D. G. Duncan

It was three o’clock in the morning on January 3, 2022, when I was awakened by enormous pain that filled my entire upper body. The afternoon before, I had experienced a minor incident of pain, which I thought was COVID-related based on the experiences of friends and neighbors, which I generally dismissed because the pain was not severe and it passed within a few minutes. However, the early morning pain incident was completely unbearable to me. I was actually in the throes of a major heart attack and soon came close to losing my life—a life full of years of business success in private industry that had culminated with years of success in the public arena. I was looking forward to the retirement that I had planned for, which was to start in the year 2023.

So, I awakened my wife, Marlene, and within a few minutes, we were off to the hospital, still thinking that I had COVID. Within an hour of arriving at the hospital, I was on an operating table having serious heart surgery. I remember thinking, as I lay on the operating table, that I was losing my life; it was all over! Fortunately, the doctors started the emergency stint heart surgery process quickly and the great emergency room staff and doctors at my hospital saved my life that early Monday morning.

During the stint surgery, I was extremely blessed to have a young man named Eli as my primary operation nurse, who stood by me on my left. I was fully awake throughout the entire stint surgery and Eli helped me to deal with the pain and comforted me with his words of encouragement. Interestingly, on my right side, I could only see the stint surgeon and all of his surgical equipment from my head to my feet. However, I was clearly aware that someone was holding my right hand, which created within me an enormous feeling of calm that countered most of the stress that I was feeling. I could not actually see this person, but I assumed that the one holding my right hand was my wife, who I thought was with me as I was taken into the operating room.

After the stint surgery, when I was reunited with my wife, I began to thank her for helping me so much with the stress, but Marlene looked at me with a look of great surprise as she told me that she had never been in the operating room. Later that same day, my terrific operating nurse, Eli, came to check on me to see how I was recovering, and during our conversation, I asked him, "Who was the nurse that held my right hand through the surgery?" Eli also looked surprised by my question and stated, "No one was holding your right hand during the stint surgery; in fact, your right hand and arm were completely secured as the stint surgery entry point began at your lower right arm."

Frankly, I then realized the truth. Someone was indeed holding my right hand, but the someone was not of this world. I will forever remember looking at Eli and my wife and stating the obvious: "the Creator of all things had protected me once again by blessing me with his grace and mercy.' I will also forever recall the look on Eli's face when I looked at him and again stated the obvious: "I think an angel was holding my hand!" Eli then just grinned and said, "Sounds right to me."

Three months later, I had triple bypass heart surgery to correct years of very bad eating habits, and this series of events became a huge wake-up call for me, no pun intended, and it ultimately changed much of my life and my wife’s life as well. I realized that I was "in the throes of eternity," meaning that my life is not just temporal, but rather it is also eternal. My life will go forward into eternity; therefore, I absolutely should not take it for granted. I need to make my life count in every way that I can.

My wife, kids, and grandkids were awesome during this time in my life, which made me appreciate my life and my family even more. As a result of this close call, I re-evaluated my life and made many important changes that my doctors prescribed. I lost 60 pounds, changed my diet completely, and one of my major goals for the future soon surfaced: to write a fiction novel series that included some of my life experiences set within a fictional story. A story that would reach well into the future, a future that pitted strong forces of good against ominous forces of great evil.

Many of my personal life experiences can be described as like riding a very scary roller coaster, full of several over-a-cliff falls into bottomless pits and an equal amount of terrifically high rocket up the side of the mountain climbs. This description also certainly applies to my spiritual life. Through the years, I have gone from hating God immensely to loving God unconditionally. There have been many times when I thought that God was some old man with a long white beard sitting in heaven just waiting to hit me and others with a giant baseball bat!

Fortunately for me, I have also found that God created our unbelievably beautiful world, along with everything on or in our world and the enormous universe that surrounds us all, which I now find absolutely incredible. Additionally, through the years, I have also learned that what God creates, He also loves without measure.

The shock of all this heart attack drama ultimately prompted me to write a story that I had outlined years earlier. This story had been imagined in my mind through the years, but I had never found the time to make it come to life; however, now I had the time and, more importantly, the impetus to do the work of bringing the story to life. As a result, In The Throes of Eternity, a new fiction story, was born. This new fiction story plays out in a continuing series of books, primarily because the story has many twists and turns based on the many events described in several Bible prophecy references given in the Old Testament and the New Testament. The total number of books in the series has not yet been determined; however, the second book of the series is entitled Gideon Team of Resistance. The Gideon Team of Resistance will learn very quickly that being In The Throes of Eternity puts the entire team in the middle of a horrendous catastrophe of enormous dimensions, full of extreme danger, death, intrigue, mystery, and planetary destruction.

Furthermore, this story is a fictional account of how the future might look; however, the basis of this story will remain Biblical, as much as possible. Through the years, I have been a student of Bible prophecy and I have studied many of the various end-time interpretations proffered by several excellent Bible teachers and prophecy experts. My stated goal is to be as literal as possible in how I interpret Bible prophecy in this continuing story. The time frame of the story starts in 2001 and reaches several years into the twenty-first century, which includes the seven-year time frame known in scripture as the Tribulation Period.

During this seven-year period of time, vast populations of the Earth will be killed and oppressed beyond any known measure, while enormous portions and characteristics of the Earth will be destroyed beyond known comprehension. The Gideon Team of Resistance is a small group of believers, aided by God’s miraculous power and a team of supernatural beings devoted to God. The Gideon Team of Resistance will subvert, extinguish, and overwhelm many of the plans and goals of the Evil Trinity, Satan and his two devotees, the Antichrist, and the False Prophet.

This is a classic story of everything that is good pitted against everything that is evil. It is a story of making difficult decisions that affect one’s life and other people’s lives in positive or destructive ways. It is a story of belief versus unbelief, absolute truth versus absolute lies, traveling down a narrow road to life everlasting, or traveling down a wide-open road that leads to utter destruction. In The Throes Of Eternity is a story of friends who find themselves in an unbelievable life-and-death struggle against evil that goes well into eternity, and book two of the story brings God’s team to the battle in a great stand against the wiles of the enemies of God.

So today, I am a retired business executive who is married with six grown children and eight grandchildren. and I now spend my days as a writer and publisher of excellent fiction, and my promise is “More to Come." Look for the second book of the In The Throes Of Eternity series to be available in the near future!