Chapter 11

Out of the Mouths of Children

“Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength.” — Psalm 8:2 (ESV)

A. The Question on the Table

A four-year-old boy had a cardiac arrest during surgery at a military hospital in Berlin. He survived. Months later, fully recovered, his father asked him a simple question: What would you like to do today? The boy said he wanted to go to the park. His father was puzzled. They had never visited a park near the army camp where they lived. Which park did he mean?

The boy answered without hesitation:

"The one through the tunnel. . . . The one I went to when I was in the hospital. There was a park with lots of children and swings and things, with a white fence around it. I tried to climb over the fence but this man stopped me and said that I wasn’t to come yet and he sent me back down the tunnel and I was back in the hospital again." — A four-year-old cardiac arrest survivor, reported in The Science of Near-Death Experiences¹

His father was stunned. “As he was only four at the time,” he said, “I cannot believe that he could make this story up.”²

No one had told this child about tunnels, white fences, or kindly strangers who send you back. He had not read any books about death. He had not watched television specials about the afterlife. He was four. And yet the story he told matched the same core pattern that adults around the world have been describing for decades: leaving the body, passing through a tunnel, reaching a place of light and peace, meeting a figure who tells you it is not your time, and coming back.

That is what makes children so important to this conversation. Adults who report near-death experiences can always be suspected of borrowing a script. Maybe they read a book. Maybe they saw something on the news. Maybe they are telling the story they expect the researcher wants to hear. But very young children, especially those under five or six, carry almost none of that baggage. They do not know the script. Many of them do not even understand what death is.

So when they come back from the edge and describe the same things adults describe, a serious question drops on the table: Where did this come from? If culture manufactured these experiences, why do children too young for culture report them?

That is the question this chapter sets out to answer.

B. Why Children Are a Special Test

Think about everything that shapes what an adult expects after death. A lifetime of Sunday school lessons, funeral sermons, movies, bestselling books, news features, conversations with friends. By the time a grown man or woman faces a medical crisis, a whole library of images about the afterlife is already stored in their mind: tunnels, bright lights, pearly gates, harps, clouds. A skeptic can always argue that a dying adult is simply playing back those stored images in a confused brain.

Children strip that argument down. A three-year-old has heard no funeral sermons. A two-year-old has read no bestsellers. A toddler who nearly drowns in a swimming pool has no mental file marked “what heaven looks like.” And yet, as we will see, very young children report the same core elements that adults do. They leave their bodies and watch the doctors work. They pass through darkness into light. They meet people, sometimes relatives who died before the child was born. They feel deep peace and love. And then they come back, often reluctantly.

This is why researchers have called children’s NDEs one of the strongest lines of evidence for the reality of the experience.³ Young children are a natural control group. They have not absorbed the culture. They have not learned the script. If NDE reports were only an echo of what people already expect, children should report something different from adults. Or they should report nothing at all.

They do not. They report the same thing.

Jeffrey Long, a radiation oncologist who founded the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF), put the point plainly. He studied twenty-six NDErs who were five years old or younger at the time of their experience and compared their reports to those of 585 NDErs who were six or older. The NDERF survey asked thirty-three questions about the content of the NDE. Long found no statistically significant difference between the two groups on any of the thirty-three questions.⁴ The children’s experiences looked just like the adults’. The average age of the younger group was 3.6 years old.

Cherie Sutherland, a researcher who reviewed thirty years of scholarly work on children’s NDEs, came to the same conclusion:

"It has often been supposed that the NDEs of very young children will have a content limited to their vocabulary. However, it is now clear that the age of children at the time of their NDE does not in any way determine its complexity. Even pre-linguistic children have later reported quite complex experiences. . . . Age does not seem in any way to affect the content of the NDE." — Cherie Sutherland, Ph.D., cited in Hagan, The Science of Near-Death Experiences⁵

Pre-linguistic children. Children who could not yet talk at the time of their crisis still came back and, once they had words, described the same things. If culture is writing the script, it is writing it for people who cannot read.

C. The Heart of the Case

1. Why Children’s NDEs Matter

Let me say it as simply as I can. The cultural-expectation theory says that people see what they have already been taught to see. Dying brains pull images from memory, from movies, from Sunday school, from books, and play them back in a kind of farewell hallucination. That theory has to account for every case. And when it bumps into a three-year-old who has never set foot in a church, never opened a Bible, and never heard the word “tunnel,” it has to explain why that child is describing the same tunnel and the same light that a sixty-year-old churchgoer describes.

That is a hard thing to explain. Not impossible, but hard. And the difficulty grows when you add the details. Children do not just report vague feelings of peace. They report specific features: rising out of their body, watching the medical team, traveling through darkness, arriving in a place of brilliant light, meeting a figure who radiates love, and being told to go back. The very same features adults report.⁶

In my doctoral research, I analyzed 5,278 near-death experiences. When I looked at the data across age groups, the consistency surprised me. The core elements did not shift much with the age of the person. Children reported the same kinds of experiences that adults did, with a few notable tendencies. Children were more often accompanied into the light by a being or figure who held their hand or guided them.⁷ They were less likely to report a formal life review, which makes sense: a four-year-old has less life to review. But the basic architecture of the experience was the same.

That sameness matters because it cuts against the strongest version of the skeptic’s case. If NDEs were only the product of a dying brain searching its memory banks, the product should look different when the memory banks are nearly empty.

Think about what a child’s memory banks actually contain. Cartoons. Stuffed animals. Playgrounds. Birthday cake. If a three-year-old’s brain were assembling a farewell hallucination from stored images, we might expect a celestial playground, or better mommies and daddies, or a fantasy island full of toys. We would not expect tunnels, beings of light, deceased relatives the child never met, and a boundary they must not cross. Yet that is what children report, over and over, across decades and around the world.⁴⁹

2. What Children Report

So what do the youngest near-death experiencers actually see and feel? Here is a sampling drawn from the research.

A boy, not yet three, had a cardiac arrest. After his recovery, his grandmother noticed something odd. During play, he said, “Grandma, when I died, I saw a lady.” Over the following months, he kept talking about what happened. “When I was in the doctor’s car,” he said, “the belt came undone, and I was looking down from above.” He added, “When you die, it is not the end . . . a lady came to take me. . . . There were also many others, who were getting new clothes, but not me, because I wasn’t really dead. I was going to come back.”⁸

His parents noticed that he kept drawing the same picture over and over. As he got older, the picture grew more complex. When they asked about the balloon shape in his drawing, he said, “When you die you see a bright lamp and . . . are connected by a cord.”⁹ This toddler used children’s words for what adults call the light and the silver cord. No one had taught him these ideas. He found his own language for what he had experienced.

Notice the pattern. Leaving the body. Being met by a loving guide. Traveling to a beautiful place. A deep feeling of safety. Being sent back. These are the same elements Raymond Moody identified in adults in 1975 (see Chapter 6). The children are not copying Moody. Most of them have never heard of him.

Consider another case from Atwater’s files. A four-year-old boy nearly drowned and later described what happened. He felt himself surrounded by beams of soft golden, pink, and white light. “The light was so alive and peaceful,” he said. “I felt so comforted.” He saw figures he called “light beings” with their arms outstretched. A voice told him he was loved. He was taken care of. There was nothing to be afraid of.⁴⁶ He was four years old. No one had coached him to describe beings of light. He simply told what he saw, in the only words he had.

Or consider the young girl from Atwater’s study who had a near-death experience during a health crisis. While outside her body, she could clearly identify a child she named as her brother Michael. The problem? Michael had not yet been born. Her mother confirmed he was not conceived until the following year.⁴⁷ Whatever one makes of that detail, it is not something the girl learned from a storybook.

Pediatrician Melvin Morse reported one of the most famous cases. A seven-year-old girl named Katie nearly drowned in a YMCA swimming pool. She was found floating face down, profoundly comatose, with massive brain swelling. Morse gave her a 10 percent chance of surviving. She recovered in three days.¹¹

At a follow-up visit, Katie described details of her medical treatment that she should not have known, since her eyes had been shut and her brain deeply unconscious. When Morse asked what she remembered about the pool, she said, “Do you mean when I visited the Heavenly Father?”¹² She told of entering darkness, then a tunnel, then being met by a “tall and nice” woman named Elizabeth who took her through the tunnel. She met several people, including her late grandfather and two boys named Mark and Andy. She also reported visiting her own home and seeing her brothers playing with a toy, while her mother cooked chicken and rice. She knew what they were wearing. Her parents confirmed the details.¹³

Katie’s parents were Mormons who had not talked to her about tunnels, guardian angels, or anything of the kind. When her grandfather died, her mother had told her that death was “like sending someone on a boat ride.”¹⁴ Katie saw no boat ride. She saw a tunnel, a guide, deceased relatives, and Jesus. Whatever produced her experience, it was not her parents’ teaching.

3. Atwater’s Research: Patterns Across Hundreds of Cases

No one has spent more time with child near-death experiencers than P. M. H. Atwater. Atwater is one of the early pioneers in NDE research, having begun her work in 1978. She herself had three near-death experiences and then devoted decades to studying the phenomenon in others, with particular focus on children.¹⁵

Her book The Forever Angels reports the findings of her second major study of childhood NDEs. She focused specifically on children who had their experiences before the age of six, many of them newborns, infants, and toddlers. The study drew on 120 primary cases, with additional cases pulled from her earlier work.¹⁶ Her method was direct and personal: face-to-face interviews, often sitting on the floor to be at eye level with the smallest children. She cross-checked her findings at least four times with different people in different parts of the country.¹⁷ And she rejected about 15 percent of the interview opportunities she had, because the child seemed to be adjusting their story to match a parent’s expectations.¹⁸

What Atwater found confirmed the bigger picture. Children and adults displayed similar patterning in their NDE scenarios and aftereffects, though they were, as she put it, “worlds apart in how the phenomenon affected them” over time.¹⁹ The scenarios were the same. The way children handled them afterward was very different. Adults could choose how to process the experience. Children often could not. Many tucked the memory away and did not begin to integrate it until decades later.

"I quickly learned that although adults and children displayed similar patterning with scenarios and aftereffects, they were worlds apart in how the phenomenon affected them at both the moment of and over time." — P. M. H. Atwater, The Forever Angels²⁰

Atwater’s largest cluster of cases fell between three and five years of age. The second-largest cluster was birth to fifteen months. Drowning was the most common cause of crisis, followed by birth complications, high fever, surgery, accidents, and child abuse.²¹

One finding stands out for our purposes. Many of Atwater’s subjects were preverbal when they had their experience. They could not yet form sentences, let alone describe a tunnel or a being of light. And yet, once they gained language, they described exactly those things. Some children who were infants or newborns at the time of their crisis grew up exhibiting the typical aftereffects of a near-death experience without ever knowing why they felt so different from other children.²² The pattern of aftereffects gave them away even when the memory did not.

4. Consistency Across the Decades

Here is something I think many readers will find striking. When I scored the 5,278 near-death experiences in my doctoral research, I was not only comparing experiences across cultures and age groups. I was comparing them across time. The cases in my dataset spanned seven decades, from the middle of the twentieth century through the 2020s. And across all of those decades, the core features of the NDE stayed remarkably stable.²⁴

This matters because of a date: 1975. That is the year Raymond Moody published Life After Life, the book that introduced the term “near-death experience” to the public and described its features in detail for the first time (see Chapter 6). If the cultural-expectation theory were right, we should see a clear shift in NDE reports around 1975. Before that year, few people had heard of NDEs. After that year, the concept was everywhere: bookstores, talk shows, magazine covers. If culture were shaping the experience, reports from the 1950s and 1960s should look different from reports of the 1980s and 1990s.

They do not. In my data, the core features held steady across the 1975 dividing line. People who nearly died in 1958 described the same tunnel, the same light, the same loving presence, and the same reluctance to return that people who nearly died in 1998 described. The script did not change when the culture learned the script.²⁵

Now add children to this picture. The children in these studies had even less exposure to the NDE concept than the pre-1975 adults did. A three-year-old in 2010 may live in a culture full of NDE talk, but that culture has not reached a three-year-old. The child does not watch talk shows. The child does not browse bookstores. And still, the child describes leaving the body, passing through darkness, meeting a loving figure, and returning.

Jeffrey Long drew the conclusion plainly. The lack of significant difference between children’s and adults’ NDEs, combined with the lack of significant difference across cultures around the world, “is consistent with the concept that NDEs occur independently from physical brain function as currently understood.”²⁷

5. The Culture Objection Answered

The argument from culture is one of the most common explanations skeptics offer. It goes like this: people who nearly die see what their culture has taught them to expect. Christians see Jesus. Hindus see Yamraj, the god of death. Westerners see tunnels and light. People in other parts of the world see other things. The experience is real as an experience, but its content is supplied by cultural conditioning, not by another world.

I take this argument seriously. It deserves a fair hearing, and the full response belongs to Chapter 24. But the evidence from children puts heavy pressure on it right here.

Consider what the culture argument needs to be true. It needs children under five to have absorbed a detailed script about the afterlife, including tunnels, beings of light, deceased relatives, boundaries they must not cross, and a command to return. It needs preverbal infants to have loaded that script from their environment before they can even speak. And it needs all of these children, across decades and across countries, to be playing back the same script.

That is a lot to ask of a three-year-old.

Long’s cross-cultural data makes it harder still. NDERF collected accounts in twenty-three languages from dozens of countries. When Long compared non-Western NDEs to Western ones, he found impressive similarities in content. His conclusion: “All near-death experience elements appearing in Western NDEs are present in non-Western NDEs.”²⁸ A study of nineteen Iranian Muslim NDEs reached a similar finding: Muslim NDEs “may not be especially different in their key features from Western NDEs and therefore not heavily influenced by cultural variations, including prior religious or spiritual beliefs.”²⁹

Long connected these two findings explicitly. The children’s data and the cross-cultural data point the same way:

"The lack of significant differences in the content of near-death experiences around the world, including NDEs from non-Western countries, suggests that NDE content is not substantially modified by preexisting cultural influences. This finding is consistent with the previously discussed finding that children age five and under, who during their brief lives have received far less cultural influence than adults, have NDEs with content that is essentially the same as older children and adults." — Jeffrey Long, M.D., in Hagan, The Science of Near-Death Experiences³⁰

If you are looking for a purely natural explanation for all of this, the field is narrowing. You can still try expectation, but expectation does not explain toddlers. You can try the dying brain, but the dying brain should produce different images from different memory banks. And children’s memory banks, especially the very youngest, have almost nothing in them about the afterlife.

I am not claiming that every child’s NDE report is flawless. Children can be influenced. They can confabulate. We will look at those objections shortly. But the overall pattern is hard to set aside. When the people least shaped by culture report the same features as the people most shaped by it, the “culture made it up” theory has a problem.

D. What the Researchers and Scholars Say

The pioneering researcher in children’s NDEs was Melvin Morse, a Seattle pediatrician. His encounter with Katie in the 1980s led him to a three-year study of children who had survived cardiac arrest, funded through the National Cancer Institute. Of twelve children who had survived cardiac arrest, every one of them reported at least one component of the NDE.³¹ Morse estimated that about 70 percent of children who come close to death would report an NDE.³² His book Closer to the Light brought children’s NDEs to public attention for the first time. After studying the full range of proposed explanations, he concluded that “the simplest explanation is that NDEs are actually glimpses into the world beyond.”³³

Atwater built on Morse’s work with a much larger sample, though her methods and interpretive framework were different. Where Morse validated children’s experiences close to the time they occurred, Atwater took the long view, interviewing adults near the end of life who recalled NDEs from their earliest years. Bruce Greyson praised this strategy for giving “an unprecedented ‘long view’ of how NDEs influence these children over the entire course of their lives.”³⁴

There is an honest disagreement between the two researchers about long-term effects. When Morse followed up on thirty childhood NDErs seven years later, he found that they were well-balanced, more likely to eat healthily, better in school, and none were addicted to alcohol or drugs.³⁵ Atwater’s long-term data told a more complex story: over half of her sample of childhood NDErs dealt with depression, and over a third struggled with alcohol.³⁶ The likely reason for the difference is that Morse validated the children’s experiences early, helping them make sense of what had happened. Many of Atwater’s subjects had their experiences as infants or toddlers and were never given that validation. They grew up feeling different and not knowing why.

Jeffrey Long brought the weight of large-scale data to the question. His NDERF database gave him the numbers to compare children’s and adults’ experiences head-to-head in a way earlier researchers could not. His finding of no significant difference across thirty-three content questions was a strong, statistically grounded result.³⁷

William Serdahely, another researcher, compared retrospective accounts of childhood NDEs with contemporary pediatric NDE accounts and found that “adult retrospective accounts were indistinguishable from contemporary pediatric NDEs.”³⁸ In other words, when adults looked back on childhood NDEs years later, they told the same kind of story that children told at the time. Memory did not reshape the experience into something different.

Penny Sartori, a nurse-researcher, contributed her own finding. Her work included children who later in life accurately described events at their birth or infancy. She argued that this shows a mature, functioning brain is not needed for an NDE, a conclusion that sits awkwardly with any theory that locates the experience entirely inside the brain.³⁹

One researcher deserves special attention because of where her work took her personally. Diane Komp was a pediatric oncologist who spent her career treating children with cancer and teaching at Yale University School of Medicine. She began her career, by her own account, somewhere between agnosticism and atheism. Her assumption was clear: if she were ever to believe in God, it would require testimony from witnesses who had no cultural reason to expect what they reported.⁵⁰

She could not have guessed that those witnesses would be children.

Seven-year-old Hannah was dying of leukemia. In her final moments, she sat up in her hospital bed and said: “The angels, they’re so beautiful! Mommy, can you see them? Do you hear their singing? I’ve never heard such beautiful singing!” Then she lay back on her pillow and died. Her parents responded not with grief but with awe. They felt they had been given a gift.⁵¹

Komp had expected that sitting with a dying child would be a solemn duty. She had not expected joy. But this was only the beginning. In another case, a four-year-old boy reported a vision of an angel visiting him. Afterward, he called the hospital staff into his room one by one. He thanked each of them for their care. Then he said goodbye, lay down, and died. He was calm. He was lucid. He was not upset. If not for a message from somewhere else, how could he have known he was dying?⁵²

Over years of such encounters, Komp recognized that her secular worldview had been filtering what she was willing to notice. She had been deaf to a dimension of her patients’ experience. Once she began to listen without that filter, she found the evidence overwhelming. Her experiences with dying children led her not just to belief in God, but to a personal faith in a God who loves and cares for the smallest among us.⁵³

Angela Ethier, who earned a doctorate of science in nursing, studied death-related sensory experiences in children through direct interviews with parents. She found a consistent pattern: children who had not been told they were dying nonetheless knew. They were excited about what they had seen. They tried to prepare their parents for what was coming. One mother described her son’s attitude: “I feel like he told us, ‘I am going, it is okay for you guys to let go of me.’ . . . We were more like the child and he was the parent.” Ethier concluded that these experiences pointed beyond the natural world, to a messenger guiding the child through the dying process.⁵⁵

In my doctoral research, I assessed the weight of evidence from children’s experiences and rated them nine out of ten in favor of the afterlife. That is one of the highest scores I gave to any category of evidence. The reasoning was straightforward. Under a purely natural explanation, children should not know they are dying when no one has told them. They should not report a consistent pattern of visions when they have no prior knowledge of that pattern. And what they see should reflect their own expectations, which at three or four years old would be playgrounds and parents, not tunnels and angels. The data simply did not fit the naturalistic theory.⁵⁶

There are some differences worth noting honestly. Researchers initially thought that children’s NDEs lacked certain adult features, such as the life review and distressing experiences. More recent and thorough work has shown this is not quite right. Children can have life reviews, though they tend to be shorter. And children can have distressing experiences, though they report them less often. One feature that does appear more often in children is the presence of a guide who takes the child by the hand and leads them into the light. Adults are more likely to travel alone or to feel pulled by the light itself.⁴⁸ If the experience were purely a brain product, it is hard to see why a dying brain would add a hand-holding guide for a child but not for an adult. But if a loving God is on the other side, it makes all the sense in the world.

Taken together, these researchers converge on a consistent finding: children’s NDEs match adults’ NDEs in content, even when the children have had almost no opportunity to learn what an NDE is “supposed to” look like.

E. Counter-Objections

Fair enough, the skeptic says. But children are not sealed chambers. They pick things up. Let me state the strongest pushbacks and answer each one.

Objection 1: Parents and doctors unconsciously coach children. A child has a medical crisis and survives. A worried parent, perhaps one who believes in the afterlife, asks leading questions: “Did you see a light? Did you see Grandma?” The child, eager to please, says yes. Over time, the story grows.

One detail from the research stopped me cold. Physicist Sir William Barrett, one of the earliest scientific investigators of deathbed experiences, noticed that dying children who reported seeing angels were often surprised that the angels had no wings. Barrett pointed out that if these children were imagining things, surely they would imagine angels with wings, since every picture book and Christmas card they had ever seen showed angels that way.⁵⁷

Angela Ethier found the same thing in her interviews. One preschooler, after swearing her mother to secrecy with a pinky promise, asked if her mother could see the angels in the room. The mother, trying to play along, said yes. The child asked her to describe them. “Mine has big wings,” the mother offered. The little girl corrected her: “Mama, you don’t have to lie. They don’t have wings.” She then described the angels in detail.⁵⁸ Think about what this means. If the child were drawing from her cultural expectations, the angels would have had wings. The fact that they did not tells us she was reporting something she actually saw, not something she had been taught to imagine.

Objection 2: Children confabulate vividly. Young children have active imaginations. They invent invisible friends, talk to stuffed animals, and tell elaborate stories about things that never happened. Why should we take their NDE reports more seriously than any other childhood fantasy?

This is partly right. Children do have rich imaginations, and not every claim a child makes should be taken at face value. But researchers have noticed a difference between NDE accounts and ordinary childhood fantasy. NDE accounts are remarkably consistent across children who do not know each other, across cultures, and across decades. Childhood fantasies, by contrast, are wildly individual. One child invents a dragon friend; another invents a tea party on the moon. NDE reports follow a pattern that no one taught the children to follow.⁴¹ And crucially, the aftereffects are real and lasting. Children who have had NDEs often show measurable changes in personality, intelligence, and values that persist for decades (see Chapter 6). Childhood fantasies do not leave that kind of mark.

Objection 3: Modern media saturate even young children with afterlife imagery. Television, movies, picture books, overheard conversations. Even a two-year-old absorbs more than we realize. Perhaps children are picking up afterlife images from their environment without anyone noticing.

There is some truth here, especially in the age of screens. But this objection does not explain the pre-1975 cases or the cases from cultures where NDE imagery is not in the media at all. It also does not explain infants and newborns. A six-month-old who has a cardiac arrest during surgery has not been watching television. And Atwater’s data includes cases from birth to fifteen months, where media exposure is effectively zero.⁴²

Objection 4: The features really do vary across cultures more than claimed. Some scholars argue that NDE reports from non-Western cultures include genuinely different elements, such as being sent to the wrong person by a bureaucratic afterlife, as in some Indian cases. This shows that culture does shape the experience.

I grant that there are cultural variations in the details. Some Indian NDE reports include a “messenger of death” figure not commonly found in Western accounts. Some features are described in culturally colored language. But the core elements persist: separation from the body, a journey into light, encounters with the dead, a boundary, a return. Long’s cross-cultural data supports this strongly.⁴³ The variations are real, but they are variations on a theme, not different themes altogether. Think of it this way: if ten people described the same building, their descriptions would differ in detail, but a listener would still recognize that they were all describing the same building. For a fuller treatment of the naturalistic explanations and why they fall short, see Chapter 24 and Appendix B.

F. Conclusion and Pastoral Application

Here is what the evidence from children tells us.

First, the core features of the near-death experience are not a product of adult expectation or cultural programming. Young children who carry none of that baggage report the same things adults do. The experience comes from somewhere deeper than a filing cabinet of borrowed images.

Second, the consistency across decades and cultures adds weight to what we have already seen in the veridical cases (Chapter 9) and the blind NDErs (Chapter 10). Something real is happening. Something is meeting these people at the edge of death. And the smallest and most innocent among us seem to meet it just as clearly as anyone else.

Third, the very fact that children who cannot possibly have learned the script still follow it is, I believe, strong support for the view this book has been building: that a human being is more than a body (see Chapter 2). If the soul is real, and if the soul can function apart from the body (see Chapter 8), then a child’s soul does not need a fully developed brain to see, to feel, and to remember. The soul does not wait for the brain to grow up.

And that brings me to the pastoral word I want to leave with you.

If you are a parent whose child has said something strange after a medical crisis, listen. Do not panic. Do not dismiss what the child says. Morse’s research suggests that children whose NDEs are acknowledged and validated early tend to do much better over the long term than those whose experiences are buried in silence.⁴⁴ Your child is not crazy. Your child may have been given a glimpse of something real.

If you are a pastor or caregiver counseling a family through a child’s medical crisis, and the child speaks of tunnels and lights and people they met while they were “gone,” take it seriously. You do not have to accept every detail as gospel. Apply the same discernment you would bring to any experience (Chapter 23). But start with an open ear, not a closed door.

Jesus once told His disciples that they would need to become like children to enter the kingdom of heaven.⁴⁵ I wonder sometimes if children who have near-death experiences are showing us what that looks like. They meet the light without the filters we spend a lifetime building. They see what is there without all the reasons we tell ourselves it cannot be there.

“Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger.” — Psalm 8:2 (ESV)

The Psalmist believed that God could speak through the smallest voices. The evidence from children’s near-death experiences suggests he was right.