Jesus is The
Way
By Keith Donnellan
| I simply don't believe 99% of the accounts of people
claiming to have died and gone to heaven or hell, or of people's near death experiences. The other
1% I am skeptical of, or simply non-committal. I have included this article only because I personally know the author, but I still cannot guarantee it's veracity. .... Keygar |
When I was a kid I was sent to
Sunday school where they taught me the basic stories of the Bible. I went to primary school and we were taught
about being good, not to tell lies and to pray every night on your knees before
you went to bed. I had lost my sight
and left hospital a day before my 9th birthday, and then I was sent to a school
for the blind where I was bullied. I
left that school and went to high school where I was harassed and beaten by
other kids that could see and were bigger than me. I couldn't understand what was going wrong! They taught me through Scripture to be kind
and gentle, and yet I had lost my sight and was being harassed instead of being
given a reward for being good, so I rebelled.
I went the way of the world
and learnt how to fend for myself and instead of being a target to bullies, I
became a threat to them. It was three
months before my 19th birthday when the Lord removed His hand from me, and
because I was without His protection, I died.
A car doing over 70 kilometers per hour ran me down. The paramedics worked desperately over me
while I was still laying on the road in the pouring rain but I wasn't breathing
and they pronounced me dead, but just then blood trickled down the back of my
throat which made me cough, and I began to breathe again. Because anesthetic would have ended my life,
the surgeon could only stop the bleeding before sending me to an intensive care
unit, and going to meet my parents to tell them their only son wasn't likely to
last the night, as he had given me a 1 in 100 chance of living. They were taken into my room and saw
something that resembled an Egyptian mummy lying on a hospital bed with
countless tubes and wires coming out of various places and leading to the
monitoring machines that hummed, clicked and flashed lights throughout my
room. My head and body were almost
entirely covered in bandages, which were stained with blood and smelt strongly
of antiseptic. There was another smell
and that was the smell of death. My
mother kissed me for what she thought was the last time and then was asked to
leave.
The next morning I was still
breathing and my treatment continued without much hope or encouragement for my
parents. The morning they were going to
open up my skull to relieve the pressure on my brain, my surgeon walked into my
room to leave instructions with the nurse prior to the operation just a short
time away, when he noticed I was no longer showing signs indicative of pressure
on the brain and after an examination, my operation was cancelled. He then told my parents that despite this I
would be severely brain damaged and I would probably lose the ability to walk
unaided. I might have a chance with
crutches and calipers but due to my head injury a wheelchair might be the best
alternative.
It took several operations to
set my broken left ankle, the two breaks in the left femur, work on my
shattered pelvic bone and set the six broken ribs that had speared into my
vitals. They had bolted my dislocated
left arm back into the shoulder socket and stitched up all the gashes and then
the therapy began. I was given
intensive physiotherapy to get my body as functional as possible and nine weeks
later, I walked out of the hospital on crutches. I had grown 7.5cm in that time and that wasn't the only
difference. I had changed from the
inside forever and I am talking about my outlook and views on life and the
people I meet.
I had been blind just over
nine years when I died and I can remember what happened to me when my spiritual
body left my physical body. I remember
falling backwards down a very long and dark tunnel and watching the light at
the top of the tunnel growing smaller and smaller the further I moved away from
it, and then it went out altogether. As
soon as the light disappeared I was in a total darkness that was a spiritual
darkness. It was blacker than the blackest night. I relate it to being the kind of darkness that might have covered
the world for three hours when Jesus died on the cross. I now know that this was caused because God had left me totally alone. The second God left
me, the terror began and I believe that terror is only part of the hellish
existence that awaits all unrepentant sinners, and the remainder of that horror
is what is seen and endured in those eternal flames. At first I could see
the light as I wasn't in my physical body and therefore I didn't have blind
eyes but when the light disappeared, my blindness came back. My memory is very
clear about this because I was in a spiritual world and had left my injured
body behind me for a short period of time.
I knew I was in hell when I stopped falling and I knew that I didn't
want to look behind me because I would see things there that I never wanted to
see. I remember saying to myself
"I'm dead but I can't die now, I have too much to do with my life," and then I reached out to
where I last saw the light.
The Lord allowed me to die
because He wanted to show me what life would be like without Him. Yes, there is life after death and it is our
decision how we spend the time we have on earth and where we want to spend our
lives after we depart from this world.
I do not believe I would have my sight if I had remained in hell because
only God can restore sight but He allowed me to have vision for that brief time
that I may witness what was happening to me and where I was going, so I’d be
able to come back and tell others of what I have seen. No, I did not see flames or demons because I
refused to look behind me but I have no doubt that they were there and coming
towards me to claim me as their own. What
the Lord showed me and other people when I left hospital was how quickly I
recovered, both physically and mentally, from my fatal accident. It wasn't a near fatal accident because I
did clinically die three times to be exact.
I was walking and dancing without crutches and calipers the third day I
was out of hospital and three months later I passed a brain test with flying
colours. I ran in a 12 kilometre run to raise money for charity another three
months later, and a week after that, I rode a tandem bicycle 280 kilometres,
just to be able to say I did it. I
bought myself two horses and was able to stay in the saddle despite their
efforts to unseat me, because my legs had become strong again. When I was forty years old, I did five
courses in computer technology for fun and got five diplomas for my
effort. The lowest score I got was 89%,
then I got 95%, and in the last three exams I got 100%.
Now that you have read my
story and know the extent of the damage I suffered and the way I recovered so
completely and quickly, do you understand why I think I was blessed to die and
go through what I went through, that I might know what I know now? I do know there is life after death, I do
know that we are all mere mortals and I do know that Jesus is the way, for
without Him there is nothing. I know
all this because, my friend, I speak from personal experience.
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