Excerpt from "Memories From Heaven"

I have enjoyed a lifetime love affair with children, particularly newborns, infants, and toddlers. If a baby is in the room, it’s almost as if there is a magnetic connection that draws my attention and I must make contact. Being the father of eight children, I have spent countless hours simply gazing into the eyes of a brand-new arrival into our family. In these private moments, I often send silent inquisitive messages asking them to tell me about God and what the formless spiritual world is like.

I have passed many, many hours of my life lying on the floor making direct contact with our new arrivals. I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that children just show up here with personality traits. I love to ask little toddlers who are only beginning to communicate with language to tell me what they remember about their experiences before coming here for this earthly incarnation. In fact, this entire book was created because my co-author, Dee Garnes, engaged in such a conversation with her little boy, Marcus, who was just learning how to communicate in single words. (You can read about this joyful conversation in Dee’s Introduction, which follows mine.)

I have asked adults from all walks of life to share the wisdom of their little ones, and I have included many of my own experiences with my children’s recollections in this book. After reading through the responses that Dee and I received from people all over the planet, I am more than convinced that there is much more to our lives than the few short years we are allotted here on Earth. And our young boys and girls are the ones who can offer us a glimpse into the unfathomable, infinite, invisible world that is for all of us to discover. After all, they haven’t had much time to truly forget.

I have always loved the poem written by the English poet William Wordsworth, titled “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” One of the lines says: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” As I would look into the eyes of one of my own newborns, I would frequently contemplate what the poet is saying here. This entire human experience is like a dream: we sleep, we dream, and then we awaken, forgetting all of those wondrous experiences in our dream state. But sometimes we can recall some tidbits of that dream, particularly if we have very recently emerged from sleep. As I would look at this newly arrived miracle in my lap, I’d feel the truth of Wordsworth’s words.

Our birth may indeed be a sleep, but not all of it is forgotten by children, and it was thanks to that idea that this compilation was born. Every remembrance cited here came from children who seem to have these recollections, just as we adults do when attempting to explain what has taken place in that mysterious dream world we enter every night, and live in for at least one-third of our time here.

Dee and I have gone through thousands upon thousands of entries that were sent to us when we asked for personal anecdotes about young children’s memories of heaven. So many of the stories that my own children relayed to me when they were just learning to talk, which I thought were unique to me and our family, have actually turned out to be quite universal in nature—countless people gave us almost identical stories about children reporting how they remembered choosing their parents for this journey, how they had invisible friends that only they could see, memories of past lives in the same family, visitations with God, and on and on.

Today there is an entire literature filled with rigorous scientific evidence of past lives and the presence of angels among us. I myself have had a very powerful journey to a previous life, and I have had my mind expanded by my close association with many highly respected scholars who have provided convincing testimony for the reality of the infinite spiritual realm. But it is out of the mouths of these babes, who have recently shown up here and still have some remnants of heaven clinging to them—which they talk about unequivocally—that we are all provided with clues to the world beyond. It is to those voices that this book is dedicated.

In Wordsworth’s “Recollections of Early Childhood” he gives us this to chew on as well: “The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, /

And cometh from afar . . . From God, who is our home. As you read through these enthralling commentaries about the world beyond what we see and experience with our five senses, know that these little beings are drenched in the heaven that is our home. They have so much to teach us all.