Bessie Haskell

While in Chicago, one of our witnessing teams visited a nursing home. As we were walking down the halls, surveying the different rooms, checking to see if any of our aged fellow humans were awake so that we could witness to them, a frail voice came from one of the rooms. It was a lady’s voice asking us to come in and visit her. She was a sweet little old lady, and her name was Bessie Haskell. She asked us, “Are you men Christians?” We told her, “Yes.” Bessie told us that she had had a very supernatural experience with the Lord Jesus. She said she made a promise to Him, and that promise was that she would tell everybody what Jesus is all about. She said she thought she knew what Jesus was about, but if you read on you will see that even after being in a church all her life, she didn’t have a clue as to what Jesus is all about.
Here’s what Bessie said:

I was born at Rensselaer, Indiana, on a farm along with nine other children.
I was the third from the bottom. I weighed only two and three quarter pounds when I came into this earth, and I was always very small and sickly. When I finally got big enough to go to church, One day my aunt said to me, “Bessie, you have never been baptized, and you can never become a member of this church until you come up to the altar and tell the people that you want to join the church and be baptized.” Then she said, “You do want to join the church, don’t you?” I told her, “Yes, I do.” A few weeks later, we went down to the creek; I was dipped down and brought up out of the water. That made me very happy, because now I was part of the church.
When I was seventeen, I went to Chicago to live with my aunt. While in Chicago, I seldom went to church. I had a job taking care of a baby for a family. The mother of the baby was very ill. The family I worked for were Catholics, and they believed everyone should go to church on Sunday. It had been so long since I had been to a church that I thought I had better join this church. Well, to join that church I had to be baptized again, so I was. After that, I met my husband, and over a period of several years we had two children. I had a house and children, and everything was beautiful, except that with the children so young, I couldn’t go to church again. Then we moved to a different neighborhood. My older sister died, so I took in her four-year-old daughter to raise. During this time, my father brought me three more children. He told me they were starving to death. Their father was a drunkard and had abandoned them, so I took them in. I now had six children to feed, and many times I wouldn’t have enough food for myself and would go to bed hungry. I found myself getting sicker and sicker. I finally went to the doctor and found out I had yellow jaundice.

Word had come that my uncle had his leg amputated, and they said he wasn’t going to live long. He wanted to talk to every one of my mother’s children and lead them to Christ. So after all my brothers and sisters had gone to see him, it was finally my turn. He begged me to accept Christ as my personal Saviour. I told him I would, but not tonight. He took my hand and said, “Bessie, I am going to die, but I want to see you saved before I die.” I left that night without accepting Christ. When I got home I was very restless because this yellow jaundice was getting worse. I was very sick, but never thought of taking Christ as my Saviour. I just got sicker and sicker. When the doctor came, he said, “Bessie, you must go to the hospital.” I told him that I couldn’t until after Uncle George’s funeral. I was so sick at the funeral I thought I would fall over dead. When I went by the casket, it looked to me like he pointed his finger at me and said, “Bessie, you’re lost.” I said, “I know, Uncle George, but you’re dead now, and I don’t know what to do.” On my way home from the funeral, I went into convulsions, so I went straight to the hospital in critical condition. They worked on me and got me ready for surgery. I was going in and out of consciousness, and I heard the doctors say that I would never live through the night. There I was. It kept going through my mind, “...and I’m not saved, I’ve been baptized twice but I’m not saved.” When I awoke, I said to my doctor, “I heard you say out of your own mouth that I was going to die. I want to go home.” So they got me an ambulance, took me home, and put me in the dining room where they could get a good hospital bed and a place to work. I would go into these light comas. When you go into a coma, you can hear part of the time if you’re not too far under, but finally, you go in and you don’t come back at all. And that’s what I went into, into the darkness of night.

I don’t know how they know that you’re still alive. You just hang between life and death. I think it was about the sixth day that I was taken out of my body. My spirit and my body separated, and I saw Bessie Haskell lying on the bed. The Spirit took me by the right arm and took me through the corner of the room. Just as quick as we were outside of the house, we sank into the pit of the earth, and we went right into a monstrous cave. Now when I say a monstrous cave, I mean a monstrous one. It had thousands upon thousands of people there. You don’t walk a step—there are no steps. But its gravity and the gravity carried me down. The faster we went down, the more I began howling, “Oh, God, I never wanted to come to this place. Since I can remember, I always said, ‘I wanna go to Heaven when I die.’ How did I get here?
Why am I in this awful place?” He only took me about half way, then He let me stop and look, and in front of me on my left side was a lake of fire, a lake that burneth with fire and brimstone, and it was a big one. It wasn’t a little lake. It looked like Lake Michigan, and the people were going over. They’d just gone over, and you’d hear those awful screams. Then I kept looking for where they were going to put me. And I told the Lord, “Lord, from the time I was a child, I used to never want to come to, and how on earth can I ever get out?” Then the Lord let me look up and see the Heavens, and oh, what a beauty! But I said, “How do I get there?” Jesus said, “There is a great gulf fixed, and no one will ever pass except those who have been born again by the Spirit of God and washed in His blood.” I said, “But it’s too late, it’s too late! Oh God, please don’t leave me in this awful place! Show me, Lord, what I can do. See, Father, You know I tried, and now here I am.” He showed me one big cross, and Jesus was carrying it up Golgotha’s hill. Down it went into the ground, and they nailed Him to it. They also had the other two, and they were barely alive. But it was Him I saw. When they got His hands nailed and His side pierced and the blood coming out, He looked up, and He looked right in my eyes and He said, “Bessie, this is what it is all about. This is what I died for.” He looked at me with such pity, and I cried, “Oh God, nobody ever told me! Father, nobody ever told me! I went always say that I want to go to Heaven when I die. Father God, if anybody ever worked themselves to death, it’s been me. I’ve got those four children and two of my own and hardly enough food to feed them, and I go without food over and over so that I can say I did my best to raise these children. I took them, Father, to church, when I was able. And Father, I couldn’t have done more than what I have done. I joined two different churches, and I got baptized two different times. Here I am in this place that I went from the time as a little child, Father, and nobody seemed to care. Did they know to tell me and failed to do so?” And He said, “Oh yes, but many miss it.” I said, “I have a husband, and I’ve got two little children at home. Father God, who will raise these children, who will take care of those precious little souls?”
“Father, let me go back. Let me go back, dear Father. I’ll be a witness for you as long as I live. I raise my right hand. You see this hand? It’s my oath and my promise to witness to every soul. I’ll serve You, Father. I’ll worship You, Lord. I’ll raise these children in the fear of the Lord. My poor husband doesn’t know it, very few people know it, but Uncle George knew it. But we don’t any of us know it; my father down on the farm doesn’t know it; my mother, dear God, don’t know it. But oh, God, I know it now!” I tell you, my heart was full; my joy had begun. I knew the way to Heaven, and I was going to tell it to doctors and grocers and insurance men and different ones that came to my door—every soul that I could. “Father, I’ll testify of your love and your power.” He just said to me, “I’ll take you back by your promise, Bessie. I’ll take you back.” And He took me again just like He did the first time with that right arm, and He touched me in back of my elbows, and He brought me back the same way He brought me down. I saw myself come through my own dining room, and I seen about eight or ten people. My sister, Ida, was sitting at the head of the bed, and there laid that cold body. It was as cold as ice, but my spirit just crawled back in. I remember I started at my feet, and I just came all the way up. They said, “You’re so cold, you’re so cold, you’re so cold.” I said, “Yes, but I won’t be for long, because I’ve got a heart that is warm. I’ve been with Jesus.” They said, “Where have you been?” I said, “In the pits of Hell, but I’ll never go back. I’ve found the Christ. I’ve found God. I found Uncle George’s God and I’m going to serve Him.” And that’s exactly what I did. For the next six nights I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking of the vision and what I saw, and I kept thinking, “I’ll go to the people. They don’t know.” I’d look at another, and they didn’t know. I’d look at another, and they didn’t know, they didn’t know. I wondered, how am I going to get this to the people, so they will know that God has a place prepared for His own? I saw it; I saw it with my own eyes. You know, I went back and told my family, and they didn’t want to hear it. When I tell a lot of people today, they don’t want to hear it. They don’t understand because it’s not preached. You must be born again. And friend, I’m going to tell you, there is no other way under Heaven that you can get to Heaven, unless you confess you are a sinner, and you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your sacrifice for sin, and you can do that right now. You have no promise that you will live five minutes from now, so please pray so that you can be born again right now.