their eyes were shining with life and pleasure, just like everyone else waiting for their turn through the huge doorway.\u00a0 (76)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Continuing on our luxury fine-dining tour of southern Utah today, we did in-car filming and drone filming for Becoming Brigham<\/em><\/a> in the general vicinity of Koosharem<\/a>. \u00a0I doubt that many people who haven\u2019t themselves been involved in filmmaking can appreciate how time-consuming and even repetitious it can be. \u00a0Just a few minutes of finished product can require hours of prior work; this has all been quite enlightening, eye-opening really, for me. \u00a0I now look at movies and television dramas with a considerably altered sensibility.<\/p>\n We also filmed a segment from an off-road location looking toward Capitol Reef National Park<\/a>. \u00a0However, our final filming work of the day took place at Anasazi State Park<\/a>, in Boulder, Utah, and within the Anasazi State Park Museum<\/a>. \u00a0As you might perhaps guess, our principal topic for the day was relations between Latter-day Saints and Native Americans in early Utah Territory, which saw an abundance of conflicts, challenges, misunderstandings, and, sometimes, tragedies.<\/p>\n Anasazi State Park contains the ruins of an Ancestral Puebloan settlement that flourished in the twelfth century after Christ and then was fairly suddenly abandoned for reasons that remain unknown. \u00a0(Ancestral Puebloan<\/em> is the preferred term among scholars today for the people who continue to be commonly known as the Anasazi<\/em>, who were almost certainly the forebears of today\u2019s Hopi. \u00a0 We don\u2019t know what they called themselves, and the term Anasazi<\/em> was given to them by modern Navajo workers on archaeological sites; it means \u201cancient enemies.\u201d)<\/p>\n But I need to report on the elements of today\u2019s travel that most fascinate the crack investigators over at the Peterson Obsession Board, who are posting very enthusiastically about this trip of mine, subjecting my reports to intense, meticulous, and extremely skeptical analysis:<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a long day, I\u2019m running out of energy, and I need to walk down that dirt road before retiring to bed. \u00a0So I think that I\u2019ll reserve until tomorrow my comments about the spectacularly scenic road that we drove today. \u00a0It was even more interesting than my oatmeal, sandwich, and chicken strips were.<\/p>\n Posted from Escalante, Garfield County, Utah<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a0 Book-length accounts of single near-death experiences are not my preferred means of gaining information on the subject, though I don\u2019t summarily dismiss them.\u00a0 I\u2019m much more inclined to credit short, modest, anonymous accounts provided to reputable researchers by people who didn\u2019t seek their attention and who don\u2019t stand to gain financial profit or notoriety […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":115901,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11266,39839,8576,2905,788,12653],"class_list":["post-115898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-anasazi","tag-escalante","tag-indian","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-mormon","tag-native-american"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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