A woman described a near-death experience that included a key aspect — encountering deceased loved ones — after a severe fall that broke her back.
It happened May 27, 1977, during a surgery to Jeannette Meadows, as told to a television host, Sid Roth (“It’s Supernatural”].
When they gave her her first shot, before the back operation, Meadows says she suddenly felt her spirit shoot upwards out of her physical being.
Was it painful?
“No,” she says. “It didn’t hurt to die [you can watch her in the video below].
“When I came back into my body it did hurt. I went speedily through the ceiling of the hospital escorted by two angels to the Presence of the Lord. It happened so quick, in the blink of the eye, at the speed of light.”
The first thing she experienced was a conversation with the Lord. As Scripture says, to be absent from the body is to be in the Presence of the Lord. Then she found herself in a garden and she saw her grandparents and great-grandmother and they looked young, like in wedding pictures. Her grandfather, bald when she knew him, now had hair. Would she see her cherished daughter, who had died in a horrible accident (hit by a truck) a week before her sixteenth birthday?
“I thought I was going to get to stay,” related Jeannette. “I didn’t know that I couldn’t stay, at the time. One angel came with me and we went over this way and that way. There was a garden by a river. And that’s where I saw my daughter and we were wading in the river and when you get out of the river and you step on the grass, it pushes down just like your grass at home, but then when you move your foot it’s up again.
“Everything in Heaven is flawless. It’s perfect. The colors are magnificent. They’re so vibrant, they’re so beautiful, and the music is so clear. If you try to sing along with it it’s almost like you can’t keep up. It’s just awesome. It’s just like — it’s the place you belong. It’s where you were created to be, if that makes any sense.” There was absolute clarity of mind, sight, and sound, unlike in the body, where, when she returned, her mind fogged.
Were all her relatives in Heaven, she asked?
“No, the Lord told me a lot of my relatives didn’t make Heaven.”
Did she want to come back to earth?
She answers as most people who’ve had such an experience do: emphatically: “No. Absolutely not. Because it’s so peaceful, so beautiful, so glorious.
“The Love of God permeates everything. It’s like, you are created for that.” Nothing is more important than a direct relationship with God. It’s as she — and so many others — said: a return to our real Father. A return to our real home.
[View from about 4:40 minutes to 8:30]
[See also: Pope reflects on death]