January 20, 2025 • 37 mins
Mike McKinsey didn't realize that his appendix had burst when he started feeling gut pain. Three days later he finally went to the Emergency Room and was diagnosed, needing an emergency appendectomy.
Before he felt like he was even under anesthesia, his near death experience began. Looking to his right he saw Jesus in the room with his hand outstretched. Taking His hand, Mike was led to the top of a mountain where he looked down and viewed a heavenly city.
During his NDE, Mike's senses were heightened to where he could feel every blade of grass under his feet. He saw a beautiful sunset that was lit by "the glory of the Lord." His childhood prayer was answered.
As doctors shocked him back to life, Mike's NDE ended abruptly.
In this episode about Mike's near death experience, we learn how it felt to be with Jesus, and what He looks like.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
(00:08):
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
(00:29):
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody.
And a warm welcome to our special guest, Mike McKenzie.
How are you, Mike?
Hey, I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me, Eric.
You are very welcome.
(00:51):
You're from the South, in the United States, from Georgia.
Do you love it down there?
I do when it's not so cold.
I moved down here so that I could stay warm.
I'm originally from California.
And right now it's about 25 degrees outside, so we're expecting some snow.
So when the weather gets cold like this, I'm not a fan.
(01:13):
This California guy likes his sunshine.
Well, okay.
I think you just said you moved there to be warmer.
I thought California was warm.
It was actually a little too warm for me.
We lived in the Central Valley.
And my gosh, we'd have a month where it would just be over 100 degrees and it was just unbearable.
(01:35):
So tell us a little bit about you, and then we're going to jump into your NDE.
Just to give our listeners an idea, you're going to love this.
This is not only a very unusual kind of death, but a really cool and beautiful story during
the NDE.
Just tell us who's Mike.
So I was born and raised in California.
(01:57):
We moved to Tennessee about seven years ago, I think.
And I was in the construction trade for many years.
And right now I am retired.
We do some real estate investing now.
We do, we find houses and flip them.
And we've done a couple of those out here.
(02:19):
And then we found some property.
We were looking for another flip, another investor house.
And we came across this property out in North Georgia that had 12 acres, had a couple of
houses on it.
The houses were just trashed.
But we moved out here, fixed them up.
And now we're living country life.
And we love it.
(02:40):
We've got a big meadow out front and there's deer running around in turkeys.
And it's great.
Well, I assume that house flipping is a lot more difficult than it looks like on the
TV shows.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not a 30 minute episode.
It's, you know, they always have fun with demo day.
And that just cracks me up because they'll say it's demo day.
(03:02):
I'm like demo, it's more like demo month or demo quarter.
I mean, a lot of times these places that we get, we're demoing them for, you know, weeks
and weeks and weeks.
I've done a little remodeling.
The demoing is not that fun.
No.
It's just like fun at first to swing a sledgehammer through a cabinet or a wall, but it's dirty,
(03:24):
messy, hard work.
And there's a lot of trips to the dumpster.
Yeah.
All right.
Enough about that stuff.
We're here to talk about near death experiences.
Let's go back a few years, about 20 years.
You had a very unusual health scare.
Tell us what happened.
Yeah.
So I was at my son's wedding.
(03:44):
We were like, we were away from home about five hours away from home.
We got there four days before the wedding was going to happen.
We thought we'd take a little vacation.
It was the last week in the summer before the kids went back to school, the younger
kids and my oldest son was getting married.
It was in Ventura, California.
And so we drive down there.
We checked into the park and my younger kids were into baseball.
(04:06):
So they said, hey, dad, we're going to go play some baseball at the park, you know,
next door to the hotel.
Why don't you come over and play with us?
So I did.
We got checked in.
Went over there.
We played baseball for a couple hours and, you know, here I'm swinging a bat.
I wasn't into, I did a lot of coaching, but it really wasn't into swinging baseball bats
like that.
(04:26):
You know, I'm trying to beat these young kids and give it my best.
And so my trunk was twisting quite a bit.
It was just an unusual thing for me.
So I started feeling sick that night, thinking I was getting the flu.
Thursday night, I started getting, I was getting worse.
And of course, Friday night, we had the rehearsal dinner and I was feeling pretty miserable
(04:47):
by then.
I was running a fever.
I took a trip down to the quick stop middle of the night, got some Tylenol and, you know,
thinking that that would cut the pain.
I was having some pain in my stomach, but nothing crazy, but my fever was getting pretty
bad.
So the day of the wedding, the night before, I didn't sleep at all.
(05:09):
I mean, not, not one bit.
So the day of the wedding here, I'm, I'm walking in, I'm, I'm looking pale by now.
I'm really tired, but is my son's big day.
It was, it was the first wedding for our family, you know, his first kid to get married.
And so I just, I just thought, you know, I'm getting the flu.
I don't want to be a distraction.
(05:29):
I just tried to play it off as no big deal.
But then at the end of the night, the bride comes up to us and she says, Hey, we're going
to go to my parents' house.
They lived in Ventura too.
They had a beautiful house overlook the ocean.
And she says, we're going to take the presence out there and open up presence.
And you know, some of the guests are going to come and keep the party going kind of thing.
(05:50):
And I said, guys, I got to get checked out.
You know, I need, I need to go find out what's going on.
Cause here I am.
This is no, no sleep for 24 hours.
But now I'm sweating and I'm feeling miserable, but I still thought it had the flu.
And so my son was in the medical field.
He told me what hospital to go to.
So we go there into the ER and of course, you know, Saturday night it's packed.
(06:13):
So I sat down and I'm just like, like, I don't know if I was falling asleep, waiting for
a, you know, to be seen or in and out of consciousness because I was miserable by then.
The nurse calls me back in and she kind of poked around and she asked, you know, what,
what's going on.
And they took a little blood test, send it off to the lab.
(06:33):
She says, I think it's your appendix.
And I kind of laughed.
I said, nah, it's the, you know, I just got the flu.
Just give me something.
I'll go home here.
You know, there's me, stupid me telling her the nurse, what's going on with me.
Right.
She says, no, I think it's your appendix.
And she starts poking around in my abdomen.
She asked me, does any of that hurt?
And I said, no, it doesn't, you know, which was unusual.
(06:56):
Cause usually, you know, if you have appendicitis, you're, you have that point tenderness that
they always say, you know, you poke on a certain spot and it hurts.
So she takes out a little mallet that they check your reflexes with on your knee and
she pokes it.
She taps the bottom of my foot and she says, does that, does that hurt?
(07:16):
And again, I laughed and I go, no, she tapped the other foot.
I can't remember if it was right or left, but the, when she tapped the other side of
my foot, I shot pain right into my abdomen and I screamed and she says, okay, that's
your appendix.
I'm going to call a surgeon.
You know, so now my wife and I are thinking, you know, what are we going to do with the
kids?
(07:36):
The kids got to go back to school on Tuesday and this is Saturday night.
She says, if, if it's not ruptured, you'll be here for a day or two.
And if it has ruptured, you'll be here for three or four.
So we're thinking, okay, well, we'll send the kids home with grandparents, you know,
worked out all the, all the logistics and surgeon comes in about probably a half an hour later.
(07:56):
He looks at the blood test and he goes, yeah, I think it's your, it's definitely your appendix.
I, I think it's probably ruptured.
He says, did you do any, like physical activity, any unusual physical activity?
And I thought back to playing baseball and I said, yeah, played baseball Wednesday.
And I mean, he looked at me like Wednesday and this is Saturday night, you know, that's
(08:20):
like three days, three and a half days.
And he goes, well, we need to get you into surgery pretty quick.
So they start an IV.
They, you know, wheel me down the hall as soon as they throw up in the doors to the
surgical room, they start pushing or pulling me over to the table.
I'm kind of squatting over there.
You know, it's freezing cold in there and that surgical table felt like it was like tiny,
(08:43):
like I was going to fall off.
And so I'm trying to find out what to do with my hands and I put my hands on my chest and
I looked to my right and there's Jesus standing there.
In a white robe and he holds out his hand and like now everything else just kind of
disappeared.
(09:04):
It was like, it was like the surgeon walking in to do my surgery, but it's Jesus and he
holds out his hand and he says, I want to answer your prayer.
And I thought, what is going on here?
You know, my, what my prayer, you know, I just, it, it, I was so confused, didn't make sense.
And I'm looking around the rest of the room trying to figure out where is everybody.
(09:27):
Just all kind of turned white and fuzzy.
And so, you know, all these thoughts are going through my head like, like am I dead?
Like what, what the heck's going on?
And what prayer?
It didn't make sense to me.
So I take his hand as soon as I touch his hand, we're instantly standing on what looks
like to be a mountain or a hill.
(09:49):
I look below me.
There's, there's beautiful green grass.
Just perfectly manicured grass.
My senses were heightened to the point where I could count every single blade of grass
touching the bottom of my feet.
It was the weirdest thing.
Like I knew exactly how many blades of grass there were, but everything else around me
was white in front of me.
(10:10):
Everything was just super white.
And so I'm trying to adjust my eyes and see because I can see the grass, but I can't see
anything else.
I'm still holding Jesus hand.
I, I noticed that I'm wearing the hospital gown, the same thing that I was wearing in
surgery and I'm looking at my bare feet.
I'm looking at his bare feet, you know, standing on this grass, but everything else is white.
(10:31):
And I'm kind of like rubbing my eyes like, like, why can't I see everything super white?
And then off to like my right, just a little bit to my right, there's this round light.
It looks like it's basketball shape, like size, you know, but it's way off in the
distance and it's wider than the rest of the white.
(10:52):
It's almost like shimmering.
It's like a, it's like a light bulb, but it's just glowing and it's just, it's, it's amazing
looking.
And then all of a sudden out of this, out of this round light, it starts shooting these
things that look like fluorescent light tubes, but they're about two feet long.
They're a little bit fatter than a fluorescent tube.
(11:15):
They're all smooth and they're kind of shimmering the same color as that, as that round light
and they're coming, they start coming by me and I can see them going through the white
and it almost looks like fog, like super thick fog.
And I can see them one after another, after another, pretty soon they start coming a little
bit faster.
One of them starts coming at my head and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, well, you know, should
(11:40):
I dock?
And, you know, and while I'm thinking of that, it just hits me right here, right above my
right eye.
And as it goes through my head, it makes this like light buzzing sound and it warmed me
all the way down to my toes.
Like instantly, I just felt warmth.
I look back at, at the basketball size light, the shimmering glowing light and now it's
(12:05):
like somebody took a curtain, like a giant curtain on a stage and pulls it from my right
to my left.
And so this white is now replaced by a beautiful scenery.
And I look below me, now I can see the grass, below the grass down, down this hill.
I'm, I realize I'm standing on a mountain, pretty good sized mountain.
(12:26):
There are like these beautiful little flowers.
They look like sweet peas, but they're pastel colors.
There's purples and blues and greens and, and, you know, some oranges and pinks.
They're just beautiful.
And they're kind of doing this.
They're kind of like, like they're, they're being blown by a soft wind, but there's no
(12:49):
wind.
I don't, I don't feel any wind.
So it was almost like they were dancing at the bottom of this, of the flower hill.
There's a great big city.
But the only thing I can see of the city because this curtain of fog that was pulled in front
of me is now laying on top of the city.
So I see these, these buildings, the roofs are sticking through the fog, but all I can
(13:14):
see is the roofs.
So right about in the middle, there's this great big gold.
It looks like a capital dome and it's huge.
It's like, it's just huge way bigger than the rest of the buildings.
There are some other capital looking buildings.
They're smaller.
Some of them are gold.
Some of them are white.
And then there's also these, these, what looks like to be church steeples and most of them
(13:38):
are white and they're sticking through this, this, this cloud layer or this fog layer,
something I thought that was a little unusual.
I kind of looked into it later.
But the top of those, you know, at the top of the church steeples that we see around
here and I'm in the, I'm in the South.
So they're everywhere.
There's a lot of old churches.
(13:58):
They all have crosses at the top, but there were no crosses on the top of these, which
I thought was kind of strange.
And then on the other side of the city, there's another great big mountain and it's covered
in these pine trees, but the pine trees are perfect, perfect shape.
They're a beautiful green.
They're like, they have these like dainty pine needles on them.
(14:21):
They're, they're sort of moving a little bit, but in that, not, not as much as the flowers
are in front of me.
And then above that there's, it looks like the most beautiful sunset that I've ever seen,
but there was no sun.
So above the trees, there's like reds and oranges and yellows.
And then above that it's kind of blends into these greenish blue and then there's very
(14:46):
bright blue at the top.
And there's a few, it's some kind of like white clouds, but not billowy clouds or just
sort of, I don't know.
I think down here we call them cirrus clouds.
They're sort of long and skinny and wispy looking.
Now these light beams that were coming at me are now going across the city and one of
(15:11):
them hits the tip of a tree and it's like it had a diamond on the tip because when that
light beam hit that diamond on the tip, it burst into hundreds of tiny little, little
white light beams.
It was like fireworks, but they were all white, just this brilliant shimmering white.
(15:32):
And pretty soon there's more of them hitting the tips of the trees and there's just like
pops of these, this white going everywhere.
It's like there's a, there's a bright white fireworks show.
I mean, it's not, there's no popping or sound.
It's just like boom, boom, boom, you know, all over and the sky is just filled with this
light everywhere.
(15:53):
I look back at the source where they were coming from that basketball shaped sized light, that
shimmering light that's sending these beams and Jesus says to me, it's the glory of the
Lord.
And when he said that, I was just overcome with emotion.
(16:13):
My knees got weak and I fell to the ground on my knees and the instant my knees hit the
ground, they shocked me and they brought me back.
So now instead of this beautiful scene, I see a doctor leaning over me wearing a mask
and he says, do you know your name?
And I answered him, Mike, but I answered in my head.
(16:37):
I was, I didn't verbalize.
And so he looks at me again, he's looking pretty concerned.
He says, do you know your name?
And I thought, oh, I didn't, I didn't move my mouth to talk.
So my mouth was so dry.
I was finally able to get the word out, Mike.
And he says, good, do you know where you are?
(16:58):
And now I'm thinking back, I think, man, I think I was just in heaven.
Where's Jesus?
You know, but I'm thinking, okay, we went through the wedding.
I'm in Ventura.
So I was able to say Ventura.
And he says, okay, good.
And he turns around and now I realize there's other people in the room.
There's other people wearing some scrubs and blue scrubs.
(17:18):
And he says, he's back.
And he says, let's get him up to intensive care.
So they wheeled me back up.
After that, I spent four days in intensive care and I developed an abscess.
So we had some complications to deal with, but I spent 12 days in the hospital and I
got out.
Now, the next morning, one other thing I want to tell you before you have a question for
(17:41):
me here.
The next morning, the surgeon comes in and he says, hey, I heard we had a little episode.
How are you feeling?
And I said, I'm okay.
I'm pretty weak.
You know, I couldn't lift my hands off my chest as I'm laying there.
And he says, yours was the worst case I've ever seen.
And I said, what?
You're kidding.
And he says, no.
(18:02):
And he gets done looking at the stitches and all that.
And he says, I'll be back in a little bit.
And he turns around, he comes back in and he says, oh, yeah, what I said there, it wasn't
exactly true.
Yours was the worst case I've ever seen where the patient lived.
And I said, well, thank you for saving my life.
And he says, you're welcome.
And then he said, God's not done with you yet.
(18:23):
That's pretty amazing.
Wow.
I'm not sure where to start.
That's amazing.
Thank you for sharing that.
Okay.
Let's start kind of from the beginning.
So when you looked over and saw Jesus, it sounds like you had just gotten on the operating
table and it doesn't matter if the timeline is perfect here.
(18:46):
I'm just curious, if you have a feeling, was it the beginning of surgery or end of surgery
where your heart actually stopped and they brought you back?
That part I've never been clear on.
I think that he showed up before anything happened, before surgery started.
I've had people say, well, maybe it was the drugs.
(19:09):
They didn't even give me any drugs.
I don't remember them putting the mask on and counting down.
Before surgery, they usually do that.
I just remembered there was Jesus.
And it had to have been at least two hours because he showed up before surgery and then
when they brought me back, I was done.
(19:30):
I mean, they didn't wheel me back into surgery or say, hey, we need to stitch you up.
It was done.
And that doctor had gone home.
The surgeon had gone home.
I did ask about that later.
You know, I said, where's the guy's name was Dr. Owaziek.
I said, where's Dr. I?
And they said, he's gone.
He's home.
So you felt like you were with Jesus for a long time?
(19:54):
It was a long time, but to me, it just seemed like 15 minutes.
It didn't seem like that long at all.
How did you know it was him?
You know, I get asked that a lot.
There's a couple of ways I could answer that.
The easiest way is, I always say, when the Savior of the world stands in front of you,
you'll know.
(20:14):
I knew it was Jesus.
But the way He said, I want to answer your prayer, you know, people have said, well, maybe
it was your spirit leader or, you know, everybody has their different theories about it.
But to me, Jesus answers prayers.
And one of the things that I found out later that I found out, but I realized later was
(20:37):
the prayer that He was answering was, as a kid, I used to pray that I could see heaven.
Because my grandfather passed away when I was very young.
And at his funeral, they were saying, you know, grandpa's in heaven.
He's no more pain.
He's, you know, there's no tears.
You know, he's in a better place.
And as a kid, I remember thinking, man, that sounds like a great place.
I want to see this place.
(20:58):
So, you know, I'm starting to learn about God and I started praying.
Can you show me heaven?
I mean, I don't really want to die, but can you show me heaven?
I think it's so cool that He took your hand and was holding your hand.
Yeah.
I've interviewed hundreds of people and some that have seen Jesus.
And back to my first question, I don't think anybody's ever told me that they were introduced
(21:23):
to Him.
They just automatically knew who it was, which makes sense to me.
It didn't need to be verbal communication of that.
Yeah.
So, the white, round, shimmering light thing that you said is the glory of God.
Can you explain that any further?
I actually think what He was talking about was, and this is, you know, this is something
(21:48):
else that, okay, as a kid, I used to pray that I could see the glory of God because
we used to watch this show, the Charlie Brown Christmas special.
And I remember, you know, back in those days, you couldn't stream it.
You know, you had to gather around with the family at seven o'clock on Tuesday night.
And I remember laying there on the floor one time watching that show and Linus comes out
(22:12):
holding his blanket and everything's quiet.
And he says, you know, he tells that story from Luke and he says the glory of the Lord
showed all around them.
And he used to think, wow, God made heaven and earth and everything that I know and
everything that I interact with, what must his glory look like?
That had to be pretty special.
(22:33):
And I used to ask him, hey, can you show me heaven? and then later as a kid, I'd say,
can you show me the glory of the Lord?
So one of the things that I found out later, I was reading the Bible a couple years after
my NDE and in Revelation, it says heaven doesn't need to be lit by the sun because it's lit
by the glory of the Lord.
And I was like, yeah, I saw it.
(22:56):
So I think it was all that, you know, all those lights.
Yeah, that's something I was going to ask next because you talked about this beautiful
sunset without a sun.
Tell me a little bit more about the colors of the sunset and then how does that tie in
with the glory of the Lord?
The colors are so hard to describe.
(23:17):
One of the ways I try to describe it, and it kind of makes sense to me, maybe it will,
to some people, maybe it won't.
But if you take a picture with your iPhone and you go to the, you know, you want to adjust
it and make it look really cool.
You got all these filters and different things.
If you take the saturation and you move it all the way over till it's like 100 percent
(23:39):
and everything gets kind of blurry, but the colors get really vivid.
That's what the sky looked like without getting weird looking.
It was just, you know, I try to describe it like that, but it's still not doing it justice.
It was just amazing.
Yeah.
What were you feeling this whole time?
I had this warm and fuzzy feeling, right?
(24:01):
Like I was just, I felt like I was comfortable.
I was loved.
I felt like I was home.
That's something that as a human being walking around, I've never, I've always thought there's
more to this life than what we're living.
I've never felt like this was my home.
I feel like walking around like an outer body experience or out of body experience.
(24:24):
It's just, I've never thought that this was all there was.
So that's the way I felt.
I would just say just comforted and loved.
Yeah.
Tell me more about the city.
You talked about the tops of buildings standing up above the fog.
Did you see any more than that?
That was all I could see.
You know, it was, it was all covered.
(24:45):
And you know, it's funny because something inside of me just knew that that was just the,
that was the New York city of wherever I was.
That was a bustling city.
I knew that there was just, you know, hundreds of thousands of people down there and, you
know, maybe cars.
Who knows?
I, I, I don't know.
But I think in looking back on it, I think that when I used to ask to, to see heaven,
(25:09):
I didn't ask to see loved ones, past loved ones.
So Jesus said, okay, I'm going to honor your prayer.
You want to see heaven?
I'm going to show you heaven, but I'm not going to show you all of it.
That's for the, for future Mike.
That's for the day that I bring you here and, and you don't go back.
Yeah.
That's for just death experience, Mike.
(25:30):
Exactly.
Not near death, but permanent death.
What did Jesus look like?
He, um, he looked very different than what I was shown as a kid.
You know, I was a, I'm, I'm a white kid growing up in America.
So I was shown as, as a child.
I was born in 1959.
So I was shown a blonde haired blue eyed Jesus with white skin, you know, like me.
(25:57):
So I never really thought about what Jesus looked like.
I just was never that into, I guess, religion.
I've been a Christian my, my whole life, but I wouldn't say that I was like a really religious
person.
So I didn't do studies and, you know, that kind of thing.
But he, his skin was a lot darker than what I thought.
He looked like an Arab man.
(26:18):
He had beautiful, bluish green eyes.
Like I'd say more green than blue, but like dark blue.
I've always said when his eyes looked into my eyes, he looked into my soul.
He had a short beard.
He had wavy brown hair, dark brown hair, um, about shoulder length, a little bit past
(26:38):
shoulders and wearing a white robe.
What does that feel like when he looks into your soul?
Is there any guilt?
No.
It was just, it was all love.
You know, it was just, see, that's another thing that's really hard to explain.
The feeling of love from Jesus was, was overwhelming.
(27:00):
I mean, this, you know, to be honest, I've held it together pretty good on this interview,
but usually I cry because it was so emotional.
You know, it was just so overwhelmingly emotional.
If I, if I think about it, I'll start crying again.
My wife came in to see me the next day after surgery and I, I said, I got to tell you what
(27:20):
happened and she said, what?
And I started to tell her and I start crying.
I couldn't even tell her.
This is my wife.
Same thing happened the next day.
It took three days before I was able to tell her without crying.
And then I was, you know, fighting back tears, telling her what happened.
And she was just amazed.
And then of course I get home after, after 12 days in the hospital and my best friend
(27:45):
comes over and he sits down and I'd lost 35 pounds in 12 days because of the diet that
they had me on.
I couldn't eat anything.
I was on liquid diet for about a week.
He says, you know, my wife told him that something happened and he wanted to hear about it.
He comes over and I start crying and he's sitting next to me.
He's a touchy feely guy.
(28:06):
He leans over and he's holding my hand and he goes, come on, you can tell me, you can
tell me.
And we're both crying.
It was just that feeling from Jesus was really overwhelming.
How did your wife react?
Did she believe it?
She believed me.
She cried.
There were some things going on in her life that kept her at a distance, I think from,
(28:28):
that's probably a whole other story.
But yeah, she believed me.
I've told some people, I've told some pastors of mine about that, the experience.
And I could just tell the look in their eye that they didn't believe me.
One pastor just said, wow, that's amazing.
(28:49):
Everybody has a different empathy level.
So I don't know, maybe he, maybe he believed me, maybe he didn't.
It's tough because I can't change the experience.
So no, you're just saying what happened to you.
Yeah, exactly.
And you're not trying to infer anything by it or say people should believe this or that
because of it.
(29:09):
I can tell.
They're just sincere.
It's just very matter of fact.
Here's what happened.
The whole thing with clergy fascinates me a little bit because I've heard a lot of people
tell me either what you just did, like, I don't know if they believe me or not.
Some have actually been quite negative and said, oh, the devil was showing you something
to deceive you in some way earlier today.
(29:33):
And I don't know if this episode is going to come out before or after yours, but earlier
today I was interviewing a priest about his NDE and I asked him a question about this.
And he said, he said his, his leaders, the bishops that he talked to were really good
about it and believed him.
(29:53):
And he actually apologized on behalf of all clergy who have made the mistake of not believing
their parishioners who have had an experience like this.
Just because they don't understand it well enough.
And he's, and he kind of put a call out to, you know, other clergy of, of whatever faith
(30:15):
doesn't matter.
If this is something that you don't understand, get a little more education.
These people aren't crazy.
This isn't something of the devil.
But above all, we're supposed to support each other, right?
And that starts with, Mike, when you look me in the eye and you're this sincere and
you tell me what happened, I believe you.
(30:37):
You know, I've shared this story quite a bit.
And the thing that, that I find that a lot of Christians do is, and I've always said
this should be what, what I call an in-house debate.
Don't tear Christians down for something that, that they believe.
Don't tell them, hey, educate yourself, read your Bible.
(30:57):
What's wrong with you?
Look, this happened to me.
I believe that it was Jesus that, that took me and answered a childhood prayer, even though
it took 40 years to answer.
He still did.
He honored that prayer.
But what'll happen is a lot of times somebody will throw a Bible verse out at me and it's
taken completely out of context.
(31:18):
The one that I always hear is the Bible says no man has ever seen what God has prepared
for him, something like that.
I don't even know the verse exactly.
But it's, it's, it does, it's not even talking about a near death experience.
I mean, Paul, the disciple had what he, what most people believe is a near death experience.
You know, when Stephen was stoned to death, it says he looked up and he saw Jesus standing
(31:44):
at the right hand of the father.
He didn't say Jesus was floating.
He said Jesus was standing there.
And so when I had my NDE, I thought, wow, Stephen is describing kind of what I saw too.
It was a physical place and that was just fascinating to me.
But you know, talk on it.
Christians will throw out some Bible verse and say, I had one lady, when I first wrote
(32:06):
my book about this, this came out, I don't know, it was 12 years ago.
I think I was doing a book signing and this lady looks at me and she says, when Jesus held
his hand, did you feel the nail hole in his hand?
And I said, no.
I mean, nobody's ever asked me that.
She says, well, I just don't even believe you then.
(32:26):
And she walked away.
She was mad at me because it and I thought, okay, what's the deal with them?
Well then I come, I do a little digging and I find out that they probably didn't put the
nail in his hand.
They put it in his wrist.
And if you, if you dig into the Roman times, they had, it has to hold your weight.
The hand would just rip apart in the way they describe their language.
(32:51):
The hand goes up to here.
It's not just the hand.
This is what we call our hand, but in Roman times, their hand was, I think it ended right
about there.
So I thought, well, I guess that's the way it's going to be.
Some people will believe and some people won't.
I can't change that.
No, you can't.
And don't take it personally.
Speaking of people in the Bible, and I'm not here to get into a big Bible talk, but the
(33:16):
one person I want to get on this show so badly and I don't know how to do it is Lazarus.
Oh wow.
He was dead for three days.
Imagine all the things that he saw and experienced.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No kidding.
Anyway, maybe someday Lazarus, if you're listening, come on buddy.
(33:37):
How much fear of death do you have now?
I don't fear death.
I've kind of described death this way.
It's the death is like moving.
I'm not looking forward to the process, but I'm excited about the destination.
It's a great way to put it.
You know, hopefully my death will be quick and or, you know, pass when you're sleeping.
(34:01):
That's the way to go, I think.
Yeah.
I think that's a great way to put it.
All right.
We're going to wrap up, but I would love you to leave our listeners with a message of
hope or anything that maybe you've left out that you just would like to share to lift
somebody up today.
You know, one of the things that happened, I was in the hospital for 12 days and I was
(34:23):
in a beach town, Ventura's right on the beach.
And the first day I had to get up and walk, you know, walking is huge in the hospital.
They want you to walk as soon as you can, get everything working again.
So I had four different tubes coming out of me that were all hooked up to an IV stand
and one day the nurse comes in and he says, okay, let's go.
You're going to walk today.
(34:44):
This is like the second day.
And he starts walking me down the hall and there was these beautiful pictures of sunsets
and ocean scenes, you know, it was a beach town.
So it was oceans, a lot of ocean pictures.
And I just walked by there and I remember thinking, man, what have I been missing?
I had, at the time, I was a superintendent for a real estate development company and
(35:09):
it was my job to go through 30 to 35 houses every day.
I had to walk through every single house, make sure that the contractors were there,
make sure that the guys that had just left did their job, did it right.
It was a really stressful job.
And I was so stressed out and I was busy with, you know, coaching kids after work.
There was just no time.
(35:30):
It was just one thing after another after another, just super stressful life.
And I remember walking down the hall looking at those pictures and thinking, man, what
have I been missing?
I'm just racing through the graveyard.
I've got to slow down.
So if anybody, anybody listening is stressed out, take time.
(35:51):
Stop and smell the roses.
It's a stupid cliche, but you wouldn't believe how many times I'm walking through a park.
I live surrounded by a national forest here and there's a trail, there's a creek half
a mile from my house.
I walk through there and I'll stop and smell every flower.
I'll pick wild blueberries.
I take so many pictures, my iPhone is full of sunset pictures.
(36:15):
I just have to stop and just take in God's beautiful creation.
Even though it's, you know, we're living under a curse of sin, but there's still so much
beauty out there.
Just slow down.
You have made my day better.
Mike, thank you so much for being with me.
Thank you for having me, Eric.
I appreciate it.
(36:38):
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com.
If you want to share your near death experience, or if you have questions or comments about
the show, send an email to eric at roundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.
From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
(00:08):
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
(00:29):
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome, welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody.
And a warm welcome to our special guest, Mike McKenzie.
How are you, Mike?
Hey, I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me, Eric.
You are very welcome.
(00:51):
You're from the South, in the United States, from Georgia.
Do you love it down there?
I do when it's not so cold.
I moved down here so that I could stay warm.
I'm originally from California.
And right now it's about 25 degrees outside, so we're expecting some snow.
So when the weather gets cold like this, I'm not a fan.
(01:13):
This California guy likes his sunshine.
Well, okay.
I think you just said you moved there to be warmer.
I thought California was warm.
It was actually a little too warm for me.
We lived in the Central Valley.
And my gosh, we'd have a month where it would just be over 100 degrees and it was just unbearable.
(01:35):
So tell us a little bit about you, and then we're going to jump into your NDE.
Just to give our listeners an idea, you're going to love this.
This is not only a very unusual kind of death, but a really cool and beautiful story during
the NDE.
Just tell us who's Mike.
So I was born and raised in California.
(01:57):
We moved to Tennessee about seven years ago, I think.
And I was in the construction trade for many years.
And right now I am retired.
We do some real estate investing now.
We do, we find houses and flip them.
And we've done a couple of those out here.
(02:19):
And then we found some property.
We were looking for another flip, another investor house.
And we came across this property out in North Georgia that had 12 acres, had a couple of
houses on it.
The houses were just trashed.
But we moved out here, fixed them up.
And now we're living country life.
And we love it.
(02:40):
We've got a big meadow out front and there's deer running around in turkeys.
And it's great.
Well, I assume that house flipping is a lot more difficult than it looks like on the
TV shows.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's not a 30 minute episode.
It's, you know, they always have fun with demo day.
And that just cracks me up because they'll say it's demo day.
(03:02):
I'm like demo, it's more like demo month or demo quarter.
I mean, a lot of times these places that we get, we're demoing them for, you know, weeks
and weeks and weeks.
I've done a little remodeling.
The demoing is not that fun.
No.
It's just like fun at first to swing a sledgehammer through a cabinet or a wall, but it's dirty,
(03:24):
messy, hard work.
And there's a lot of trips to the dumpster.
Yeah.
All right.
Enough about that stuff.
We're here to talk about near death experiences.
Let's go back a few years, about 20 years.
You had a very unusual health scare.
Tell us what happened.
Yeah.
So I was at my son's wedding.
(03:44):
We were like, we were away from home about five hours away from home.
We got there four days before the wedding was going to happen.
We thought we'd take a little vacation.
It was the last week in the summer before the kids went back to school, the younger
kids and my oldest son was getting married.
It was in Ventura, California.
And so we drive down there.
We checked into the park and my younger kids were into baseball.
(04:06):
So they said, hey, dad, we're going to go play some baseball at the park, you know,
next door to the hotel.
Why don't you come over and play with us?
So I did.
We got checked in.
Went over there.
We played baseball for a couple hours and, you know, here I'm swinging a bat.
I wasn't into, I did a lot of coaching, but it really wasn't into swinging baseball bats
like that.
(04:26):
You know, I'm trying to beat these young kids and give it my best.
And so my trunk was twisting quite a bit.
It was just an unusual thing for me.
So I started feeling sick that night, thinking I was getting the flu.
Thursday night, I started getting, I was getting worse.
And of course, Friday night, we had the rehearsal dinner and I was feeling pretty miserable
(04:47):
by then.
I was running a fever.
I took a trip down to the quick stop middle of the night, got some Tylenol and, you know,
thinking that that would cut the pain.
I was having some pain in my stomach, but nothing crazy, but my fever was getting pretty
bad.
So the day of the wedding, the night before, I didn't sleep at all.
(05:09):
I mean, not, not one bit.
So the day of the wedding here, I'm, I'm walking in, I'm, I'm looking pale by now.
I'm really tired, but is my son's big day.
It was, it was the first wedding for our family, you know, his first kid to get married.
And so I just, I just thought, you know, I'm getting the flu.
I don't want to be a distraction.
(05:29):
I just tried to play it off as no big deal.
But then at the end of the night, the bride comes up to us and she says, Hey, we're going
to go to my parents' house.
They lived in Ventura too.
They had a beautiful house overlook the ocean.
And she says, we're going to take the presence out there and open up presence.
And you know, some of the guests are going to come and keep the party going kind of thing.
(05:50):
And I said, guys, I got to get checked out.
You know, I need, I need to go find out what's going on.
Cause here I am.
This is no, no sleep for 24 hours.
But now I'm sweating and I'm feeling miserable, but I still thought it had the flu.
And so my son was in the medical field.
He told me what hospital to go to.
So we go there into the ER and of course, you know, Saturday night it's packed.
(06:13):
So I sat down and I'm just like, like, I don't know if I was falling asleep, waiting for
a, you know, to be seen or in and out of consciousness because I was miserable by then.
The nurse calls me back in and she kind of poked around and she asked, you know, what,
what's going on.
And they took a little blood test, send it off to the lab.
(06:33):
She says, I think it's your appendix.
And I kind of laughed.
I said, nah, it's the, you know, I just got the flu.
Just give me something.
I'll go home here.
You know, there's me, stupid me telling her the nurse, what's going on with me.
Right.
She says, no, I think it's your appendix.
And she starts poking around in my abdomen.
She asked me, does any of that hurt?
And I said, no, it doesn't, you know, which was unusual.
(06:56):
Cause usually, you know, if you have appendicitis, you're, you have that point tenderness that
they always say, you know, you poke on a certain spot and it hurts.
So she takes out a little mallet that they check your reflexes with on your knee and
she pokes it.
She taps the bottom of my foot and she says, does that, does that hurt?
(07:16):
And again, I laughed and I go, no, she tapped the other foot.
I can't remember if it was right or left, but the, when she tapped the other side of
my foot, I shot pain right into my abdomen and I screamed and she says, okay, that's
your appendix.
I'm going to call a surgeon.
You know, so now my wife and I are thinking, you know, what are we going to do with the
kids?
(07:36):
The kids got to go back to school on Tuesday and this is Saturday night.
She says, if, if it's not ruptured, you'll be here for a day or two.
And if it has ruptured, you'll be here for three or four.
So we're thinking, okay, well, we'll send the kids home with grandparents, you know,
worked out all the, all the logistics and surgeon comes in about probably a half an hour later.
(07:56):
He looks at the blood test and he goes, yeah, I think it's your, it's definitely your appendix.
I, I think it's probably ruptured.
He says, did you do any, like physical activity, any unusual physical activity?
And I thought back to playing baseball and I said, yeah, played baseball Wednesday.
And I mean, he looked at me like Wednesday and this is Saturday night, you know, that's
(08:20):
like three days, three and a half days.
And he goes, well, we need to get you into surgery pretty quick.
So they start an IV.
They, you know, wheel me down the hall as soon as they throw up in the doors to the
surgical room, they start pushing or pulling me over to the table.
I'm kind of squatting over there.
You know, it's freezing cold in there and that surgical table felt like it was like tiny,
(08:43):
like I was going to fall off.
And so I'm trying to find out what to do with my hands and I put my hands on my chest and
I looked to my right and there's Jesus standing there.
In a white robe and he holds out his hand and like now everything else just kind of
disappeared.
(09:04):
It was like, it was like the surgeon walking in to do my surgery, but it's Jesus and he
holds out his hand and he says, I want to answer your prayer.
And I thought, what is going on here?
You know, my, what my prayer, you know, I just, it, it, I was so confused, didn't make sense.
And I'm looking around the rest of the room trying to figure out where is everybody.
(09:27):
Just all kind of turned white and fuzzy.
And so, you know, all these thoughts are going through my head like, like am I dead?
Like what, what the heck's going on?
And what prayer?
It didn't make sense to me.
So I take his hand as soon as I touch his hand, we're instantly standing on what looks
like to be a mountain or a hill.
(09:49):
I look below me.
There's, there's beautiful green grass.
Just perfectly manicured grass.
My senses were heightened to the point where I could count every single blade of grass
touching the bottom of my feet.
It was the weirdest thing.
Like I knew exactly how many blades of grass there were, but everything else around me
was white in front of me.
(10:10):
Everything was just super white.
And so I'm trying to adjust my eyes and see because I can see the grass, but I can't see
anything else.
I'm still holding Jesus hand.
I, I noticed that I'm wearing the hospital gown, the same thing that I was wearing in
surgery and I'm looking at my bare feet.
I'm looking at his bare feet, you know, standing on this grass, but everything else is white.
(10:31):
And I'm kind of like rubbing my eyes like, like, why can't I see everything super white?
And then off to like my right, just a little bit to my right, there's this round light.
It looks like it's basketball shape, like size, you know, but it's way off in the
distance and it's wider than the rest of the white.
(10:52):
It's almost like shimmering.
It's like a, it's like a light bulb, but it's just glowing and it's just, it's, it's amazing
looking.
And then all of a sudden out of this, out of this round light, it starts shooting these
things that look like fluorescent light tubes, but they're about two feet long.
They're a little bit fatter than a fluorescent tube.
(11:15):
They're all smooth and they're kind of shimmering the same color as that, as that round light
and they're coming, they start coming by me and I can see them going through the white
and it almost looks like fog, like super thick fog.
And I can see them one after another, after another, pretty soon they start coming a little
bit faster.
One of them starts coming at my head and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, well, you know, should
(11:40):
I dock?
And, you know, and while I'm thinking of that, it just hits me right here, right above my
right eye.
And as it goes through my head, it makes this like light buzzing sound and it warmed me
all the way down to my toes.
Like instantly, I just felt warmth.
I look back at, at the basketball size light, the shimmering glowing light and now it's
(12:05):
like somebody took a curtain, like a giant curtain on a stage and pulls it from my right
to my left.
And so this white is now replaced by a beautiful scenery.
And I look below me, now I can see the grass, below the grass down, down this hill.
I'm, I realize I'm standing on a mountain, pretty good sized mountain.
(12:26):
There are like these beautiful little flowers.
They look like sweet peas, but they're pastel colors.
There's purples and blues and greens and, and, you know, some oranges and pinks.
They're just beautiful.
And they're kind of doing this.
They're kind of like, like they're, they're being blown by a soft wind, but there's no
(12:49):
wind.
I don't, I don't feel any wind.
So it was almost like they were dancing at the bottom of this, of the flower hill.
There's a great big city.
But the only thing I can see of the city because this curtain of fog that was pulled in front
of me is now laying on top of the city.
So I see these, these buildings, the roofs are sticking through the fog, but all I can
(13:14):
see is the roofs.
So right about in the middle, there's this great big gold.
It looks like a capital dome and it's huge.
It's like, it's just huge way bigger than the rest of the buildings.
There are some other capital looking buildings.
They're smaller.
Some of them are gold.
Some of them are white.
And then there's also these, these, what looks like to be church steeples and most of them
(13:38):
are white and they're sticking through this, this, this cloud layer or this fog layer,
something I thought that was a little unusual.
I kind of looked into it later.
But the top of those, you know, at the top of the church steeples that we see around
here and I'm in the, I'm in the South.
So they're everywhere.
There's a lot of old churches.
(13:58):
They all have crosses at the top, but there were no crosses on the top of these, which
I thought was kind of strange.
And then on the other side of the city, there's another great big mountain and it's covered
in these pine trees, but the pine trees are perfect, perfect shape.
They're a beautiful green.
They're like, they have these like dainty pine needles on them.
(14:21):
They're, they're sort of moving a little bit, but in that, not, not as much as the flowers
are in front of me.
And then above that there's, it looks like the most beautiful sunset that I've ever seen,
but there was no sun.
So above the trees, there's like reds and oranges and yellows.
And then above that it's kind of blends into these greenish blue and then there's very
(14:46):
bright blue at the top.
And there's a few, it's some kind of like white clouds, but not billowy clouds or just
sort of, I don't know.
I think down here we call them cirrus clouds.
They're sort of long and skinny and wispy looking.
Now these light beams that were coming at me are now going across the city and one of
(15:11):
them hits the tip of a tree and it's like it had a diamond on the tip because when that
light beam hit that diamond on the tip, it burst into hundreds of tiny little, little
white light beams.
It was like fireworks, but they were all white, just this brilliant shimmering white.
(15:32):
And pretty soon there's more of them hitting the tips of the trees and there's just like
pops of these, this white going everywhere.
It's like there's a, there's a bright white fireworks show.
I mean, it's not, there's no popping or sound.
It's just like boom, boom, boom, you know, all over and the sky is just filled with this
light everywhere.
(15:53):
I look back at the source where they were coming from that basketball shaped sized light, that
shimmering light that's sending these beams and Jesus says to me, it's the glory of the
Lord.
And when he said that, I was just overcome with emotion.
(16:13):
My knees got weak and I fell to the ground on my knees and the instant my knees hit the
ground, they shocked me and they brought me back.
So now instead of this beautiful scene, I see a doctor leaning over me wearing a mask
and he says, do you know your name?
And I answered him, Mike, but I answered in my head.
(16:37):
I was, I didn't verbalize.
And so he looks at me again, he's looking pretty concerned.
He says, do you know your name?
And I thought, oh, I didn't, I didn't move my mouth to talk.
So my mouth was so dry.
I was finally able to get the word out, Mike.
And he says, good, do you know where you are?
(16:58):
And now I'm thinking back, I think, man, I think I was just in heaven.
Where's Jesus?
You know, but I'm thinking, okay, we went through the wedding.
I'm in Ventura.
So I was able to say Ventura.
And he says, okay, good.
And he turns around and now I realize there's other people in the room.
There's other people wearing some scrubs and blue scrubs.
(17:18):
And he says, he's back.
And he says, let's get him up to intensive care.
So they wheeled me back up.
After that, I spent four days in intensive care and I developed an abscess.
So we had some complications to deal with, but I spent 12 days in the hospital and I
got out.
Now, the next morning, one other thing I want to tell you before you have a question for
(17:41):
me here.
The next morning, the surgeon comes in and he says, hey, I heard we had a little episode.
How are you feeling?
And I said, I'm okay.
I'm pretty weak.
You know, I couldn't lift my hands off my chest as I'm laying there.
And he says, yours was the worst case I've ever seen.
And I said, what?
You're kidding.
And he says, no.
(18:02):
And he gets done looking at the stitches and all that.
And he says, I'll be back in a little bit.
And he turns around, he comes back in and he says, oh, yeah, what I said there, it wasn't
exactly true.
Yours was the worst case I've ever seen where the patient lived.
And I said, well, thank you for saving my life.
And he says, you're welcome.
And then he said, God's not done with you yet.
(18:23):
That's pretty amazing.
Wow.
I'm not sure where to start.
That's amazing.
Thank you for sharing that.
Okay.
Let's start kind of from the beginning.
So when you looked over and saw Jesus, it sounds like you had just gotten on the operating
table and it doesn't matter if the timeline is perfect here.
(18:46):
I'm just curious, if you have a feeling, was it the beginning of surgery or end of surgery
where your heart actually stopped and they brought you back?
That part I've never been clear on.
I think that he showed up before anything happened, before surgery started.
I've had people say, well, maybe it was the drugs.
(19:09):
They didn't even give me any drugs.
I don't remember them putting the mask on and counting down.
Before surgery, they usually do that.
I just remembered there was Jesus.
And it had to have been at least two hours because he showed up before surgery and then
when they brought me back, I was done.
(19:30):
I mean, they didn't wheel me back into surgery or say, hey, we need to stitch you up.
It was done.
And that doctor had gone home.
The surgeon had gone home.
I did ask about that later.
You know, I said, where's the guy's name was Dr. Owaziek.
I said, where's Dr. I?
And they said, he's gone.
He's home.
So you felt like you were with Jesus for a long time?
(19:54):
It was a long time, but to me, it just seemed like 15 minutes.
It didn't seem like that long at all.
How did you know it was him?
You know, I get asked that a lot.
There's a couple of ways I could answer that.
The easiest way is, I always say, when the Savior of the world stands in front of you,
you'll know.
(20:14):
I knew it was Jesus.
But the way He said, I want to answer your prayer, you know, people have said, well, maybe
it was your spirit leader or, you know, everybody has their different theories about it.
But to me, Jesus answers prayers.
And one of the things that I found out later that I found out, but I realized later was
(20:37):
the prayer that He was answering was, as a kid, I used to pray that I could see heaven.
Because my grandfather passed away when I was very young.
And at his funeral, they were saying, you know, grandpa's in heaven.
He's no more pain.
He's, you know, there's no tears.
You know, he's in a better place.
And as a kid, I remember thinking, man, that sounds like a great place.
I want to see this place.
(20:58):
So, you know, I'm starting to learn about God and I started praying.
Can you show me heaven?
I mean, I don't really want to die, but can you show me heaven?
I think it's so cool that He took your hand and was holding your hand.
Yeah.
I've interviewed hundreds of people and some that have seen Jesus.
And back to my first question, I don't think anybody's ever told me that they were introduced
(21:23):
to Him.
They just automatically knew who it was, which makes sense to me.
It didn't need to be verbal communication of that.
Yeah.
So, the white, round, shimmering light thing that you said is the glory of God.
Can you explain that any further?
I actually think what He was talking about was, and this is, you know, this is something
(21:48):
else that, okay, as a kid, I used to pray that I could see the glory of God because
we used to watch this show, the Charlie Brown Christmas special.
And I remember, you know, back in those days, you couldn't stream it.
You know, you had to gather around with the family at seven o'clock on Tuesday night.
And I remember laying there on the floor one time watching that show and Linus comes out
(22:12):
holding his blanket and everything's quiet.
And he says, you know, he tells that story from Luke and he says the glory of the Lord
showed all around them.
And he used to think, wow, God made heaven and earth and everything that I know and
everything that I interact with, what must his glory look like?
That had to be pretty special.
(22:33):
And I used to ask him, hey, can you show me heaven? and then later as a kid, I'd say,
can you show me the glory of the Lord?
So one of the things that I found out later, I was reading the Bible a couple years after
my NDE and in Revelation, it says heaven doesn't need to be lit by the sun because it's lit
by the glory of the Lord.
And I was like, yeah, I saw it.
(22:56):
So I think it was all that, you know, all those lights.
Yeah, that's something I was going to ask next because you talked about this beautiful
sunset without a sun.
Tell me a little bit more about the colors of the sunset and then how does that tie in
with the glory of the Lord?
The colors are so hard to describe.
(23:17):
One of the ways I try to describe it, and it kind of makes sense to me, maybe it will,
to some people, maybe it won't.
But if you take a picture with your iPhone and you go to the, you know, you want to adjust
it and make it look really cool.
You got all these filters and different things.
If you take the saturation and you move it all the way over till it's like 100 percent
(23:39):
and everything gets kind of blurry, but the colors get really vivid.
That's what the sky looked like without getting weird looking.
It was just, you know, I try to describe it like that, but it's still not doing it justice.
It was just amazing.
Yeah.
What were you feeling this whole time?
I had this warm and fuzzy feeling, right?
(24:01):
Like I was just, I felt like I was comfortable.
I was loved.
I felt like I was home.
That's something that as a human being walking around, I've never, I've always thought there's
more to this life than what we're living.
I've never felt like this was my home.
I feel like walking around like an outer body experience or out of body experience.
(24:24):
It's just, I've never thought that this was all there was.
So that's the way I felt.
I would just say just comforted and loved.
Yeah.
Tell me more about the city.
You talked about the tops of buildings standing up above the fog.
Did you see any more than that?
That was all I could see.
You know, it was, it was all covered.
(24:45):
And you know, it's funny because something inside of me just knew that that was just the,
that was the New York city of wherever I was.
That was a bustling city.
I knew that there was just, you know, hundreds of thousands of people down there and, you
know, maybe cars.
Who knows?
I, I, I don't know.
But I think in looking back on it, I think that when I used to ask to, to see heaven,
(25:09):
I didn't ask to see loved ones, past loved ones.
So Jesus said, okay, I'm going to honor your prayer.
You want to see heaven?
I'm going to show you heaven, but I'm not going to show you all of it.
That's for the, for future Mike.
That's for the day that I bring you here and, and you don't go back.
Yeah.
That's for just death experience, Mike.
(25:30):
Exactly.
Not near death, but permanent death.
What did Jesus look like?
He, um, he looked very different than what I was shown as a kid.
You know, I was a, I'm, I'm a white kid growing up in America.
So I was shown as, as a child.
I was born in 1959.
So I was shown a blonde haired blue eyed Jesus with white skin, you know, like me.
(25:57):
So I never really thought about what Jesus looked like.
I just was never that into, I guess, religion.
I've been a Christian my, my whole life, but I wouldn't say that I was like a really religious
person.
So I didn't do studies and, you know, that kind of thing.
But he, his skin was a lot darker than what I thought.
He looked like an Arab man.
(26:18):
He had beautiful, bluish green eyes.
Like I'd say more green than blue, but like dark blue.
I've always said when his eyes looked into my eyes, he looked into my soul.
He had a short beard.
He had wavy brown hair, dark brown hair, um, about shoulder length, a little bit past
(26:38):
shoulders and wearing a white robe.
What does that feel like when he looks into your soul?
Is there any guilt?
No.
It was just, it was all love.
You know, it was just, see, that's another thing that's really hard to explain.
The feeling of love from Jesus was, was overwhelming.
(27:00):
I mean, this, you know, to be honest, I've held it together pretty good on this interview,
but usually I cry because it was so emotional.
You know, it was just so overwhelmingly emotional.
If I, if I think about it, I'll start crying again.
My wife came in to see me the next day after surgery and I, I said, I got to tell you what
(27:20):
happened and she said, what?
And I started to tell her and I start crying.
I couldn't even tell her.
This is my wife.
Same thing happened the next day.
It took three days before I was able to tell her without crying.
And then I was, you know, fighting back tears, telling her what happened.
And she was just amazed.
And then of course I get home after, after 12 days in the hospital and my best friend
(27:45):
comes over and he sits down and I'd lost 35 pounds in 12 days because of the diet that
they had me on.
I couldn't eat anything.
I was on liquid diet for about a week.
He says, you know, my wife told him that something happened and he wanted to hear about it.
He comes over and I start crying and he's sitting next to me.
He's a touchy feely guy.
(28:06):
He leans over and he's holding my hand and he goes, come on, you can tell me, you can
tell me.
And we're both crying.
It was just that feeling from Jesus was really overwhelming.
How did your wife react?
Did she believe it?
She believed me.
She cried.
There were some things going on in her life that kept her at a distance, I think from,
(28:28):
that's probably a whole other story.
But yeah, she believed me.
I've told some people, I've told some pastors of mine about that, the experience.
And I could just tell the look in their eye that they didn't believe me.
One pastor just said, wow, that's amazing.
(28:49):
Everybody has a different empathy level.
So I don't know, maybe he, maybe he believed me, maybe he didn't.
It's tough because I can't change the experience.
So no, you're just saying what happened to you.
Yeah, exactly.
And you're not trying to infer anything by it or say people should believe this or that
because of it.
(29:09):
I can tell.
They're just sincere.
It's just very matter of fact.
Here's what happened.
The whole thing with clergy fascinates me a little bit because I've heard a lot of people
tell me either what you just did, like, I don't know if they believe me or not.
Some have actually been quite negative and said, oh, the devil was showing you something
to deceive you in some way earlier today.
(29:33):
And I don't know if this episode is going to come out before or after yours, but earlier
today I was interviewing a priest about his NDE and I asked him a question about this.
And he said, he said his, his leaders, the bishops that he talked to were really good
about it and believed him.
(29:53):
And he actually apologized on behalf of all clergy who have made the mistake of not believing
their parishioners who have had an experience like this.
Just because they don't understand it well enough.
And he's, and he kind of put a call out to, you know, other clergy of, of whatever faith
(30:15):
doesn't matter.
If this is something that you don't understand, get a little more education.
These people aren't crazy.
This isn't something of the devil.
But above all, we're supposed to support each other, right?
And that starts with, Mike, when you look me in the eye and you're this sincere and
you tell me what happened, I believe you.
(30:37):
You know, I've shared this story quite a bit.
And the thing that, that I find that a lot of Christians do is, and I've always said
this should be what, what I call an in-house debate.
Don't tear Christians down for something that, that they believe.
Don't tell them, hey, educate yourself, read your Bible.
(30:57):
What's wrong with you?
Look, this happened to me.
I believe that it was Jesus that, that took me and answered a childhood prayer, even though
it took 40 years to answer.
He still did.
He honored that prayer.
But what'll happen is a lot of times somebody will throw a Bible verse out at me and it's
taken completely out of context.
(31:18):
The one that I always hear is the Bible says no man has ever seen what God has prepared
for him, something like that.
I don't even know the verse exactly.
But it's, it's, it does, it's not even talking about a near death experience.
I mean, Paul, the disciple had what he, what most people believe is a near death experience.
You know, when Stephen was stoned to death, it says he looked up and he saw Jesus standing
(31:44):
at the right hand of the father.
He didn't say Jesus was floating.
He said Jesus was standing there.
And so when I had my NDE, I thought, wow, Stephen is describing kind of what I saw too.
It was a physical place and that was just fascinating to me.
But you know, talk on it.
Christians will throw out some Bible verse and say, I had one lady, when I first wrote
(32:06):
my book about this, this came out, I don't know, it was 12 years ago.
I think I was doing a book signing and this lady looks at me and she says, when Jesus held
his hand, did you feel the nail hole in his hand?
And I said, no.
I mean, nobody's ever asked me that.
She says, well, I just don't even believe you then.
(32:26):
And she walked away.
She was mad at me because it and I thought, okay, what's the deal with them?
Well then I come, I do a little digging and I find out that they probably didn't put the
nail in his hand.
They put it in his wrist.
And if you, if you dig into the Roman times, they had, it has to hold your weight.
The hand would just rip apart in the way they describe their language.
(32:51):
The hand goes up to here.
It's not just the hand.
This is what we call our hand, but in Roman times, their hand was, I think it ended right
about there.
So I thought, well, I guess that's the way it's going to be.
Some people will believe and some people won't.
I can't change that.
No, you can't.
And don't take it personally.
Speaking of people in the Bible, and I'm not here to get into a big Bible talk, but the
(33:16):
one person I want to get on this show so badly and I don't know how to do it is Lazarus.
Oh wow.
He was dead for three days.
Imagine all the things that he saw and experienced.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No kidding.
Anyway, maybe someday Lazarus, if you're listening, come on buddy.
(33:37):
How much fear of death do you have now?
I don't fear death.
I've kind of described death this way.
It's the death is like moving.
I'm not looking forward to the process, but I'm excited about the destination.
It's a great way to put it.
You know, hopefully my death will be quick and or, you know, pass when you're sleeping.
(34:01):
That's the way to go, I think.
Yeah.
I think that's a great way to put it.
All right.
We're going to wrap up, but I would love you to leave our listeners with a message of
hope or anything that maybe you've left out that you just would like to share to lift
somebody up today.
You know, one of the things that happened, I was in the hospital for 12 days and I was
(34:23):
in a beach town, Ventura's right on the beach.
And the first day I had to get up and walk, you know, walking is huge in the hospital.
They want you to walk as soon as you can, get everything working again.
So I had four different tubes coming out of me that were all hooked up to an IV stand
and one day the nurse comes in and he says, okay, let's go.
You're going to walk today.
(34:44):
This is like the second day.
And he starts walking me down the hall and there was these beautiful pictures of sunsets
and ocean scenes, you know, it was a beach town.
So it was oceans, a lot of ocean pictures.
And I just walked by there and I remember thinking, man, what have I been missing?
I had, at the time, I was a superintendent for a real estate development company and
(35:09):
it was my job to go through 30 to 35 houses every day.
I had to walk through every single house, make sure that the contractors were there,
make sure that the guys that had just left did their job, did it right.
It was a really stressful job.
And I was so stressed out and I was busy with, you know, coaching kids after work.
There was just no time.
(35:30):
It was just one thing after another after another, just super stressful life.
And I remember walking down the hall looking at those pictures and thinking, man, what
have I been missing?
I'm just racing through the graveyard.
I've got to slow down.
So if anybody, anybody listening is stressed out, take time.
(35:51):
Stop and smell the roses.
It's a stupid cliche, but you wouldn't believe how many times I'm walking through a park.
I live surrounded by a national forest here and there's a trail, there's a creek half
a mile from my house.
I walk through there and I'll stop and smell every flower.
I'll pick wild blueberries.
I take so many pictures, my iPhone is full of sunset pictures.
(36:15):
I just have to stop and just take in God's beautiful creation.
Even though it's, you know, we're living under a curse of sin, but there's still so much
beauty out there.
Just slow down.
You have made my day better.
Mike, thank you so much for being with me.
Thank you for having me, Eric.
I appreciate it.
(36:38):
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com.
If you want to share your near death experience, or if you have questions or comments about
the show, send an email to eric at roundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.
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