NDEs

Near-death-experiences, or NDEs are interesting in that people often see and hear the same type of thing.  Most report some kind of tunnel with a bright light at the end, and although skeptics claim this is physiological only, owing to an optic nerve effect, what follows is not so easily reduced to small-box paradigm.

NDEers commonly report a life review, as well as having expansive knowledge of everything they ever wanted to know.  Wonderfully, these visions usually involve meeting Jesus, whom they describe as a being of light, a person of infinite love and wisdom.  Some will also have an experience of loved ones who have gone on before.

Some conservatives who take only those spiritual experiences given in the Bible as genuine and dismiss all others as demonic neglect to understand that God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow.  If He spoke to people in the past to inspire and comfort, He does so as often as is prescribed to current sufferers.  We are not unwise to test the fruits, however.

Yet when these people return and are filled with zeal for souls and a desire to make amends in their own accounts, one cannot dampen the fire.  What may prove most convincing to the Sadducaic lot (who deny angels or the resurrection, etc.) may be vivid descriptions of the subject while out-of-the body.  People are often able to recount the surgeon's attire and actions minutely, although they had been put under prior to such activity.  In one case, a woman was clinically brain dead for an hour but later astounded the medical staff by providing a graphic description of the entire brain surgery she underwent.

To those who love and fear God such tales serve to mark the path to higher reality.  They remind us that our lives in the present will be revealed in glory and help to live to that end.