The near death experience of Bruce Van Natta

[Music] My name is Bruce Vanetta. I live in Wisconsin and I didn't have a super spiritual upbringing or background. Both of my parents had been severely abused as children and neglected as kids. My parents medicated their inner woundedness and pain with drinking and drugs sometimes. So I just grew up in a what people call dysfunctional home. You know, verbal abuse, physical abuse, and made a lot of bad choices as a young guy to trying to medicate the inner woundedness and pain. Looked for all the stuff that the world has to that says will make you feel better. drugs, alcohol, sex, and uh raced motorcycles, uh big game hunting, lots of hobbies and stuff. And we started a business in 2003 where I did on-site diesel repair. I got married, uh we started having kids, then we started this business, and that was actually how the accident happened. So, my accident happened in 2006. I was called into this logging business because this logging truck had a coolant leak. It was leaking anifreeze. There was another mechanic, his name was uh Leonard. And I actually had known Leonard for a long time. And so I was working with him on this Ford Chevy Peter Belt. And I was just down to last couple tools left when Leonard came and tapped me on the shoulder and he said, "Hey, before you go," he said, "I'd like you to look at one more thing." And I looked up at the the clock on the wall and I remember it said 6:10 p.m. I left my house that morning at 6:00 a.m. It took me an hour to get there. So when he asked me, he wanted me to look at something else. I'm looking at the clock and I'm doing the math and I'm thinking I didn't want to because I just wanted to go home and eat supper. And he could see the wheels turning in my head. And so, uh, he said, "Oh, I don't want you to stay late." He said, "I just want you to look at one more thing." He said, "There's a dirty spot on the front of the engine that's seeping oil." He asked me if I'd look underneath the truck at this one more thing. I look underneath the truck and I saw that he had jacked up that truck to remove that front wheel with a with a bottle jack, but unfortunately, he had not used any safety equipment. So, the truck has been on the jack for 3 days. It's been running for like 15 or 20 minutes. He had just crawled up from underneath the truck. And I looked underneath there. I saw that it wasn't on safety equipment. I saw it was John a jack and I thought, "Oh, no big deal. It must be good cuz it's been on there for 3 days." So, I I rolled underneath the truck, feet first on my back. Where I ended up, the bumper was just back behind my head. The running engine was just above me. and the axle that has the 10 to 12,000 pounds of weight was just a little bit above my belly, just a couple inches above me. So, I'm looking at the bottom of the engine. I figured out what I thought that the leak was. And so, I yelled at the Leonard and I said, "Shut the truck off. I don't need it running anymore for this." So, he got up inside the truck to shut it off. When he did, the whole truck shifted above me because the air suspension of the truck when he got in it, it shifted the whole thing. Shifted the whole truck. So, it's normal. But then I saw movement in the peripheral vision of my left eye. And I turned my head just in time to see that the jack when he got in the truck and the truck shifted, the jack had slipped out and it was just barely touching underneath the axle and it was actually teetering, rocking and before I could do anything, the jack shot out and this 5 to six tons of weight, 10 to 12,000 lbs of weight fell right through the middle of my body like a blunt guillotine. basically crushed my body in half because the again the width of that axle is you know 6 8 inches or whatever it is this way. So it fell through the middle of me. It's not sharp. It's kind of rounded. So if you can imagine when it fell there was this loud explosion noise of steel on cement. And before I even looked down, before I even felt the pain, I just called out and said, "Um, Lord, help me." I said it twice. I'm not sure why I said it a second time, but I said, "Lord, help me." I looked down and that's when I saw my body, the axle had fallen all the way through the middle of me. And on the left side, there was only maybe about an inch of space between the bottom of the axle and the cement. So, I knew my body was about an inch thick. So, if you're a skeptic, if anybody's listening today or watching or at some point watches this and go, I don't believe this guy. I was thinner than my spine. I don't have a belly button anymore, but straight through from where I used to have a belly button is my L4 and L5 vertebrae. And according to this the radiology reports, my vertebrae were actually spider cracked and a little bit D-shaped. So I was thinner than my spine when the truck fell on me. If you could picture that. It hurt so bad. The pain was just off the charts. So he shut the engine off. I'm begging him to call 911. He called 911. It's a volunteer fire department in the middle of nowhere because of such a remote area of a logging business. So now he hung up off the phone from the volunteer fire department. Finally, he got the truck up off my body and now I could see my whole body top to bottom. And the first thing I saw was my my work uniform went to the edge of my ribs, went straight back, followed along my spine, and came back up my pelvic. So, I had this literally this ridiculous flat spot from the bottom of my ribs till basically my pelvic bone all the way across like your soft part of your belly. And the only thing I could think when I saw my body this flat with a flat spot in the middle was that it was cartoonish. like there's nothing in real life to compare it to. So, um the pain is off the charts. The jack is just barely hanging on. It looks like it's going to slip. So, I'm begging Leonard to get me out front with the truck. I just wanted to drag me out from the truck in case the jack slipped and it fell on me again that it wouldn't hurt me again. So, I'm begging him to get me from the truck. Most people been told you don't want to move somebody with a back injury. So, he wouldn't touch me. He's just said, you know, I've called 911. They'll come. They'll help you cuz you know, he could see the flat spot. So, the bumper is back here behind my head. I reached back. I grabbed the bottom of that bumper and it took everything I had, but I was able to drag myself out. And I noticed that my bicep was jumping up and down, shaking like uncontrollably so fast. It was like a blur. And it was terrifying to see. But then the next thing was even more scary. I realized that when the truck followed me, it pushed my diaphragm out and it had collapsed my lungs. And so when I was trying to push and I my body was shaking, that was when I realized I I couldn't breathe either. I was sucking air for I was like doing this like trying to suck in my next breath and I know I got it a couple because I've been trying to talk to him and stuff but when I got to this point I was trying to do that push and straighten out my arms that's when I couldn't get any more air. My heart was pounding my ear and so I could literally hear my heart pounding bup and it was the craziest thing. I heard my heart stop from going racing. My heart literally just it sounded like shutting off an engine. My heart went bup. And on the last beat of my heart, my spirit left my body. And I went up to the roof of the garage, 14, 15, 16 feet. My body was crushed. It hurt so bad. But when I went up on the roof of the garage, I don't have words to describe how good it felt. It was perfect peace. It's like the probably the best way I can describe it. And even that is like way lame because that doesn't even cover it. But perfect peace is what I experienced. The Bible talks about peace that surpasses our mental understanding. So I'm looking down and I say it like this. I was having a party by myself in the ceiling. I could see the truck. I could see the accident scene. I could see the guy underneath the truck. I was so disconnected from the accident. I didn't even know that guy was me. I'm just watching from above. And now the volunteer fire department are showing up. You know, their pagers went off. It's 2006. So their pagers are going off wherever they're at. And they're just coming from wherever they were at. So these people are coming in and I'm up in the roof of the garage watching them come in. Eight people were in the room, but then number nine and 10 came and everybody came through the front. Now, these are volunteer fire department people. Everybody came behind me is the front door that goes out to the road. Everybody came through that front door. But number nine and 10, they came in the wrong door. They actually came in the back door. And I'm just going to stop here and say I spent the next year in the hospital. And when I got out of the hospital, I wanted to go to that volunteer fire department and just tell them thank you. So I went to their monthly meeting and there was like roughly 30 people in the room and this is you know over a year since the accident. I went around the room and I picked out eight out of the 10 people that came to the scene of the accident. And two of the eight that I picked out were the last two people that came in and they came in the wrong door. And I was able to ask them in front of everybody in that room why they came in the wrong door. At the point that they came in, I already had no heartbeat and no pulse for several minutes. And yet I was able to tell them they came in the wrong door. And then I asked them a question. Why did you come in the back door when everybody else came in the front door? It had been over a year. They had to think about it and then they're like, "Oh, that's right. We missed the driveway cuz they're responding to an address." They missed the driveway and then they saw that the flashing lights were there. They drove past it and there was a secondary gravel driveway and they just came in a secondary driveway and that's why they came up the driver's side of the truck and basically the wrong door, the back door. But that little detail proves the real Bruce was in the ceiling. So sometimes people ask, you know, this out of- body experience, what did it seem like? And the only way I can describe it, it was perfectly conscious, perfectly real. It was not like a dream state. It wasn't like a vision. It wasn't like something in my mind. It was something I lived, something I experienced just like looking at my hand in front of my face. It was completely real. All of it. So anyway, I'm up in the ceiling. Watch from above. I'm looking down. And I can see Leonard, the guy that I've been working with who had known me since I was young. He's on his knees. He's crying. He's running his fingers through my hair, but I didn't know it was me at the time. And he's apologizing to this guy and he's saying, "I'm sorry." I could hear every word he said. He's saying stuff like, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I should be the one that's dead, not you. I'm such an old fool." Because he hadn't used the safety equipment. You know, whatever. That's stuff he was saying. And on each side of Leonard was an angel. Um, and I'm basing their height approximately 2 feet taller than Leonard based on just me looking down. They were on their knees just like Leonard was. So, I'm I'm guesstimating that they were approximately 8 ft tall. Big big guys, very muscular, white shining robes. They didn't have wings. Sometimes in the Bible they have wings, sometimes they don't. But the one from the driver's side, he had really long hair that went way down past the belt on their robe. And the one from the driver's side reached over and he put his hands in the flat spot. and one from pass side reached over and he put his hands in the flat spot. And so I'm just watching from above and I said to myself, "Oh, look those the angels down there and they're down there to help that guy, but I didn't know it was me and it didn't even seem like a big deal." Strangely, it seemed normal. So, I'm just watching it from above and the angels are touching the guy and that's when the last two people got there and the lady, her name is Shannon, she moved Leonard out of the way and she is now down between the angels. She's feeling for a pulse. I'm watching it all from above. And there was a big guy. And from my point of view, which would be the the passenger side of the truck to the left, there was a big guy, what I call farmer bibs, just bib overalls that are light colored with dark blue stripes. And he had his arms crossed. And there was a little guy next to him. And the big guy with the farmer bib said to her as I watched above, he just said, "It's too late. He's passed. He's he's passed several minutes ago." And um she just kept frantically feeling for a pulse. And he said it again. It's too late. He's passed. And then she said to Leonard, "What's his name?" Leonard said, "Bruce Vanetta." And I watched as that lady, Shannon, she starts doing this. Bruce Vanetta, come back. And she kept getting louder and louder. And all the other people, the other volunteer fire department people, they weren't going to do CPR cuz I have a massive chest injury. So that's why they didn't do CPR. They just said, "Let me be." They called Medflight and then I passed. But she's slapping me in the face and everybody in the in the garage, they all are looking at her like, "What are you doing?" And she just kept getting more emphatic, louder and louder. Come back. Bruce Vetta, come back. And the only way I can describe it is it every time she said Bruce Vanetta, I would not have said it was my name. Not even close. The only thing I could say was I, and this sounds really weird, but it sounded familiar. The only way I could say it. And she kept saying it and my spirit began creeping down from the ceiling. And when I got about half the way, my spirit came back in really super fast, it seemed like. And it seemed like it came in through the top, through my head. And when my spirit came back in my body, my heart started. No CPR, no medicine, no nothing. My heart started, my eyes pop open, and I'm looking at this lady. And the first first thing that hit me was when I came back in was this horrible, horrible pain. Cuz like I said, I felt perfect in the ceiling. So now I'm back inside my body in this horrible pain. And I remember saying literally, "Oh no, I'm the guy under the truck. It's me." And it hurts so bad. It hurts so bad. And I and I just said to myself, I guess I just said, "I don't want it. I don't want this. It hurts too bad. And when I said, "I don't want this." My heart stopped. My spirit left my body. I went back up to the roof of the garage. But this time, a tunnel opened up. Like some people have a near-death experience or out of body experience. They see a tunnel with a light on the end of it. And it was going up like at a 45 degree angle. It was like a million miles long. And there's a bright light on the end of the tunnel. And I knew that I knew that I knew that I knew heaven was on the end of that tunnel. And I started going towards the light really fast. I know it. I shouldn't have felt GeForce in the spirit, but I did. I literally felt like momentum like like in a fast car, which I like. And like a carnival ride or something like that. So, I'm kicked back in the seat from the GeForce rocketing away towards the light when all of a sudden I hear this Bruce trying to come back, come back. I stopped. I got sucked backwards out of tunnel. I still looking towards that end though. I looked down. I could see the angels. I could see the red-haired lady. And now I know it's me. My spirit came back into my body. And when I come back in the second time, I opened my eyes and I looked on my left and my right for the angels, but I couldn't see them with my earth eyes, which really scared me because it hurt so bad. And I was terrified. I was thinking, I can't imagine why did God take the angels away when I need them really, really bad cuz they hurt really, it hurts really bad. So sometimes people ask about, do we have angels? Do I think that everybody has a guardian angel? You know, when I went above and I could see the angels, but when I came back in my body and I couldn't see the angels, I think that's probably pretty normal that they're around there, but we can't see them usually. That's my belief because when I was in my body, I couldn't see them. But every time I left my body, I could see them plain as day. So, I think they're around. We just we don't see in the spirit realm. So, I closed my eyes and I was just thinking that I didn't want it. And that's when I heard a voice that I know was God. I didn't see anything, but I know God spoke to me. And the first thing that struck me immediately was it was very calm. Nothing else in that atmosphere in that garage accident scene was calm. Especially after this lady showed up and my spirit came back in and my heart started. They were all running around frantically. I mean, they were I think minds were blown. So, there was nothing calm going on. But this voice was very calm. And it simply said this. If you want to live, you're going to have to fight. And it's going to be a hard fight. I thought about it like 2.2 two seconds and I said, "Screw it. I don't want to fight. It hurts too bad. I don't want it." So, my heart stopped. My spirit left my body. I went up the roof of the garage. The tunnel was there. I got in the tunnel the second time and I started going towards the light. I felt about the same thing. I got about halfway there when I could hear her saying it again. Bruce start to come back and I got sucked backwards out of the tunnel. I looked back down now. I could see the angels that I couldn't see in my spirit. I could see him again from above and my spirit came back into my body. My spirit came back in my body. My heart starts the third and final time. And I'm looking at her, Shannon. Her face is right here. And she says to me, "Miss, mister, you're on the verge of life and death. What do you have to fight for?" And up until that moment, I had not thought of my wife or my kids. And just because of my childhood, just because of not really ever having any peace. As a young man, I had battled the thought of suicide at different times. And that was what I'd always wanted was that peace. And I'm positive that God knew that if it was up to me that I wouldn't have come back because the peace was too great. But he used this woman to remind me about my wife and my kids. And she says, "What do you have to fight for? Do you have a wife? Do you have kids?" Up in that moment, I hadn't even thought about him because the pain was so crazy. And I knew right in the spot that God was using her to remind me about Loring the kids so that I'd stay. And so she said, "Don't close your eyes. Stay here. Fight." And so they ended up medflighting me to our state's biggest trauma center where they operated on and off. But I'm just going to stop here and say I didn't tell you about the crazy thing about Shannon, the red-haired lady that came. Shannon was 38 years old, found out later. And Shannon had been raised a Catholic, but didn't believe in any of it. And so when she was 18 years old, she walked away from the Catholic faith and said, "I don't believe in God or any of that stuff." But then, you know, she got her master's degree, she got married, she had kids, got her job, and they bought a house that had spirits in it. And it led them on a spiritual journey because they knew they were hearing thumps and bumps. And there was go basically what people call ghosts in their house. And they didn't believe in God. They didn't believe in spirits until they bought that house. And they knew that there were spirits in the house. So there if there were spirits, then it brought up the idea, well, then is there a God? And so she went on this spiritual journey. and she prayed me back to life three times at the scene of the accident. So when she was slapping me in the face, she was praying and she was asking God to bring me back. So three times she prayed me back. They end up taking me to the the trauma center. My wife and some family members and some people from church went down there and they operated on me and they came out of the operation and the head of the trauma department got called in from home. He took over the operation. He came out and he told my wife two things. He said, he said, "In all my years of running this trauma center," he said, "I've never seen a body so badly crushed, traumatized, and still make it to the hospital alive." He said, "Your husband must have one hell of a will to fight." But then he said, "His body so badly destroyed and damaged. I don't expect him to live through the hour. Cross your fingers." So my wife said, "We're not going to cross our fingers. We're going to pray." So her and some people from church started praying. And then one of the guys said heard the doctor say that. Jim heard the doctor say that and he said, "Well, let's thank God for every 30 minutes that Bruce was alive because he said I was gonna live an hour." So, every 30 minutes I was alive all night long, they they gathered in a circle and told God, "Thank you for 30 more minutes of life." The next morning, the the doctor came in from home shocked to find that I was still alive and didn't think I was going to make it, you know, again. And then around 11 or 12 that day, he came back in check on me again. That's what my wife told him, just go ahead. And she said, "You said there's a bunch of operations still need to be done. Go ahead and do them." bruises in God's hands and we'll just see what God does. So, like I said, they operated on and off, kept me in a duc coma for weeks. I had five major operations and we found out from the doctors. They take my case and they compare it against some studies were done and doctors say that I'm the only person they can find in the entire world to have lived after having major arteries suffered in five places. They say there's nobody else they could find compared to my case compared to the studies there. That's one thing. And then the other big crazy thing that happened for me was that when the truck fell on me, right underneath my belly button is everybody is your small intestines. And your small intestines is like a ball of worms. It's al the doctors call it circuitus. It just goes around in circles. Adults have 18 to 20ome feet length of small intestine. And so when the truck fell on me, all my small intestines were destroyed because I was literally like, you know, an inch thick. And so my intestines were all crushed. So the doctors removed all of my small intestine because it's so destroyed except for two pieces and they saved those two pieces and they sewed them back together so that in hopes that I'd be able to eat to live and there was this magic number they said that 100 centimeters now this goes back because they it's changed now but when my accident happened in 2006 ongoing medical thought at that time was you had to have approximately 100 cm of small intestine to be able to live below 100 centimeters you weren't going to live. So I had just over 100 centimeters and then in March of '07 while I was in the hospital, one of those two pieces that they had saved that was damaged but they tried to save died. So I had to remove that, cut that out and re reconnect it all. So now I'm underneath the 100 cm. I hadn't eaten in months. I was being fed introvenously. I lost 65 pounds in the hospital and I'm starving to death so badly that when I had an aunt come to visit me in the hospital after several months. She came into the room and didn't recognize me because my looks had changed so much because I lost 65 lbs and said, "Oh, excuse me. I'm in the wrong room." And went to and I'm like, "No, Aunt Penny, it's me." So, I mean, that's how badly I was wasting away. And I'm um a super active guy. It's hard for me to hold still. So, after months and months, I got in a fight with one of the doctors. I was just I was in a bad attitude, bad mood day. And I said, "You got to let me out of this hospital. I'm going crazy. You can't keep me here." I looked up online and there's these bags, colossi bags or ilio bags where you have the bag outside your body. And I said, "For your intestines?" I said, "Just give me one of those bags so I can leave this hospital." And I remember saying to her, I said, "You can't keep me here forever." And the doctor, as I got her mad, she said, "Mr. Vanetta, we're not going to keep you here forever. We don't expect you to live any longer if it's 6 months to a year at this point." So then God woke up this guy, Bruce Carlson, two mornings in a row at 5:00 a.m. all the way over to New York. And for where I live in Wisconsin, that's like halfway across the United States. And he woke him up two mornings in a row and told him, "Buy a plane ticket, fly to Wisconsin, and pray for me in the hospital." And if he'd do that, he'd do a miracle. The first morning, he didn't do it, but he told his wife and he told his pastor. He talked about it because it kind of freaked him out. The next morning, what happened? He bought the ticket, came and prayed for me in the hospital. He put his palm on my forehead and when he prayed I felt the power of God come out of his palm into my forehead into my stomach and I felt my intestines coming back. Doctors say I have half approximately half my intestines. So 9 to 11 ft. So I went from a piece of intestine about this big to 9 to 11 ft. So a complete creative miracle that nobody can say didn't happen because there's proof before and after. So, so bottom line, those are two big miracles that doctors say I'm the only person that's lived after having major arteries severed in five places and the fact that I had this small piece of intestine all that was left and now I've got half my intestines. So, either one of those two things should have killed me, but God chose to keep me alive. And one time I was on this TV show and this this host he said he read the bio and the bio says what the doctors say that I'm the only person that they can find that's lived after having major art in five places. And the guy read that on air and he said, "So why would God save you if nobody else has lived?" He says, "What you know what's special about you? Why would God save you?" Immediately God gave me an answer for that and it's from the Bible. And I turned right to it. God gave me like the address 1 Corinthians chapter 1 starting at verse 26. And I paged to it sitting right there. And right there it says that God chooses the weak things, the lowly things, the things that are not of noble birth so that no one may boast before him. So really the crux of it is I believe the reason why he saved me was to set the bar so low to say that look if I'd saved that knucklehead I'd save anybody because I believe I'm the last person that would deserve it or there's no way to earn it. There's no way to like to be good enough to get that and I'm far from that. So I've made a lot of bad choice decisions and uh I fully believe that he's a god of mercy means not getting the punishment we deserve and God loves us despite us. So, we've added up the days I've actually been in the hospital more than a year in my life. I'd get in, you know, I'd have a big operation, I'd get sent home for a couple weeks, go back in for a couple months, come back out for a couple days or whatever, have some complication, go back in, in and out, in and out, and then I did a couple years of rehab. So, it was definitely a long process, but I'm going to spend the rest of my life traveling around and telling people, look, I I know what I experienced, and I just want to share it with people so that they can make their own choice, their own decision about God, and about what happens when we die. So, initially when they first took me out of the coma, I didn't realize I still had a breathing tube in. So, I was trying to talk and the very first thing that I wanted to tell everybody was that I had saw these two huge angels. And it's so weird because when I was in the ceiling in the spirit and I looked down, they seemed real normal and natural. And I've thought about this a lot. And the only thing I can think of, the only thing that makes any sense is because angels are normal in the spirit realm. But as soon as I was out of the spirit realm and back in my body, when they took me out of the coma, I wanted to talk about angels. So then I was trying to speak, but then I, you know, realized I couldn't speak because of tube. So then I motioned with something to write with and all I wanted to do was write the word angel. I was because my mom and my um my wife were in the room that day that they woke me up and I remember they they gave me was a pen or pencil, whatever. And I I wrote it put it down on the paper and I was going to just write the word angel and I couldn't I couldn't make the a come from my head to my finger. It took me like 6 months before I could read or write again. And the first time they took the tube out and I tried to breathe, my lungs weren't strong enough to breathe. But the next time that they tried to take me off the breathing machine, I had actually worked and the very very first thing I said out of the coma was I saw two angels. God sent these two huge humongous angels to save me. And that's why it was such a big deal to me because I'm saying God sent angels for me. Like I'm the last guy that would deserve it. So it was uh the first thing I wanted to tell everybody. And I told all the doctors, I told the nurses, told people from my family, I told everybody that anybody that'd listen about what I saw. And with this experience, having the out- of- body experience, seeing the angels, it's one thing to hear people say that God loves you. It's one thing to read it in the Bible or have people talk about it, but to actually experience it, to live it, to be in an instance where I literally the point of life and death crushed by a truck and call out and say, "Lord, help me." That's it. It's that's all I said. Lord, help me twice. And have him send a lady to bring me back to life. have him send two angels, have God send this guy from across the United States to pray and then the miracle happened in my intestine, all these things. And then now I've been traveling around and um sharing this testimony with people and then seeing what God does in other people's lives. It's very humbling. It makes me cry a lot when I see the mercy and grace of God in people's lives, knowing that none of us deserve it, that none of us can do anything to deserve that, but yet he's he's a loving God. Despite all the messed up, crazy bad things in this world, he's still loving God. So, yeah, it's changed to the point that uh money used to be really important to me and I love my business. I love my job. I could still be doing that. I mean, I have healed to the point where I could I could still run that business. I could have people work for me and do it. But I want to spend the rest of my life telling people that God is real and that he loves them. And so, that's why I'm doing this podcast today and that's why I do the things I do is just to travel around tell people that God loves us despite us. Even if we don't know him, he loves us and he wants to have a relationship with us. So that's what I go around and tell people. So when we read the Bible, there's a spot where Jesus says in this world you have trouble, tribulation. You look up that word in the Greek, it's a bad word. It literally means to get crushed or to feel like it's a grape getting crushed. That's what literally the word means. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of bad stuff in this life. My take, I'm no theologian. I'm just a normal guy that had this supernatural experience. And from my take on it is this that God made us to be in fellowship, to be in relationship with him. He gives us people the choice whether they're going to do that or not. Some people choose to be in fellowship, relationship with him. He allows people not to not. I mean, it's their it's our free will choice. For those that enter into relationship with him, he offers this crazy intimacy that is literally not just like fire insurance. You know, people think about, oh, I want Jesus so I don't I want God so I don't have to worry about dying and going to hell. It's so much more than that. God wants to be a part of every day of our life. Not just like when we die and go to heaven. He wants to be a part of every day. And so for me, the reality of God is him wanting to be part of every day of my life. So I spend the first hour of my day with him every single day. Talk to him. He talks back. Gives me my marching orders for the day or whatever. And does that mean my life is perfect? No. Does that mean I'm perfect? No. Am I still a sinner? Yeah. Do I still do or say things I shouldn't? Yeah. But I I don't know. I mean, I don't think anybody's going to be perfect in this life. And God says he loves us despite us. So, he just wants us to share I think he wants us to share his love with other people. And the only way you get to know anybody is by spending time with him. So, sometimes people say, "I'm a Christian. I believe in God, but I don't hear his voice." Well, I I use this analogy all the time and I say if me and my wife went to the state fair in Wisconsin, like Summerfest, and there's like 80,000 people, 100,000 people there at once. If she got separated in the crowd and I start calling her name, is she going to recognize my voice? She's going to recognize my voice because she knows me. Not because she can see me, only because she knows me. It's the same with getting to know God. If I get to know God's voice when he does talk to me, then I'll recognize his voice. So, like I was just in British Columbia. I was praying for a woman and she asked for prayer for her knee and her shoulder. We got done praying for her knee and her shoulder and I just had this somebody could say a thought. Somebody could say a voice. You call it what you want, but this this little voice, this little thought dropped into my head and and God just simply said to me, "The real reason why she's here has nothing to do with her knee. It's not her shoulder. The real reason she wants prayer, but she's not going to ask for it, she has an adult son that has major issues." So I just said to the lady, "Ma'am, do you have an adult son that's going through issues?" Her eyes pop open. She just immediately starts balling like crazy. And says, "How did you know that?" Well, some people like to use the words psychic. I am not a psychic. Not even close. But anytime somebody says, "I want to hear God's voice." I just tell him, "Hey, that's awesome. He wants to talk to you." You just got to get to know him. And the only way you get to know him is by praying to him, talking to him, then listen to him be quiet and listening for those thoughts to come back cuz he's a spirit. So he talks to us spirit to spirit, not like through our ear audibly. So, I mean like I like that example of me just in British Columbia me with that lady or I could give example after example like that. I'm I do my Bible reading and praying usually in there in my bedroom in the morning and right in the middle of it, God will just stop me and say, "Hey, call so and so today." And I won't know why, but I'll call that person and then I'll find find out why I needed to call them, you know, for some God reason. So, getting to relationship with God, dialogue with God is getting to know his voice and the only way you get to know his voice is by spending time with them. So, it's it's something that doesn't happen overnight. It's just like getting to know anybody. It takes time, but it has to be an intentional choice. If somebody's desires that, God's all over that and he'll jump over it. But it it has to be somebody's intentional choice or desire because like Jesus said, it's a sacrifice to spend that time to get to know him because we're so busy in our life. I mean, who wants to take an extra hour out of your day? If it's a waste of time, why would you waste that hour a day? You know what I mean? God proved to me way back before the accident even before my accident happened uh and I was running a business that had 17 employees that if I skipped my morning time with him, the day would go bad and my employees would make mistakes and it cost me money. But if I'd start the day with him, it was always better. So he's he's just been for me working on that for a long time. So, since my experience and what I experienced of perfect peace when I went to the roof, what it's done for me, um, people ask me, "Are you afraid of dying?" I'm absolutely not afraid of dying at all. My daughter got really, really, my oldest child, adult got really, really sick. Was in the hospital with sepsis. And so, I mean, it was really, really bad. They did not even know if she was going to make it. Like, literally, the nurse is crying. And my wife is crying. And I'm like, I said to my wife, you know, you know what my story is. you know how good it felt. Yeah, we would miss her, but I would be happy for her. We would miss her, but for her, I'd be happy for her. I mean, you know, so yeah, there's always that I feel bad. You know, obviously you're going to miss somebody. I feel bad when somebody lose a loved one, but if we really had a eternal focus of what it's going to be like the day that I died and my spirit went up in the ceiling, I've never felt so good ever. Ever. And I've talked to people who've made it to the end of the tunnel and actually got to heaven, but then an angel or God or somebody told them it's not their time. going to have to go back. I never got there. But I've also talked to people instead of gone in the tunnel that's gone up. I've talked to people who've gone in the tunnel that's gone down in the darkness that told me that they didn't believe in God or they were atheists, you know, before they had this experience. And I'll tell you, those those stories impact me way more than the Christian stories. And I'm not sure why. Maybe it's cuz I'm a skeptic at heart or, you know, my nature is of that of a skeptic. When somebody if somebody says they believe one thing but then they experience something they come back and they change everything the skeptic inside me goes ah something something was real there otherwise nothing would have changed right so that's why I think why the the atheist ones impact me so much because they said they were atheists but then they have this experience and now they're completely different and if when those people tell me their stories face to face I can remember you know a handful of them that really impacted me and it's like whoa there's no reason for them to make it up because at that point they're saying I used to believe this, but I was wrong. So, right off the bat, they're admitting they were wrong. How many people are going to do that? And I'd say that this experience, uh, one thing that it's done for me is allowed me to, um, maybe be not as hard on myself as I used to be. A lot of times people struggle with being hard on themselves and, uh, being their worst skeptic or worst critic. And if we can get a hold of the idea that there is a creator God in heaven who loves us exactly the way we are with our faults and all, I think that is freeing for people to know, you know, this God in heaven isn't looking down on me and looking at everything I do wrong. Instead, he's looking at all the good things about me, the things that he likes about me and the things he loves about me. And I think if we did that with ourselves and with other people more, the world would probably be a lot better place to be. And we know from experience that when we read the Bible that God says he forgives us even though we don't deserve it. And he tells us he wants us to forgive other people. This experience, God's love for me has definitely made it easier for me to love other people. Easier for me to give grace to people and be forgiving to people because God has done it for me. And he says he, you know, freely have received, freely give. So freely have we been forgiven, he wants us to freely forgive others. Freely have we been loved, he wants us to freely love others. Yeah, it's definitely made me more of a loving person, more of a forgiving person. Does that mean that I'm always loving, always forgiving? No, it doesn't. Do I still get angry at people sometimes? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm I'm still a mess. I'm still, you know, still make mistakes. But but in general, I could say it's it's definitely made me more of a grace person. But when a person reads the paper, looks on the internet, watches the news, we see there's lots of dysfunction, there's lots of heartache, there's lots of pain. There's a lot of hurting people in this world and I think now more than ever people need to hear a message that God loves them and he wants us to share that forgiveness, that love with other people. So I think uh people really need to hear a message right now in the world about love and forgiveness and kindness and that if people would really love on people the way God loves on us and forgive other people the way God forgives us, the world would definitely be a lot better place to be. [Music]