by Mary C Neal
As Bill and I made our journey back to the United States, and for a couple of weeks afterward, I inexplicably experienced no physical pain. This was despite having suffered multiple broken bones and torn ligaments in and about my knees. No pain whatsoever. On a ten-point scale, zero.
Later I wondered if my recollections were inaccurate, but such was not the case. I thoroughly reviewed all my medical records, confirming that I had not received any sort of medication that could have created this sense of painlessness or well-being. I also received nothing that would have been psychotropic, with the ability to alter my mental state or cause hallucinations.
Which is important because of what I will tell you next.
GRACE HAS A FACE, AND A NAME
While I was in the hospital care units in Jackson, I had two more out-of-body experiences. In each, I returned to heaven.
One experience was brief, but it allowed me, once again, to feel that overwhelming sense of being totally and unreservedly loved by an awesome and supernatural God.
The second was longer and more involved. I sat on the ground at one end of a long field. The field was filled with wild grasses gently swaying in a soft breeze. The entire area was bathed in the beautiful, golden glow of a late-afternoon sun. My arms rested comfortably on top of my knees. The ground beneath felt firm. The world around me glimmered with…what? Exhilaration! Yes, that’s what seemed to fill creation.
As with my earlier experiences, these struck me as being more real than real. Colors were more intense than those found on Earth. Smells and sounds effortlessly filled my consciousness, and God’s pure love infused everything. The edges of the field expanded into the universe, with no apparent beginning or end. I could see people joyfully twirling and playing at the far end of the field, although I could not tell if they were children or adults.
Yet one person, who was sitting on the rock next to me, was utterly, inarguably known to me.
He was Jesus.
I have been asked how I knew it was Jesus with whom I was having a conversation in this sun-drenched field. Some people have assumed that I just imagined it because I wanted it to be Jesus. Others have tried to convince me that the one I took to be a person with a name was really just a collection of energy—the Source of all love.
But I had no doubt it was Jesus and didn’t need to ask his name. Asking would be like seeing my husband in the grocery store and, before starting a conversation, asking, “Are you Bill?” Absurd. I knew it was Jesus in the same way that I knew everything else in my experience—with a pure, deep, and absolute understanding. I didn’t just wish it were Jesus, hope it was Jesus, or think it was. I knew it was Jesus.
Of course, I have also often been asked what Jesus looked like. My answer is both simple and complex. He looked like endless kindness and compassion. Period. I realize that kindness and compassion are not words we use to describe visual attributes, but that is truly what He “looked” like to me in those moments. Other words just wouldn’t communicate what I saw. He seemed to intimately know both the pain and joy of this world, its beauty and its ugliness. He absorbed all of it and covered it with His love.
As for the color of His eyes, skin, and hair, I would say that they encompassed the essence of all colors. I know—not helpful if you’re trying to narrow things down to a particular hue. Yet, when you look around at the world, maybe it makes sense. If twenty people were put in a room and examined, no two people would have exactly the same eye, skin, or hair colors. We are all reflections of God. (In the Bible, Jesus told his followers, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”) The closest I am able to get when describing this is to go back to my description of the multitude of colors I saw and experienced when I traveled the path just after my death. Just as I cannot precisely describe, in isolation, any single color along that path, I cannot settle on any one single visual description of Jesus’s hair, eyes, skin, or other attributes. Human language, at least for me, isn’t up to the task.
While we talked, I asked Jesus a lot of questions, although I’m unable to recall many of them now. In reply, I felt that I was receiving a complete understanding of the divine order of the universe and our interconnectedness. Everything struck me as logical, interwoven, and magnificent.
What I’ll never forget was that, during the whole conversation, Jesus was endlessly patient, gentle, and mesmerizing. He seemed light of spirit, with a sense of humor.
I could not take my attention off of Him. And I didn’t want to. I never wanted to be anywhere else except in his presence.
TREMBLING IN THE PRESENCE
When I wrote my first book, I referred to this presence rather vaguely, I’ll admit. There, I called Him an “angel, messenger, Christ, or teacher.” But why didn’t I share the true identity of the man next to me? I did know who He was, and without a doubt.
Thinking about it in the years since, I’ve realized that part of me wanted to keep this most private aspect of my experience just for myself. For some reason, I just didn’t want to share everything, fearing that revealing it would make it less special. I have since discovered that this is a common concern for others who have had a deeply emotional or spiritual experience.
But something else held me back. Truthfully, I wasn’t ready to confess what I knew to be true because I knew there was nothing I had ever done to earn the right to have a conversation with Jesus.
Of course, I can never earn the right to speak with Jesus, nor can I ever be “good enough” to bask in His love for me. But, oh how I wanted to! I wanted to deserve it.
If you’re like me, receiving something wonderful that you know you didn’t earn can be hard to swallow. It certainly runs counter to our risk-and-reward, crime-and-punishment culture. If we succeed at work, we expect to receive the accolades, and hopefully the bonus. That’s only fair, right? If our children turn out well, we’re pretty sure it’s because of our good parenting. If we believe the right things, and live a “good” life, we’re pretty sure our prayers will get answered the way we want.
A mean reverse logic also lurks in our hearts and minds. When things don’t turn out well, we feel overlooked or punished by God. An inner voice cries out, But I’ve tried to live a good life! Why did things turn out this way?
Or we strongly object on someone else’s behalf: What did my kindhearted friend do to deserve cancer?
Something’s wrong with this picture. God does not play favorites, and none of us has earned what we receive—neither the perceived blessings nor the perceived troubles. It was Job, the Bible’s poster child for suffering and unfair treatment, who said, “[God] shows no partiality to princes, and does not favor the rich over the poor, for they are all the work of his hands” (34:19).
Still, there’s a ledger keeper in all of us. For some of us, the ledger only tracks the “good stuff.” For others, it fixates on a long list of bad things, which we then hold over our own heads. Either way, the arithmetic is just as broken.
Thankfully, Jesus came to show another way. You and I don’t have to “earn” an intimate moment with God. I didn’t have to “deserve” a seat next to Jesus in that beautiful field. And I’m not required to earn his favor in order to spend an eternity enjoying God’s love.
I know that now.
FREEDOM IN FORGIVENESS
It is truly good news that neither you nor I need to earn our way into God’s family or into His loving embrace. When we make poor choices or ignore God’s leading, He does not cast us away and forget about us. He continues to love us and patiently awaits our return. Regardless of who we are, where we are, or how many mistakes we have made, God will run to us when we turn toward Him. (For the picture of this that Jesus described, read his story about the prodigal son’s return in Luke 15. Read more in John 12:32 and 1 Timothy 4:10.) When our failings run deep, God’s love runs deeper.
He knows our story. He understands our heart and knows our hurts. In fact, He knew us before we were in our mother’s womb (Jeremiah 1:5). He looks beyond our out
ward appearance, seeing our beauty and promising to remove our mistakes as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). Instead of focusing on our shortcomings, God focuses on our potential. As Oscar Wilde observed, “Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.”
As we release our story to God, we can let go of our past failures (Isaiah 43:18–19), shame, guilt, anger, and disappointments. And through His forgiveness, we have the ability to live a future that is not defined by our past. With God, every new day is another blank page of our life’s book just waiting to be filled.
Recognizing our own failings and accepting God’s forgiveness of them makes it easier to show grace to those who we don’t think “deserve” forgiveness—perhaps we don’t think they have shown adequate remorse, don’t understand the pain they caused, or haven’t suffered deeply enough. We may even feel virtuous in our withholding of forgiveness, as did a woman I recently read about.
When she was asked about forgiveness during her lecture on Anne Frank, she stated that she does “not hold the Holocaust against the Germans, but that she would never forgive the Nazis for what they did.” She stated that, being Jewish, she would “never abandon her people like that.”
Many people felt a righteous anger when Nelson Mandela called for reconciliation rather than revenge after his release from twenty-seven years of imprisonment and torture.
The choice to hang on to bitterness and anger may feel virtuous but has a destructive nature. As the wise theologian Lewis Smedes said, “When we attach our feelings to the moment when we were hurt, we endow it with immortality. And we let it assault us every time it comes to mind. It travels with us, sleeps with us, hovers over us while we make love, and broods over us while we die. Our hate does not even have the decency to die when those we hate die—for it is a parasite sucking our blood, not theirs. There is only one remedy for it; forgiveness.”1
I recently read about an exercise that emphasizes this point. Fill a glass or jar with water. Pick it up and hold it in front of you, at arm’s length. Simple, right? Keep holding it straight out in front of you. Pretty soon you will feel the muscles in your arm tire, and then your arm will begin to shake with fatigue. Eventually, your arm will drop from the weight of the water-filled glass that you first thought was so light.
Refusing to forgive may seem like an insignificant burden, but its emotional weight will slowly crush us if we fail to let it go. It keeps us in bondage to our past. It gives past events the power to define us, often limiting where we go, what we do, and the space available for love.
When we choose to forgive, we choose to accept the depth of God’s love and grace for all people, acknowledging that there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. It concedes that we cannot see the bigger picture of God’s intricate tapestry of life.
THE THIRD LESSON THAT HEAVEN REVEALS
Choosing forgiveness releases our burdens and frees us to live fully and joyfully in God’s extravagant love.
And that is the incredible wonder of it all. God bathes you and me in His pure love because God is love. He rejoices over us with singing (Zephaniah 3:17). You see, whether we believe it or not, whether we live like it or not, God’s love is an unshakable reality. He covers you and me completely with mercy because His name is mercy, and His nature is Grace, and you and I and every other person who has ever lived are His beloved children. God promises that when you choose to accept His love, you will experience life more fully and more abundantly than you ever thought possible.
Too soon, Jesus gave me a gentle kiss on top of my head, our conversation ended, and I was once again beneath the covers of my bed in the hospital. I sensed that I was back to stay—that the veil between this world and the next, so recently transparent, was beginning to thicken and conceal. My spirit and body would probably remain joined until my death. And the next steps of my journey would again be on solid ground.
Chapter 5
LIFE GOES FURTHER THAN SCIENCE
“An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it.”
—MAHATMA GANDHI
In the days and weeks after I drowned, I felt like I was neither here nor there. I had one foot on Earth and one foot in heaven. Part of me was deeply disappointed to be back—heaven had been so intense and complete. By comparison, the life I returned to seemed like a faded black-and-white copy of the brilliantly colorful original.
There were physical aftereffects, too. When I had arrived in the ICU back in the States, my vision was blurred, and I found myself unable to focus on anything for more than one or two seconds. I wasn’t able to watch television, read books, or even hold a conversation. It was easier to just keep my eyes closed.
After a couple of days, I asked for a bible only to discover that I couldn’t manage reading even familiar passages. Then, just as I started to set the Bible aside in frustration, two words jumped from the page: “Rejoice always” (1 Thessalonians 5:16). Later, words from the following verses in the same chapter also became clear: “Pray without ceasing” (5:17 ESV) and “Give thanks in all circumstances, for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you” (5:18 ESV). Everything else, and all other reading material, remained blurry for several more days.
I have since wondered if my inability to focus was a little bit of brain injury from my being without oxygen for so long. But that certainly wouldn’t explain why my vision was selectively clear. With no logical or physiologic explanation for how this could happen, I took it as yet another in a long sequence of miracles.
As you’d expect, I spent a lot of time during my recovery trying to figure things out.
Given what I already knew about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR), I first wondered how I could possibly have survived. The generally held belief that CPR works well is most likely the result of popular television shows, which depict a 75 percent success rate. Despite becoming a routine part of medical care since its introduction in 1960, I knew the outcomes in real life are significantly different, with only a 2 percent likelihood of survival for people who collapse on the street and receive CPR before arrival at a hospital,1, 2, 3—and that number doesn’t even include people who were pronounced dead on the scene and, therefore, never taken to the hospital. The statistical likelihood of survival becomes zero after eight minutes of no treatment, or twelve minutes if CPR is included.
Survival after thirty minutes, which is how long my resuscitators believe I was without oxygen before CPR was initiated, is out of the question.
As I’ve described for you, we were in a remote area, nowhere near advanced medical care, and there were no mitigating factors. Some say I must have been trapped within an air pocket, and since I had been a “scientific-minded skeptic” about spiritual encounters, this was one of my own initial assumptions. I even considered whether my helmet could have created a small pocket of air by holding my head off the deck of my boat.
Before I lost consciousness underwater, however, I did multiple self-assessment examinations and considered that very question. After the drowning occurred, I became simultaneously aware of what was happening to my spiritual self and to my physical self. Even while being held by Christ, a part of my brain, or consciousness, was able to objectively assess what was happening. This part of my consciousness, while astounded at what was unfolding, never lost my analytical nature and continually questioned the reality of what was going on. I intermittently questioned how I felt, if I was still aware of my circumstances, if I could feel my boat and the water, if I was breathing or making any other movements, if I could hear or physically feel anything, and if I was afraid. I was curious about my fear, as I had always thought drowning would be a particularly frightening way to die.
Each time I took a moment to focus on the sensations of my mouth, nose, and chest, I felt no air movement. At one point, I noticed the sensation of my chest forcibly expanding, but feeling only water. For a moment, I imagined myself as a fish or a fet
us, silently moving fluid in and out of my lungs. I felt like a leaf being pressed between the pages of a scrapbook as the weight of the water pressed my face against the rough plastic of my boat. My helmet, which had been ripped from my head by the force of the current, clearly did not create an air pocket.
Given the circumstances and my submersion time, my predicted survival rate was zero, and to imagine my surviving without severe brain injury would have been laughable.
I had so many questions and I knew I needed to try to figure out what actually happened to me, beginning with, Was my experience real and, if so, what did it all mean? I had almost no framework for understanding or describing any of it, but the scientist in me just couldn’t tolerate not coming up with a clear, convincing, and medically credible explanation. I wanted to know exactly what occurs in the human body during and after drowning. I wanted to know how I could survive thirty minutes without oxygen and have no noticeable consequences when, in everyday life, I can barely hold my breath for one minute. I needed to understand my out-of-body experiences.
Like most people who have an NDE, I knew one thing with utter, unwavering certainty—something profound and extraordinary and wonderful had happened. And what’s more, I felt like a different person. Life back on Earth felt different, too.
Still, I knew I would not be able to pick up the pieces and return to my everyday life until I understood everything and could explain it all, at least to myself. But I knew I needed to be methodical in my search for answers. After all the trauma I had sustained, could I trust my cognitive ability to help me reach reliable conclusions?