A couple of years ago I sat with someone who had almost died.
Well, perhaps that is a bit dramatic. She had a minor heart-attack after having angina for years, but when she was sitting in out patient she started to slip out of consciousness and they had to rush her to the trauma ward.
Turns out, her heart just decided to stop working for a little while. The doctors said she really only made it because she was already in the Emergency.
While she was having the attack, she was lying there on the table and she felt herself slip out of this world into a place that is really calm.
Quiet.
Peaceful.
Everything just slipped away and she felt this deep presence surrounding her.
Comforting her.
Cradling her.
She felt as though someone were rocking her like you rock a little baby. Someone who wanted her to know that everything would be alright.
As she was telling me this story, tears started to fill her eyes as she said, “To tell you the truth, I was sad to come back. But now everything has changed. I used to worry about things all the time. Things that happened in the family so long ago. Things I have carried for a long time. They’re all gone. I feel free.”
I am not really sure how to take the story, the experience that she has obviously been given. It really can only be explained as a gift to her from God. Something that will ease her mind, and perhaps the mind of her family when she does die.
This experience has profoundly shaped her, and she is telling everyone about it.
The assurance she now has is somewhat infectious. A blessing that she can really rest in. It doesn’t really matter what happens to her now, she said. After the experience she had, she knows she is cared for.
A story like this is hard to take. It goes so far beyond our own experiences, so far out of the ordinary that it is hard to imagine, or even believe.
But maybe it is not odd.
Maybe this is the kind of experience we were designed to have and we have been deprived of it for so long because of our own reluctance to acknowledge them that we have forgotten what it feels like to truly be loved and cared for.
Maybe our experience, where we don’t feel the love of the creator, is the odd one.
After sitting with her, I think I experienced a little slice of heaven.