by Mary C Neal
Like most people, before experiencing my own, I would have imagined a life review to merely be a prelude to this final judgment by God. Despite my goals and efforts to lead a moral, ethical, and “good” life, I would have anticipated that my own life review would be filled primarily with regret, disappointment, and guilt. Despite grasping for the hope presented in the life review of George Bailey in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, most of us feel undeserving of grace, Christians included.
But I learned that a “life review” isn’t that sort of experience at all, and most people who have been through an NDE report the same thing. In fact, it is often the most enlightening event a person ever experiences. Typically, a “being of light,” who is often identified as Christ, God, “Source,” or “pure love,” presents the dying person with a review of their entire life. Regardless of whether this review is perceived as a panorama, a movie, or in small segments, it is always infused with understanding and compassion. And quite often, invaluable learning.
For example, some people are given the opportunity to “relive” experiences from a variety of perspectives. This often teaches the dying person about himself or others, yields an understanding of why he, she, or others are the way they are, and exposes the motives of everyone involved. Just as it did for the movie character George Bailey, reliving experiences also reveals the impact of the dying person’s words and actions on others, and it often leads them to a greater sense of purpose. People usually come away from a life review with a powerful sense of how they are indelibly intertwined with the universe and connected to all other people and living creatures, and they hold fast to the unshakable belief that love is the most important aspect of life.
I’ve noticed it doesn’t matter how young the believer is, or how long and earnestly he or she has strived to follow God. We all suffer from comparison to some ideal. When we look at others, we realize that we don’t pray enough, we don’t volunteer enough, we don’t give enough, we don’t love enough, and the list goes on. We feel that no matter how hard we try, our contributions on this earth pale in comparison with so many others who have done so much more. I get it. We forget that we each make little and large important contributions to the whole every day. We forget, too, what we might have experienced in moments of deepest surrender to God. In any case, it’s only human to worry that when our life is laid bare before God, our faults, weaknesses, and darkest secrets will render us unworthy of his forgiveness and reward.
But let me tell you what happened to me.
I was gently leaning into Jesus, embraced and comforted by his presence. Scenes from my life became visible in front of us, as though projected onto a large three-dimensional multisensory screen. Everything else that may have surrounded us faded into irrelevancy. Rather than anxiety or apprehension, I felt nothing but love. When I looked into Jesus’s face, I saw only kindness in endless supply. In His arms, I felt like a newborn baby into whom He poured all of His hope, concern, love, and His very being. His embrace was gentle, complete, and familiar. As my life unspooled before me, I felt deeply loved, and I knew somehow that His love was not just for me, but for all people.
The scenes moved quickly past, from right to left in sequential order. It was like swiping through the chain at the bottom of “all photos” on an iPhone. This forward motion intermittently slowed when Jesus reached his hand forward to pluck a scene from the strand of my life. Rather than just seeing the scene in front of me, I would immediately reexperience it with absolute understanding, and from every vantage point.
If this sounds impossible to you, remember the paradigm shift I laid out at the top of this chapter: Time seemed to no longer exist. I was alive in the eternal present. And everything existed in and because of the love of God. In other words, I tasted the eternity of goodness and grace that awaits us all.
As I looked at each aspect of a scene or event, I was able to instantaneously see the life story of the people involved. I perfectly understood their emotional backgrounds, motivations, and feelings. I understood their side of the story, what they brought to the situation, and how we were each changed by it.
Things got specific. The rage and confusion I felt as a child when I was witness to physical violence was replaced by compassion as I saw how the hurts, expectations, and hopes of the people involved had brought them to that moment. Their personal history influenced their behavior and reactions, and I saw how that moment would transform the future. The decades-old anger I felt toward a neighbor boy who had physically molested me as a young girl dissolved into empathy and forgiveness. Again and again, seeing a person’s backstory—their experiences, circumstances, sorrows—changed my understanding of them and my emotional response became one of grace.
My life review actually reset my understanding of grace, and I think it can do the same for you.
Grace is often thought of somewhat dismissively as just an empty and unattainable cliché. As we listen to the lies of our broken past, we assume that grace is reserved only for others. But God’s New Testament grace is relational and is the manifestation of His promised love for each of us. He looks beyond our flaws and failing, accepting us just as we are. Where we see only brokenness, He sees restoration and healing.
God’s grace is His love in action—continual forgiveness, encouragement, mercy, compassion, and kindness that is borne out of undeserved love.
That is what I learned about the grace that God offers. And it doesn’t end with us. The grace we accept is also the grace that we are able to offer others, regardless of what the circumstances might be.
THE FIRST LESSON THAT HEAVEN REVEALS
Circumstances make sense when seen through heaven’s lens, and the abundant grace we receive from God is the same grace we can freely offer others.
As you can imagine, an experience like that changes you. I’m not the same person I used to be. I experience much more grace toward others, even in minor situations. When I feel cheated or taken advantage of, even when an erratic driver cuts me off in traffic, I am able to feel a gentleness toward the perpetrator that I didn’t before. When someone treats me rudely or disrespectfully, I remind myself that the person is, at that moment, the sum total of all his or her burdens and joys, successes, and failures. Certainly, I feel all the strong emotions that come with being human, but now I’m better able to choose how to respond.
It shows up in large and small ways.
Once, I suddenly left the wedding of a friend’s son as his parents were walking down the aisle. Several days later I overheard someone make an unkind remark about how rude my behavior had been. Here’s the context: I had thought it important to attend the wedding because the groom had been a classmate and friend of my son Willie. It was a happy occasion, and everyone was beaming. But it was the first wedding I had attended since my son’s death, and when I saw the groom’s smiling parents, I was unexpectedly overcome with a deep sense of loss at never being able to share this sort of event with Willie. I left quickly to avoid distracting others with my tears.
But others couldn’t know that, right? In that instance at least, I was able to look at the unkind response differently. With the big picture in mind. With kindness instead of a grudge.
RIPPLE EFFECTS
As Jesus “swiped” through the scenes of my life, I witnessed how certain actions rippled outward from the original incident, like concentric circles, to affect others. It is easy to understand how our words and actions impact our immediate circle of family and friends, but it is usually impossible to appreciate their distant influence. During the review of my life, Jesus repeatedly allowed me to see both the immediate and distant effects of an event. I was able to appreciate and understand how each event spread through time and space, initiating a cascade of other events from which something of beauty and worth always emerged.
I did not feel grateful or happy when my parents realized their marriage was unworkable and divorced. The foundation of my world crumbled. I was left feeling wounded, betrayed, abandoned,
angry, and ashamed. And when my prayers for their reconciliation went unanswered, I felt abandoned by God, too, and discarded my childhood notions of a loving heavenly Father. At the time, and for many years after, nothing would have convinced me that something good would, or even could, come of such a rotten situation.
Yet one of God’s most astonishing gifts is His ability to use time to heal and redeem: to make something beautiful later out of something that appears ugly now. In my case, the man who eventually became my stepfather became one of my life’s greatest and most cherished influences. Through his example and guidance, he taught me about humility, unconditional love, patience, steadfastness, and compassion. Now, despite the pain I felt at the time, I see the dissolution of my parents’ marriage differently. If the breakup hadn’t happened, George would never have come into my life.
Does God really work all things together for our good? During my life review, as I witnessed beauty emerging from every event, my faith in God’s promise shifted from a somewhat vague theological hope into complete trust. I understood that He genuinely does make everything beautiful in His time.
I don’t say this lightly, and I will explore it more later. You or those you know and love could be facing unimaginably difficult and painful obstacles today. No matter how charmed life can seem, that day will come for most of us. I hope the experiences in my life review will bring encouragement and confidence to you.
Events that seem horrible and unjust do indeed ripple outward and touch people in positive ways—in ways that we would never imagine from our earthly perspective, but will be perfectly evident when we see them from heaven.
The secret, in the meanwhile, is to allow ourselves to be transformed by trust. As I’ll show you in a later chapter, consciously choosing to trust God’s promises opens the door to fully experiencing the depth of God’s love, grace, and His very presence in the world. Even in times of struggle and heartache, we can expectantly wait for the beauty that will surely come.
The change in my perspective, and the powerful feeling of being so deeply loved by God, was still fresh before my eyes as I began to feel the force of the flowing water pulling my body over the front deck of my boat. As I felt Jesus slowly release me, he told me to remember what I had been shown.
My life review had come to a close, but its impact would ripple through my life in countless ways.
Chapter 3
WE ARE BOTH PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL BEINGS
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague.
Who shall say where the one ends and the other begins?”
—EDGAR ALLAN POE
Every description of a near-death experience includes a moment when there is a separation of spirit from body. You might have heard folks say this can’t happen, that body and spirit can’t be separated, that when your body is dead, it’s done. Turn out the lights, the party’s over.
And yet my own experience resoundingly tells me otherwise.
I used to think of myself as a physical being capable of spiritual experiences, like feeling loved or feeling moved by “soulful” experiences. What I discovered when I stopped being a “physical being” was that my capacity for experiencing everything around me—including and especially the profound love of God for me—radically expanded.
Actually, I have never felt more alive than when I left my body far behind.
There is no doubt that we are both physical and spiritual beings. When we look more deeply at spiritual events commonly surrounding a person’s death, we realize there’s a rich and reliable treasury of stories of other kinds of out-of-body experiences—deathbed visions and visitations, for example, and a sudden awareness that as much as we identify with our bodies, we are more than our bodies. That’s what this chapter is about.
Don’t you think it’s a wonderful paradox, and a gift from a loving God, that just as people arrive at the threshold between life and death, heaven seems to break through all around? Old ways of organizing reality come up short. God seems more tangibly present, and more insistent on showing us that his loving plans for us are so much grander than what we had supposed.
The following poem captures the richness and mystery that greets souls in that moment of departure and arrival. “What is dying?” he wrote. “I am standing on the seashore. A ship sails to the morning breeze and starts for the ocean. She is an object and I stand watching her until she fades from the horizon and someone at my side says, ‘She is gone!’ Gone where? Gone from my sight, that is all. Her diminished size and loss of sight is in me, not in her. And just at the moment when someone at my side says, ‘She is gone!’ there are others who are watching her coming, gladly shouting, ‘Here she comes!’—and that is dying.”
AS THE SOUL IS DEPARTING
When I left my body underwater, I felt like my spirit was slowly peeling itself away, sort of like taking off a heavy wet shirt. The river current was pulling my physical self downstream, and the brilliance of the sun was pulling my spiritual self upward. From my spiritual self, I could see my body going over the front deck of my boat. I didn’t try to stop this separation and don’t think I could have anyway. I still felt like myself and was acutely aware of my circumstances.
In fact, I repeatedly did mental self-assessment exams to see how I was feeling. When I both felt and saw my knees bending back upon themselves, I took a moment to ponder the question of consciousness. Was I screaming, or feeling pain? No. Was I trying to breathe or swim? No. At least it didn’t feel like it. What I did feel was my spiritual self being lifted out of the river. As I was pulled higher and higher, I felt light and free.
I often joke that I am a lizard at heart—I come alive and feel a deep sense of happiness and contentment when I feel bright sunshine warming my skin. This is exactly how I felt as my spiritual self left my boat. The warmth of the bright light, which I perceived as a beautiful orb set in a deep blue sky, seemed to envelop me and give me life. In fact, I had the impression that this sun was the source of all life and of all love. It was beckoning to me, and I willingly rose to meet it.
The distinction between body and soul is noted as far back as the book of Genesis. As Jacob was traveling with his family and servants, Jacob’s beloved wife, Rachel, went into a very difficult labor. The son who was born survived, but Rachel died in childbirth. We read, “And as her soul was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni” (Genesis 35:18; English Standard Version).
As her soul was departing. That description resonates deeply with me, for that is exactly what I experienced. The “pop” or “plop” I felt when my spiritual self finally shook free of my physical body was like the sound water makes after a stone drops in.
In Ecclesiastes, we find another description of the spirit as a very separate entity from the body. But this reference compares the mysteries of the spirit arriving in the body with the mysteries of understanding how God works. Solomon declares, “As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything” (11:5; Revised Standard Edition).
What a fascinating picture of the distinctiveness of body and spirit! Yes, there is a moment they come together but before that moment, they are separate, and how it all happens we simply don’t know.
In the next chapter in Ecclesiastes 12:7, the writer describes the process of death in terms of spirit departing the body: “And the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” Later in the Bible, Paul explains that we leave our earthly bodies behind when we go to heaven, exchanging them for eternal bodies made for us by God (1 Corinthians 15). And in 2 Corinthians 5, he describes the body as a “tent,” and notes that when we are at home in our body, we are away from the Lord, but when we are away from the body, we are at home with the Lord.
In all this arriving and departing, did you notice what endures? Only the spirit is eternal. “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience,”
wrote the French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. “We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”1 Nothing in his writings suggests he had an NDE, yet I wholeheartedly agree with his written sentiment.
My own experience tells me that we are mostly spirit encased in an “earth suit.” Yes, as a surgeon, I marvel at the wonders of the human body as God created it. But I am even more amazed at the spirit residing within that body. Our spirits—much more than the tissues, nerves, and bones that make up our bodies—are the very essence of who we are.
Maybe that’s why so many people—from the very religious to the not religious at all—see and hear the miraculous when they are close to the very moment of leaving this earth.
DEATHBED VISIONS
Health-care providers and family members are also frequent witnesses to what are called “deathbed visions,” in which the dying person often seems to be preparing for his or her departure and may look or reach toward something, unseen by others, before their physical death. Perhaps they are seeing or grasping the hand of someone who has come to guide them across the divide. These next two stories inspire me every time I read them:
My dad was at home receiving hospice care, in and out of a coma for three days before he passed away. On the second day, he came out of his coma, but seemed to be unaware of his surroundings. He kept looking up at the corner of the room and reaching his arms out as if trying to hug someone. He put his hands together as if praying. He then straightened the oxygen tubing under his chin and fumbled around with his fingers from the top of his breastbone to the end of it.
He died the next day, and when the hospice nurse came over, we asked her about it. She said she had seen this before and it was not unusual. She said he was getting dressed to leave. Straightening the oxygen tube under his chin represented straightening out his tie, and the finger movements along his breastbone was buttoning up his shirt. It made complete sense because that is exactly what it looked like he was doing.
