How to Have a Near Death Transformation

It’s a great blessing to know your life is going to suddenly end in about five seconds. I figured that was how much time I had left as the car I sat in barreled toward a cliff. At 80 mph, and sliding on a patch of ice, there was no chance that the brakes were going to save us. Fortunately, five seconds can become a strangely long time when you see death headed at your face. As time slowed down, dozens of scenes from my life passed before my eyes. Moments of joy, acts of selfishness, and times I regretted seemed to flash before me as if from a speeded up movie projector. Then, it was time to go over the cliff…

I get to write this story because the cliff was not as high as I had feared. Yet, the impact of the ensuing crash did manage to stop my heart. If it weren’t for the grace of a fire truck seeing the whole crash and quickly coming to our rescue, I would now be dead. In the approximately three minutes where I had no beating heart, I had what is commonly called a near death experience — or NDE. You’ve probably heard of the basic outline of such experiences: a life review, feeling separate from your body, moving through a tunnel towards a loving light, and a deep sense of the sacred or encounter with God. Yet, that is only half the story.

The other half of the story, the one we rarely hear about is the transformational effect such encounters with death tend to have on people who experience them. Dr. Marilyn Mendoza, a near-death researcher states, “The event is so profound that it does alter the experiencer’s life. Perhaps the most common…