Sid Roth

Sid:  I am so excited about our guests Ron and Glenda Pettey.  I’m speaking to them by way of telephone at their home just outside of Houston, Texas.  I have just finished reading their book “Heaven is Real.”  And I can tell you this book has the atmosphere of heaven when it’s being read.  Ron and Glenda was it love at first sight on your blind date?

Ron:  Yes, it was.

Glenda:  Actually love at second sight, the first few hours I led him to the Lord, and then after that he looked pretty good.

Sid:  Now, just out of curiosity had you led many people to the Lord before you led your blind date to the Lord?

Glenda:  No, I’m sorry to say I was a cradle Baptist. So I had no excuse for that, but the Lord just put the words in my mouth and it all came out, and Ron was ready to receive, he was so ready.

Sid:  And Ron had a physical condition called Hydrocephalus, what is that exactly Glenda?

Glenda:  Okay that is just weird, spinal fluid was not draining properly through the ventricles in the center of his brain, he had had a blow to the head some years earlier in Vietnam. It was years later that this condition really surfaced.  And they had the doctors had to put in a shunt, I call it the little plumbing to reroute that spinal fluid.

Sid:  And I understand that every once and awhile that shunt would get out of place and what would happen?

Glenda:  Right it would clog, it would malfunction, many emergency runs into surgery a number of times. Then in 1982 the shunt developed into infection and had to be replaced.  Then in the replacement process we found out many many hours later they had inadvertently placed the new tubing right into a massive blood clot that had not shown up on X-ray.

Sid:  So if it was in the blood clot that means that the spinal fluid could not get out the brain so I would imagine his bead would swell up.

Glenda:   It was very swollen, swollen really beyond recognition.  So the doctors were rushed back in on a Sunday morning to find him in this condition because the blood clot would not be known for many hours yet.  So they were doing emergency surgery to go back in on a Sunday morning.  I called friends from across the state, realizing that they would be up on Sunday getting ready to go to church so that many could be praying for Ron.

Sid:  And he literally had this emergency surgery and he died on the operating table. He had an experience of going to heaven.  But it wasn’t quite what most people would think because when he got to heaven they said his name was not on the scroll.  And Ron is going to be sharing a lot about that this week, but Glenda you told me that Ron gets really emotional about it and he can’t even get the words out, explain.

Glenda: He does, he relives this testimony this experience every time we share it, we have shared this hundreds of times over the years.  But still every time he’s just there again, it’s reliving the experience.

Sid:  So you jump in because he’s reliving it he gets so emotional.  Well Ron, when you died tell me the first thing you remember seeing.

Ron:  I remember I knew where I was and I walked up to this table and I’m going to call it a table because I have no better words where I walked up to it and on this table was a book.  I walked up and I said, “I’m ready to go in.”  And this person looked at the book and my name is not there. I became just really frustrated because I’d accepted the Lord Jesus as my Lord and Savior and my name was suppose to be in that book.  Why isn’t my name in that book?  Well, by this time a person had come out of heaven, now I’m not in heaven and I in sort of a foyer area.  A man comes out of heaven, walks over to the person at the table and as I explained to him and he says “I’ll go in and check.”  Now he goes in to heaven, actual heaven I’m sort of in the foyer area and he goes into heaven and comes out a little bit later…

Glenda: He comes over to Ron and he says, he actually has a report from there.

Ron:  He says, it’s not your time you’re being sent back and I’m going with you.  Now this turned out to be my guardian angel.  See I met my guardian angel face to face in fact he came back with me, stayed in the hospital room for several days, a week.  I tried to introduce him to everybody that came to visit me in the hospital.  And they all dismissed it as well maybe he’s had brain surgery and so…

Sid:  Well, Glenda what did you think when he said, “I want to introduce you to this gentleman in my room?”

Glenda:  Right we horrified, we felt like he was hallucinating he had finally recovered from the surgery and then was trying to introduce us.  And of course this is in intensive care so every four hours we had ten minutes that he’s trying to introduce us again.  And finally we would go back out and pray that “Please Lord, let his brain clear,” and finally we’d walk in and he was not doing that anymore.

Sid:  But actually you had quite a report from the doctor that although it was a miracle he came back to life for ten years he had amnesia except for one thing; what was the one that he didn’t have amnesia over?

Glenda:  Of course, all his heaven experience, all of heaven and all of scripture and all of who Jesus is, was in his heart.  And we call that really his heavenly memory rather than his physical memory; so he had memory of all of heaven.

Sid:  Okay, Ron when they said your name wasn’t on the list what did you say?

Ron:  I thought they were bottom line I thought that they were crazy. Because I knew I had done everything necessary to get into heaven. When they finally convinced me that my name wasn’t there I raised such a ruckus that another gentleman came out of heaven walked over to the table to explain to him what is happening and he says “I’ll go in heaven and check.”  Now, I’m not in heaven at this point.

Glenda:   Right. At the very end when the second fellow came back he came over to Ron and he said, “It’s not yet your time, your mission’s not yet complete and you’re being sent back.”  At that point Ron had the most unusual response, he said, “I want to see my wife.”

Ron:  I didn’t even know that I was married because I had no memory.

Glenda:  He wanted to give him a request, but he felt like they couldn’t fulfill and they would have to say “Okay you’ve got us there come on into heaven.”  But instead the angel just nodded and said, “Okay that can be arranged.”

Ron:  The first person I remember seeing after regaining consciousness is Glenda, and my guardian angel was right there with me he pointed here she is.  And I thought wow, thank you Lord you picked out a good one for me.

Sid:  Okay, your ploy did not work. So there still not letting you into heaven, but they also said Glenda that it was because people were praying, explain.

Glenda:  Oh yes, that Sunday morning that I got the call from the doctor at 6:00 AM. The Lord had prepared for this so it was very calm to me.  I rushed down to the hospital and very soon after that I found phones I could call long distance with. So I called several people around the state who I knew would be getting up to go to church that morning.  So I knew that there would be people praying, then we just waited.  We waited for many, many hours until in the afternoon hours before we had a report, but I knew people were praying.  So then as soon as Ron recovered from this, then he told me how he had heard noise in heaven and asked, “What is all this noise?”

Ron:  At this point the angel said, “This is not noise, these are all intercessory prayers coming up on your behalf.  I said in disbelief, “You got to be kidding me.”  He said, “No, would you like to hear one?”  I said, “Yeah, I want to hear one,” you know because I wanted to get in heaven, I didn’t what these prayers interfering with me getting into heaven.” So one of the prayers was drawn out, above all the rest, he’s a dear friend of ours in Port Lavaca, Texas.  I heard every word he prayed, he was praying at the pulpit, he was a deacon of the week, or something like that and I quoted his prayer word for word.

Sid:  Here’s the deal, when he got back they had taped that prayer and you quoted it word for word before you heard the tape.  I mean this is the most phenomenal evidence of the authenticity of this experience.

Ron:  That’s exactly what I did. I tell you when I heard the tape, you know soon after getting out of the hospital we drove to Port Lavaca and they had just started recording their messages on tape.  And he found a tape and when we came back to report to Glenda and the rest of the family we had chill bumps on our arms both times the signs of God falls because it was just unbelievable.

Sid:  I’ll tell you what’s unbelievable to me, oh no it’s actually believable is that same presence you sense on this interview right now, it’s the atmosphere of heaven.