Well, to get away from church teaching, I’ll go into a personal testimony. Firstly I’ve often said my father appeared in my room the night
he died, but it wasn’t an NDE, as he was firmly dead. He started with an apology, we argued and conversed, and finally disappeared with one almighty scream.
To make sense of the following story, you need to realise the person who came to actually tell me he’d died was my mother’s brother, my uncle. He turned up four days later as the body wasn’t found for four days. As it turned out, he also died later that year, as he had undiagnosed liver cancer at the time, as did my mother’s boyfriend (a triple whammy for her - her recently divorced husband, boyfriend and only brother all died in the same year).
Now there’s a certain frustration with this episode, as he said certain things that were rather foreboding, and I’d like to know the truth.
About four years ago I was arguing with atheists on a Google groups site, and as usual getting nowhere. So I prayed I’d meet someone who’d had an NDE. I may even have prayed that it would be linked to my own father’s death somehow, but don’t quote me on that, as I’m not sure if I did or not.
Two or three days after praying about it, I was sitting in a Maxi Taxi (10 seater with wheelchair access - I drove part time a couple of days a week), in a Brisbane suburb called Boondall. If I remember rightly I was actually in Roghan Road when the job appeared on the screen with “Brighton … M”. This meant a Maxi was required in the nearby beachside suburb of Brighton.
I procrastinated as it was a few kilometres, and I assumed someone else would get the job. But when it stayed there, I put in for it, and got it. So off I went. The address was a place called Eventide, which is a state government nursing complex, right on the waterfront.
When I got there, I finally found a single bloke, about my age, who hadn’t wanted a Maxi, and had just about been ready to give up when I arrived. He wasn’t in good health, and wanted to go to the Royal Brisbane Hospital for an appointment, which was a fair drive.
We got to talking, and we’d only been going a couple of minutes when he remarked, “I’m one of those rare people”. I asked him what he was talking about, and he said he’d been technically dead for ten minutes, ie. he’d had an NDE, so I’d been given the answer to my prayer (this time anyway). Apparenlty he “died” during major stomach surgery. I think it was removed, which meant he now had to eat regular very small amounts.
He said despite being clinically dead, he could hear everything that was being said eg. “He’s gone. Well, we’d better go and tell the registrar”. But then apparently his body shook, someone noticed, and he heard, “Hang on, he just shook! We’d better try again!”
So they did and he recovered. However he also remembers the bright light, and a sense of being told to go back. He also remarked, “You should have seen the looks on the doctors’ faces when they came to visit!”
But what got me was that he went to the same high school, and was in the same class (at least part of the time) as the eldest son of the same uncle who turned up to tell me he’d died. I thought this was stretching coincidence somewhat.
Let’s assume it was an answer to prayer, and I think it was. The odds of just picking up a person who’d had an NDE was low to begin with, let alone someone with a familial connection with my own father’s death and apparitoin, in a city of about 2 million people.
Now I had free will where I drove that day, the customers who booked the cab all had free will, he had free will as to when to book a cab, the radio operator had free will, other cabs had free will, yet somehow a glitch on the booking system reserved the job for me so that a “Maxi” was required. Had it been advertised as an ordinary cab job, I would never even have seen it.
How does God organise things like this
despite our free wil? That’s why I don’t write off predestination. And I do believe that NDE’s occur, although I wouldn’t accept every story uncritically. I also believe that with modern medicaine, we’re seeing more of them as more people are brought back from the brink.
