Chapter 9
Jesus Meets the Dying:
Encounters with Christ in NDEs and DBEs

A Monday Morning

Paul went back to work on a Monday. It was the first Monday after he had buried his daughter. He was forty-four years old. She had been eighteen. A car accident on a rainy Tuesday in April had ended everything he thought his life was going to be.

His coworkers did what good coworkers do. They left him alone. They nodded when he walked in. One of them, a woman named Rhonda from the accounts department, set a thin paperback book on the corner of his desk without saying anything. It had a blue cover. A sticky note on the front said, Paul, I don't know if this will help. Somebody gave it to me years ago when my mom died. I saved it for you.

He did not open it that day. He did not open it that week. The book sat on the edge of his desk like a small, patient animal. Some nights he took it home. Some nights he left it behind. Two months later, at the end of a Friday, he put it in his bag.

He read it that weekend in one sitting. The book was Waking Up in Heaven by Crystal McVea. He had never read anything like it. He had heard of such books, of course. Everybody has. His pastor did not much like them. His pastor said these books were "sensational" and that Christians should not put "too much stock" in them. Paul understood. He had nodded along for years.

But now his daughter was dead. And he was reading the story of a woman who was not a very good Christian, who had broken every one of the Ten Commandments by her own account, who had been abused as a little girl and spent most of her life angry at God, and who had died in a hospital for nine minutes and woken up in the presence of Jesus.¹ He read about the being she saw on her right, the one she did not have to ask about because she simply knew. He read about her falling to her knees. He read about her saying, out loud, in heaven, "I could worship you for eternity."

Paul wept. He wept for the woman in the book. He wept for his daughter. He wept because he had spent a week choosing music for the funeral and never once imagined, with any real force, that Jesus might have met her himself. He had believed it. Of course he had. He was a Christian. But he had not imagined it.

On Sunday afternoon he called his pastor. He did not know why he was calling. He said, "I read this book about a near-death experience. A woman who saw Jesus. Is it all right that it helped me?" His pastor was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "Paul, come see me Tuesday."

This chapter is for the pastor who sat across from Paul on that Tuesday afternoon, and for the pastor who felt his own heart tighten as he weighed what to say. It is for Paul, too, of course — and for every grieving father and mother and wife and husband and friend who has wondered whether they were allowed to be comforted by the possibility that Jesus himself met their loved one at the end. I want to say, plainly and for the record: yes. You are allowed. More than allowed. You are invited. Let me tell you why.

The Pattern No One Expected

The surprise of the research literature on near-death experiences is not only how many people report seeing a being of light. That much was flagged fifty years ago. The surprise, for careful readers, is how many people report seeing, specifically and by name, Jesus.

Professor J. Steve Miller has done some of the most painstaking work on this question. He took a consecutive block of 141 near-death experience reports from the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) database — not a handpicked collection, but every case in sequence — and he noted every mention of Jesus.² He did this on purpose. He did not want to be accused of cherry-picking the stories that matched his theology. He took whatever came.

What he found was that twenty percent of those NDE reports involved an encounter with Jesus. When he culled the cases that were not true near-death experiences — people on hallucinogenic drugs, people with signs of mental illness, people plainly trying to sell a book — the percentage was eighteen. One in five. He wrote, almost apologetically, that this was not what he had expected. He had assumed Jesus encounters would be rare enough to be set aside as anomalies.³ They were not rare. They were core.

He is not the only researcher to find this. Cardiologist Michael Sabom, in his Atlanta study, found that thirty-six percent of conservative Christian experiencers and thirty-one percent of liberal Christian experiencers reported an encounter with Jesus or "the Lord."⁴ A smaller pilot study of sixty-two cases submitted globally found thirteen percent reporting Jesus, including the only self-described Jewish experiencer in the sample.⁵ John Burke's book Imagine Heaven gathers dozens of such accounts from hospice workers, physicians, nurses, pastors, atheists, and children.⁶

This is not what one would predict if all we had were religious people "expecting" to see Jesus and therefore seeing him. Most near-death experiencers do not expect to die at all. They go into surgery expecting to wake up. They get in a car expecting to drive home. They are not preparing to meet anyone. Miller makes this point with care: atheists do not expect any afterlife, and yet large numbers of them report one.⁷ Jews do not expect to meet Jesus, and yet some do. Hindus do not expect to meet Jesus, and yet some do. The experiencer's expectations do not predict the content of the experience as tidily as skeptical critics propose.

Somewhere between one in eight and one in three dying people, depending on the study, meet someone they identify — without being told, without prompting, and often to their own surprise — as Jesus Christ. That is the pattern. I want to look at it with you now, slowly and with care, and let it do what it does best: comfort the broken.

What the Encounters Feel Like

Before we meet individual experiencers, it is worth noticing what is shared across these accounts. Certain features appear again and again. They are not uniform. They are not identical. Different people see different things. But underneath the variety is a recognizable shape, and it is worth naming it.

First, there is overwhelming love. Not a warm feeling about love. Love itself, received as a substance, as a weight, as an ocean. Crystal McVea said, "It was like being bathed in love. It was a brightness I didn't just see, but felt."⁸ A man dying of pneumonia said of Jesus, "He was kind, warm, gentle, loving, and he cared about me. He received me. He is REAL. I always believed in him before… but now I can promise that he is REAL."⁹ Over and over, the experiencers use the same small set of words. Warm. Gentle. Loving. Home.

Second, there is recognition without introduction. The being does not identify himself. He does not need to. The experiencer simply knows. A woman in the NDERF study wrote, "I knew this heavenly personage was Jesus. He didn't say who he was, I just knew. I knew this heavenly personage was Jesus because I recognized him as a familiar friend."¹⁰ Another: "He was tall and strong, with long dark hair and a wonderful tender smile. His eyes were unforgettable, immense, dark, so loving and full of wisdom."¹¹ There is no guessing game. There is no "I wondered if it was him." There is only the plain, stunned recognition that shows up in so many accounts that researchers have stopped being able to explain it away.

Third, there is authority. Jesus does not appear in these accounts as one presence among many. He is sovereign. He decides. He sends. He calls. "I was given the choice to either go back to earth and live more life or stay with him in heaven."¹² "Jesus said, 'Come! And again, Come!'"¹³ This is not a generic spirit guide. This is someone with a voice that matters.

Fourth — and this one takes my breath away every time I read a new account — are the wounds. Again and again, Christian experiencers and non-Christian experiencers report that the Jesus they meet carries the scars of crucifixion. Not as symbols. Not as decoration. As real marks, visible, in his hands and side and feet. Cardiologist Michael Sabom documented an open-heart surgery patient who reported during his NDE, "I looked at his hands and there were the scars where the nails had gone through."¹⁴ Gary Wood, in his NDE, saw "where nails had been driven into his hands, not his palms as some paintings depict, but into his wrists."¹⁵ Four-year-old Colton Burpo, too young to have learned the theology of the atonement, told his father, "Jesus has markers, Daddy. Red markers."¹⁶ When his father asked where, he pointed to his own hands and the tops of his feet.

This matters. In the Gospel of John, the risen Jesus shows Thomas the holes in his hands. Not hidden. Not healed away. Still there. Visible. "Put your finger here; see my hands," Jesus says (John 20:27). The wounds of the cross are not erased by the resurrection. They are kept. And near-death experiencers — from little boys to cardiologists' patients to former drug users — describe the very same thing, without coaching, without a script, without, in many cases, much theological formation at all.

Fifth, there are the eyes. The eyes come up so often that it feels almost like a shared dialect. "They were piercing eyes. It was like they permeated every part of me."¹⁷ "His eyes were like flames of fire with changing colors."¹⁸ "I could get lost in his eyes and never want to come out." Vicki Umipeg, who had been blind from birth and had never "seen" anything in any ordinary sense, described seeing Jesus's eyes during her NDE: "They were piercing eyes. It was like they permeated every part of me, but not in a mean way. It was like you couldn't lie about anything, and he just looked everywhere and he could see everything. Yet I wanted to reveal everything to him."¹⁹ That is a remarkable line for anyone to say, and doubly remarkable for someone born without sight. The visionary testimony of Scripture says something very similar. Daniel saw eyes "like flaming torches" (Daniel 10:6). John on Patmos saw eyes "like a flame of fire" (Revelation 1:14). People who know nothing of Daniel or John are describing what the biblical seers described. That is not nothing.

Four Faces: Some People Who Met Jesus

Statistics give us the shape. Stories give us the weight. Let me introduce you to four people — or to a composite that gestures toward hundreds of thousands — whose encounters with Jesus have become part of the public record. Let them speak for themselves.

Crystal McVea

Crystal, whose story I have already gestured at, went into the hospital for pancreatitis in 2009. Something went wrong. For nine minutes her body failed, and during that time she found herself — her awake, aware, thinking self — in the presence of God. She was not a woman you would have predicted would write a heaven book. She had been sexually abused beginning at age three. She had broken, she says, every one of the Ten Commandments. She had challenged God repeatedly. She wrote, "I wanted to know why he didn't love me. Or why he lets bad things happen."²⁰

Then she died. And the first thing that happened, she reports, is that she fell to her knees.

As I stood in front of him and I faced him and I fell to my knees, and I raised my hands, the question I called out to him was, "Why didn't I do more for you?" Because in an instant, he revealed his true self to me which is love. I had never truly worshiped God ever in my entire life. But I fell in front of him and I worshiped him. And as I lay there in worship in awe of this Creator, I remember saying, "I could worship you for eternity."²¹

What is striking in Crystal's account is the reversal of her expectations. She had rehearsed her accusations. She had prepared her speech. She had every intention of demanding answers. And in the actual presence of the living Christ, the accusations evaporated. Not because she was silenced. Because love — the real, undefended, unhedged love of the actual God — made the accusations unnecessary. She saw, in his face, the answer her heart had been starving for.

That does not mean her questions were wrong to ask. It means her questions were not the ultimate thing. The ultimate thing was the One she was asking. When she saw him, her questions did not disappear; they were absorbed into a larger answer.

Howard Storm

Howard Storm was a university art professor, a philosophical atheist, a man who described himself as "an angry, domineering, and very sarcastic person."²² In 1985, on a trip to France, he collapsed in a Paris hotel with a perforated stomach. In the hospital, before surgery, his body gave out. What he experienced next was not a bright tunnel. It was a place of cruelty and despair — a distressing NDE, of the kind we will look at more closely in Chapter 20.

Howard was dragged toward darkness by beings who had seemed helpful at first and then turned on him. He was terrified. In his own words, he was being tormented, and he knew, for the first time in his adult life, that he was lost.

And then, deep in the dark, a small memory surfaced. From childhood. A Sunday school song. "Jesus loves me." He began to sing it, broken, gasping. And at the name of Jesus, the creatures drew back. And a light appeared in the distance and came toward him, and he was carried by the arms of Jesus out of the pit.

What matters about Howard's story, for our purposes in this chapter, is not the horror of what he escaped but the kindness of the One who came. Storm, who had spent his adult life certain that God was at best indifferent, spent the rest of the NDE in the most tender presence he had ever known. He was shown his life by Jesus and the angels — a life review, not of his achievements, but of his relationships, his children, his students, his wife. "The whole emphasis," Howard recalled, "was on people and not on things."²³ And through all of it, he reports, "no matter what we watched me do in life, they communicated their deep love for me, even as they expressed their disapproval of things I did."²⁴

Howard Storm came back from that experience, left his professorship, went to seminary, and became a pastor. That is not a minor aftershock. That is a life picked up and set down in another direction. If any NDE proves anything, that kind of sustained change — toward Christ, toward love, toward service — proves that something real happened.

Dean Braxton

Dean Braxton, a Christian from Washington State, died in a hospital in 2006 during kidney stone surgery after complications. He was clinically dead, by his doctors' measurements, for more than an hour. In his book In Heaven! he describes standing before Jesus and being unable to tear himself away. What he says about Jesus's face has become quietly famous among NDE researchers for its specificity.

Jesus is more beautiful, wonderful, and glorious than I can explain. How do I tell you what his face looks like? His face was as if it were liquid crystal glass made up of pure love, light, and life. His face had the colors of the rainbow and colors I cannot describe inside it. All these colors appeared at the same time in his face. They came out and off him as the waves of the ocean coming on to the shore.²⁵

Dean also speaks about the eyes, which by now you will recognize as a common element. "When I looked into Jesus' eyes, his eyes were like flames of fire with changing colors of red, orange, blue, green, yellow, and many other colors. I experienced in his eyes that they are deep and full of life. I could get lost in his eyes and never want to come out. In his eyes I saw the love for every human and creation of God."²⁶

Dean returned, to his own grief, with a simple message: people need to know that Jesus loves them, and that he is really there, and that heaven is a real place. This is the testimony that NDE accounts keep giving us. It does not contradict Scripture. It sits right beside it, the way a friend's story about a person you love sits right beside your own memories.

Vicki Umipeg

Vicki was born blind — totally blind, not even light perception — because of over-oxygenation in an incubator after her premature birth. She had never seen a color in her life, never seen a face, never seen a book. In 1973, at the age of twenty-two, she was in a car accident that left her clinically dead for a period.

What Vicki reports from her NDE — one of her two — is that she saw. Not light, exactly. Not colors in the ordinary sense. But a landscape, and people, and Jesus. She told NDE researcher Kenneth Ring:

He embraced me, and I was very close to him. And I felt his beard and his hair. They were very close to me. He actually enveloped me — that's the only word I can think of to describe it. He enveloped me with so much warmth and love and with his actual physical presence. His hair was past his shoulders. His eyes were piercing. It was like they permeated every part of me, but not in a mean way. It was like you couldn't lie about anything, and he just looked everywhere and he could see everything. Yet I wanted to reveal everything to him.²⁷

When the interviewer gently asked whether the Jesus she described corresponded to what she had been taught from the Bible, Vicki admitted she could not really answer, because she had never been able to picture what the Bible described. She had no visual frame of reference for any of it.²⁸ The pastoral weight of this case is considerable. A woman who could not form mental images of Jesus in any ordinary sense nonetheless describes meeting him with a specificity that matches both Scripture and the testimony of sighted experiencers.

I am not claiming that Vicki's account proves anything scientifically. I am saying that, in conversation with hundreds of other accounts, it adds to a pattern that does not have a tidy naturalistic explanation.

Jesus Across Cultures

Perhaps the deepest challenge to the claim that NDE Jesus encounters are just Christians "projecting" their expectations is the data from non-Christian experiencers. In John Burke's gathered research, and in Jeffrey Long's work, we meet people of other faiths — Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, formerly atheist — who report meeting Jesus despite having no prior expectation of him.²⁹

Yale pediatric oncologist Diane Komp tells the story of a four-year-old Chinese boy who drowned and was pronounced dead. When he revived, he told his mother about a man who "held out his hand and pulled him out of the water." The family had fled mainland China and, in Komp's telling, "had never had contact with Christians." When the boy's mother asked who the man was, he answered with a child's impatience: "Don't you know? It's Jesus."³⁰

A Jewish woman in Nancy Evans Bush's research described meeting "Jesus Christ — I mean the way he is made out to be in all the paintings, with white robe and beard and hood draped and so soft and sweet and so angelic — and I never wanted to leave this man and this place." She then struggles to integrate what happened. "I know that it all happened, and yet, logically, I cannot account for the happening — or possibly I just can't totally accept the reality of it — because I am Jewish and I do not believe in Jesus Christ."³¹

A sixty-four-year-old Jewish man, after a cardiac arrest, reported: "Jesus picked me up and he said: 'I'm going to carry you through this, my son.' You know, 'Footprints in the Sand?' Well, I was raised Jewish and am Jewish, and I don't believe in Jesus like the Catholics do. But now I believe in Jesus for Jesus."³²

Meanwhile, when Miller examined the corresponding pattern for other religions — asking whether Muslims encounter Muhammad, Hindus encounter Krishna or other niche Hindu gods, Buddhists encounter the Buddha — the numbers do not match. In the NDERF database of more than five thousand cases, only three experiencers reported Krishna, only two reported Buddha, and among eighty self-identified Muslims there were no reports of Muhammad.³³ That is not a pattern. That is, statistically, noise. By contrast, the Jesus reports are not noise. They are a signal.

I do not rehearse these numbers to shame anyone or score a point against any religion. I rehearse them because they matter for pastoral care. When your daughter dies, the question is not "which religion wins?" The question is, "was there Someone there for her?" And the evidence of the research, set alongside the Scripture we will turn to next, suggests that the Someone who reliably shows up is Jesus.

The Jesus of the Accounts and the Jesus of Scripture

What makes these encounters more than a curiosity is that the Jesus they describe matches, with remarkable fidelity, the Jesus we already know from the Bible. I want to lay the two portraits side by side, gently, so you can see the overlap. I am not arguing that the NDE Jesus is the real Jesus because he matches the Bible. I am observing that if the biblical Jesus really is real and really does meet the dying, we would expect the reports to look like this. And they do.

The Jesus of the NDE accounts is overwhelmingly loving. That matches 1 John 4:8 — "Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love" — and John 13:1, where Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, loved his own "to the end." The Jesus of the accounts has authority: he commands, he decides, he sends. That matches Matthew 28:18 — "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me." The Jesus of the accounts knows every thought of the experiencer without being told. That matches John 2:24–25, which tells us that Jesus "knew all people… he himself knew what was in man." The Jesus of the accounts carries the wounds of crucifixion, including the sometimes-noted wound in the wrist rather than the palm, and that matches John 20:20–27 where Thomas is invited to touch those very wounds. The Jesus of the accounts welcomes the dying. That matches Acts 7:55–56, where the dying Stephen looks up and sees heaven opened and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. Not seated. Standing. Standing to welcome him home.

The Jesus of the accounts is radiant, filled and surrounded with light. That matches John 8:12 — "I am the light of the world" — and Revelation 1:16, where John sees the risen Lord and "his face was like the sun shining in full strength." The Jesus of the accounts exposes sin — Howard Storm's life review contains real moral weight — but does not condemn. That matches John 8:11, where the adulterous woman is told, "Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more." The moral clarity is there. So is the mercy. You cannot have one without the other and still be Jesus.

I do not want to over-argue this. I do not want to make the NDE accounts do theological work they cannot bear. My point is simpler. If you already believe the Bible, you will find the NDE literature stunningly consistent with it. If you are just beginning to consider the biblical portrait of Jesus, you will find that hundreds of people who nearly died are describing a being whose personality, appearance, authority, and love look just like him. That is a fair convergence. A grieving Christian can lean into it without embarrassment.

"But What If They're Wrong?"

A careful reader will press back on me here. Some NDE accounts contain elements that do not fit biblical Christianity — statements about reincarnation, for instance, or about all religions being equally valid, or about a universe without hell. Does the presence of those elements in some reports undermine the Jesus encounters in others?

It is a fair question, and I want to answer it honestly.

The first thing to say is this: the NDE literature does not speak with one voice. There are good accounts, mediocre accounts, and accounts that should be set aside. Miller, in his own work, argues that when an experiencer insists he has learned, for example, specific doctrinal content from the other side that contradicts Scripture, that is a red flag. It does not mean the person is lying. It may mean they had a mixed experience, or they are interpreting their experience through a framework their culture gave them, or, in some cases, it may mean that the experience itself contained elements that were not of God.³⁴ Scripture itself warns us about this: "Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14). Paul is the one who warns us. We are not being paranoid to take that seriously.

The second thing to say is that not overriding Scripture is not the same as not telling us anything. When I read the thousands of NDE accounts that have been collected over the last fifty years, I find a pattern. The pattern is overwhelmingly consistent with the biblical portrait of Jesus — loving, authoritative, wounded, radiant, welcoming, knowing every thought. Outside of that pattern are reports that deviate from Scripture in various ways. My posture toward those reports is the same as Paul's posture toward prophecy in the first-century church: "Test everything; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Not "throw everything away because some of it is bad." Not "believe every word uncritically." Test. Keep what aligns with Scripture. Set aside what does not.

This posture allows us to be genuinely comforted by the strong, biblical, Christ-centered testimonies that fill the research literature, without pretending that every account in every popular book is equally reliable. I think this is the healthiest Christian response to the NDE phenomenon. We are not forced to choose between credulity and dismissal. We can do what the Bereans did in Acts 17:11, who "received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so."

When the Non-Believer Meets Christ

Some of the most moving NDE accounts in the research literature involve atheists, agnostics, and people of other religions who encountered Jesus and whose lives were undone — in the best sense — by what they found. Howard Storm we have already met. There is also Ian McCormack, a New Zealand surfer who was stung repeatedly by a box jellyfish off the coast of Mauritius in 1982. As he lay dying in the ambulance, a half-remembered prayer from his Christian mother floated back to him, and he asked God to forgive his sins. His NDE took him first into a dark, terrifying place; then, when he cried out, a light came and drew him into peace.³⁵ Mickey Robinson, after a plane crash; Dean Braxton, after surgical complications; the Muslim woman Samaa Habib, after being shot during a church bombing — in each case, a real encounter with Jesus reshaped the rest of the person's life.³⁶

Pastorally, this is enormous. The God of the NDE literature is not, in the main, a God who withholds himself from people outside the Christian faith until they die and it is too late. He is a God who meets people at the edge of death — sometimes for the first time — and invites them. That is not universalism. That does not mean everyone who has an NDE is saved. What it means is that the Jesus who told his followers, "Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation" (Mark 16:15), is himself going into those same creations — in the hospital room, in the car wreck, in the dying moments — and making himself available. He is not waiting for us to finish the missions work before he reaches the dying. He has always been ahead of us.

If you are reading this as a grieving Christian whose loved one was not walking with the Lord, take special note. This does not guarantee that your loved one responded to Christ. Nothing in this book guarantees that. But it does mean that the Lord was there. That the possibility of meeting Jesus at the threshold is not a fantasy. That your prayers across the years for that person were heard and honored by a God who kept showing up in ways you did not see. Chapter 13 takes up this entire question — postmortem opportunity for those who died without clear faith — with much more care than I can give it here. For now: the door to hope is not shut.

The Deathbed Vision of Jesus

So far we have been talking mainly about near-death experiences — people who clinically died, encountered something, and came back. But there is a parallel stream in the research, and for many families it is even more common. It is the deathbed vision: the experience of a dying person in their final hours, reporting the presence of someone — often Jesus — who has come to welcome them home.

This is not a modern fashion, invented by the hospice movement. It is as old as Christianity. In Acts 7, Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is stoned to death while the crowd roars around him. He is not hallucinating. His friends are beside him. And yet Stephen, as the stones strike him, gazes into heaven and says, "Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56). He sees Jesus. He names him. He then says, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," and dies. That is a deathbed vision, recorded in Scripture, of the dying man meeting Jesus face to face.³⁷

We have these accounts all the way down the Christian centuries. Augustine, in his Confessions, describes the death of his mother Monica, who said to her sons in her final illness that she was ready to go home to her Lord, and whose radiant peace in dying Augustine never forgot.³⁸ Gregory the Great, bishop of Rome in the sixth century, collects many such accounts in his Dialogues, telling stories of saints and ordinary believers who saw Christ or heard his voice in their dying hours.³⁹

The great evangelist D. L. Moody, dying in 1899, told his family: "Earth recedes, heaven opens before me… God is calling me. There's no pain. No valley. This is glorious."⁴⁰ The Presbyterian theologian J. Gresham Machen, dying of pneumonia in 1937, dictated a final telegram to his friend John Murray: "I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it."⁴¹ He was not hallucinating. He was preaching. Right up until the end.

The evangelist Billy Graham told the story of his own maternal grandmother's death: "The room seemed to fill with a heavenly light. She sat up in bed and almost laughingly said, 'I see Jesus. He has his arms outstretched toward me. I see Ben [her deceased husband] and I see angels.' She slumped over, absent from the body but present with the Lord."⁴² Graham was not prone to sensationalism. He told this story because it was true and because it comforted him. Chapter 10 takes up in more detail the entire phenomenon of peaceful Christian deaths; here I am focused on the specific element of encountering Jesus.

In the modern research, Yale oncologist Diane Komp records a nineteen-year-old cancer patient who told her of meeting a man in a beautiful garden who said he could not come with him yet. When Komp asked who the man was, the young man answered, "I know it was Jesus." Two days later, he told his parents he would not survive the night. He died peacefully in his sleep, exactly as he had said.⁴³ Physician Peter Fenwick collected dozens of similar accounts in his British study: "Jesus came walking up to me with arms outstretched. He was dressed in a long white robe, his hair to his shoulders, ginger-auburn, and he had a short beard. The nearer he got to me I could feel the warmth from his body and as his hands almost touched my face he said, 'Come!' and again, 'Come!'"⁴⁴

The historic Christian deathbed and the contemporary research hospice bed are, in this respect, the same bed. Christians have been telling these stories for two thousand years. Researchers with clipboards are now telling the same stories. Something consistent is happening. And for the Christian, the simplest and most pastorally satisfying explanation is the plainest: Jesus meets the dying.

A Pastoral Theology of Jesus at the End

Let me pull back for a moment and name what is going on here theologically. Because for a grieving Christian, this is not just about collecting interesting stories. It is about the character of the God we trust with our loved ones.

Scripture presents Jesus consistently as the One who seeks. He is the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine to look for the one (Luke 15:4). He is the Good Samaritan who goes to the wounded man in the ditch and does not walk by (Luke 10:33). He is the bridegroom who comes for his bride (Matthew 25:6). He is the friend of sinners (Matthew 11:19). He is the Son of Man who "came to seek and to save the lost" (Luke 19:10). This is not incidental to his identity. This is who he is.

A Jesus who did not come to the dying — who did not bother with them in their final hours — would be a stranger to the Jesus of the Gospels. He would be a Jesus edited down to fit our comfort with how salvation usually happens. But the real Jesus has always surprised people by his availability. He waited at the well for the Samaritan woman (John 4). He sought out Zacchaeus in the tree (Luke 19). He stopped for the blind man outside Jericho when everyone else told him to be quiet (Mark 10). The pattern of the Gospel is a Jesus who goes where the need is, and the need of the dying is the deepest need any human being ever has.

Scripture and research converge on this point. Jesus meets the dying. The Shepherd seeks his sheep. The Groom comes for his bride. The Friend comes to the friend in her final hour. When the saints we love breathe their last, he is there. He is not watching from a distance. He is the first face they see.

Consider what Jesus himself said on the eve of his crucifixion. "In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also" (John 14:2–3). The verb is personal. "I will come again and will take you to myself." Jesus does not dispatch a hired shepherd or an angelic taxi. He comes himself. This is a promise the church has read for two thousand years, but we have sometimes read it only about the Second Coming at the end of history. I want to suggest, gently, that it also describes what happens at the end of each believer's life. He comes. He takes. He carries. That is the pattern of the One who loved us to the end.

Think of the story of the criminal crucified beside Jesus in Luke 23. The man has done nothing to earn what he asks. He simply turns his head on the cross and says, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And Jesus, whose own breath is failing, answers: "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:42–43). That "with me" is load-bearing. The criminal does not go alone. He goes with Jesus. Wherever paradise is, whatever paradise is, the point for the dying man is not the geography. The point is the company. With me. This is how Jesus dies beside the dying. This is how he meets them. He says, in effect, I will be with you.

And this is not a one-off. It is the pattern. Paul, at the end of his life, writes that he is "hard pressed between the two" — between staying here and departing — and insists that "to depart and be with Christ" is "far better" (Philippians 1:23). With Christ. Not just with an idea. Not just in a state. With a Person. The same Person who walked to Emmaus with two grieving disciples and let them slowly realize it was him. The same Person who stood on the beach at dawn and made breakfast for his friends. The same Person who waited in the garden for Mary Magdalene to turn and see him and say his name. That Person waits at the end for the ones he loves.

The practical consequence of this, for the grieving Christian, is immense. You do not have to piece together comfort from scraps. You do not have to wonder whether some generic divine force noticed your loved one's passing. You can say, with the same confidence you would say it about any other truth of the Christian faith: Jesus was there. He took her. He carried her. He is with her.

Does that mean her dying was painless? Not necessarily. Does that mean the last hours of her body's failing were free of sorrow? Not necessarily. The Jesus who meets the dying also wept at Lazarus's tomb and sweat blood in Gethsemane. Christian dying can still be hard. But the One at the end of it is the One who knows what hard feels like. He has been in the grave himself. He does not ask our loved ones to walk anywhere he has not already walked. That is what Psalm 23 means when it says, "Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." The Shepherd is in the valley. He does not call from the other side. He walks through.

There is a reason the early Christians were accused, by their pagan neighbors, of being almost grotesquely unafraid of death. They had seen their friends die singing hymns. They had seen the martyrs under Nero and Domitian die with their faces turned up. Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to the lions, wrote to the church in Rome not to try to stop his martyrdom, because he longed to be with Christ. Polycarp, at eighty-six, refused to curse Christ and said, "Eighty-six years I have served him, and he has done me no wrong." These were not people bragging about their own courage. These were people who had learned, by the Spirit's witness and the testimony of their elders, that the One they had loved all their lives would meet them in the fire.

The research I have walked through in this chapter is not the foundation of the Christian hope. The foundation is the resurrection of Jesus. The empty tomb is the guarantee; the NDE accounts are a kind of echo. But the echo is real. It is saying the same thing the tomb has always said: he is alive, he is the Lord, and he is with his people.

One more thing needs to be said here. The Jesus who meets the dying is not a different Jesus from the one who walks with us now. This is one of the quiet gifts of these accounts. The kindness Crystal McVea met, the gentleness that held Howard Storm, the patience that talked with Vicki despite her lifelong blindness — that is not a heavenly version of Jesus we cannot access until we die. That is the Jesus who is praying for you right now at the right hand of the Father (Romans 8:34). The Jesus who welcomes the dying is the Jesus who welcomes the grieving. The same. Unchanging. "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever" (Hebrews 13:8). So when you picture your loved one in his presence, and you feel the faint tug that maybe that same presence is available to you, even now, in your pain — trust that tug. It is not sentiment. It is accurate. He is with her. He is with you. He is not rationing himself.

What This Means for You

I want to close the main body of this chapter by speaking to you directly, whoever you are, whatever you have been carrying.

If your loved one died in Christ, then the most likely outcome — by Scripture and by research — is that she was met by the very Jesus she served. Not a dream of him. Not an idea of him. The risen Christ, the same One she sang about, the same One she prayed to, the same One whose name she whispered on hard days. He came to her. He called her. He carried her home. You are not guessing when you imagine her with Jesus now. You are remembering what the Bible has always said. This chapter just added the quiet testimony of thousands of experiencers who have seen what Stephen saw.

If your loved one died without clear faith, take this from the chapter: Jesus goes even to people who do not yet know him. He went to the Jewish woman in the NDERF study who said she did not believe in Jesus and then met him anyway. He went to the Chinese boy whose family had never met a Christian. He went to Howard Storm in the pit. He went to Ian McCormack in the ambulance. He will have gone to your loved one too. Whether your loved one received him is a question only the Lord can answer. But the question "did he come?" has an answer, and the answer is: he has come and he does come and he is coming. Chapter 13 explores this more fully. For now, know that hope is not closed.

And if you are reading this because you yourself are afraid to die, receive this: the Jesus you know from Scripture is the Jesus the experiencers describe. He is not different on the other side than he is on this one. He will not turn cold when he sees your whole story. The gentleness you have read about in the Gospels is the gentleness Crystal McVea met. The love John described in 1 John 4 is the love that washed over Dean Braxton. The eyes Daniel saw like flaming torches are the eyes Vicki Umipeg saw despite being blind her whole life. It is the same Jesus. He will be the same Jesus for you.

Let me go back, finally, to Paul — the father we met at the beginning of this chapter — and tell you what his pastor said to him that Tuesday afternoon. His pastor, I think, had been reading the research. He said: "Paul, I have been too quick to warn people away from these books. Some of them are not reliable. But the pattern in the good ones is the pattern of the Bible. And if you found hope in what Crystal McVea wrote because it reminded you that Jesus met your daughter — Paul, I believe he did. I believe he did."

Paul wept. He wept again that day in the pastor's office. And then he drove home. And when he passed the cemetery where his daughter was buried, he did not stop. He did not need to. For the first time in weeks, he thought of her not as there, in the ground, but there, with the One whose face looks like light on water, whose hands still carry the scars of what it cost to come for her.

For Your Reflection

Sit with one or two of these questions. Do not rush. There are no right answers.

1. Who is the Jesus you imagine? Is he stern? Warm? Distant? Close? What have the pictures and sermons of your life taught you to picture — and do any of them match the Jesus described in these accounts?

2. If you could know, with certainty, that Jesus met your loved one at the moment of her death — the actual, real, risen Jesus — what would it change about how you grieve her now?

3. Have you read an NDE or deathbed account before this chapter? What was your reaction? What had you been told about such stories?

4. Is there an account in this chapter that comforted you? Is there one that troubled you? What do you want to do with that?

5. Your loved one's faith, at the end, may have been strong, weak, silent, or unclear to you. Where do you stand right now in your hope for her? What would it mean to place that hope fully in the character of Jesus, not in your certainty about what she believed?

6. How does this chapter sit beside the Bible you already love? Is there a passage that is coming alive for you again because of something you read here?

7. If you are afraid of your own dying, what in this chapter speaks to that fear? What do you want to ask Jesus about it?

For Pastors and Caregivers

Let me speak now to the pastor, the chaplain, the hospice nurse, the grief support leader, the friend who stays late. This chapter is especially for you because you are the person who will be asked about these stories. You are the one sitting across the kitchen table when someone like Paul hands you a book and asks, with a trembling chin, whether it is all right to be comforted by it. Get this right. It matters.

Key pastoral observations. The reflexive response many pastors give to NDE accounts is skepticism dressed up as caution. We have been trained to worry about anything that looks like extrabiblical revelation. That instinct is not wholly wrong — discernment is always required. But the reflex has cost our people something. It has left them afraid to be comforted by the pattern that Scripture and sound research both confirm: that Jesus meets the dying. When we treat every NDE account as suspect, we tell grieving Christians that the consolation available to them is smaller and thinner than the consolation Scripture itself offers. That is a pastoral failure. Train yourself to weigh such accounts, not to dismiss them reflexively.

What to say. Here are words you can actually put in your mouth. "The research shows that a substantial portion of people who nearly die — and many dying Christians in their final hours — report an encounter with Jesus. The pattern fits Scripture remarkably well. I think there are reasons to believe your mother was met by the very Jesus she loved." Or: "The Bible has always said that Stephen saw Jesus waiting for him. Thousands of modern accounts say the same thing. I believe your father was welcomed home." Or: "I used to be more cautious about these stories than I am now. The careful research has changed my mind. I think the consolation you are feeling is warranted."

What NOT to say. "We can't really know who she met." This is true only in the narrow sense that none of us has verified the heavenly realms ourselves. But it is pastorally misleading, because it suggests the evidence is fifty-fifty when it is not. Against the consistent biblical testimony and the cumulative research, the likeliest identity of the Jesus the dying meet is Jesus. Do not hedge. Also avoid: "I don't put much stock in those stories." That tells the grieving Christian that the comfort she found was cheap. It was not. And avoid: "The Bible is enough. We don't need NDEs." The Bible is enough for salvation. But the research confirms the Bible in ways that have been quietly healing people for fifty years, and refusing the comfort is a pastoral decision, not a theological one. Finally, do not say, "Maybe what she saw was a demon in disguise." Unless there are clear red flags — content contradicting Scripture, spiritual harm, movement away from Christ — this is a reckless application of 2 Corinthians 11:14, and it wounds grieving people for no reason.

Questions to ask. When a grieving Christian hands you a book or tells you an account that helped them, ask: "What was it about that story that reached you?" "What did you imagine about your loved one before you read this?" "What does this make you want to ask about Jesus?" "Does anything about the story trouble you?" These questions let you walk with the person instead of over them. They also let you listen for the places where real discernment is needed — for instance, if the person has begun to treat the NDE literature as Scripture, or if they are drifting toward spiritualist practices, or if something in the book they read is genuinely at odds with orthodox teaching.

Watch-outs and cautions. Some cautions are genuine. A small number of popular heaven books have been withdrawn by their publishers or authors as fabricated; be prepared to speak to that reality without using it to dismiss the entire field. Some people, in their grief, may begin to build their hope on a particular book or experience rather than on Christ. Gently redirect: the hope is in Jesus, not in any one account. Second, do not turn the bedside or the funeral into an occasion for evangelism pitched on NDE stories. The grieving are not a mission field. They are a flock. Feed them. Third, be honest about what we do not know. The research does not tell us the geography of heaven. It does not tell us the timing of judgment. It does not replace Scripture; it illuminates it. Fourth, be attentive to cases where an experience has left the person disturbed or afraid rather than at peace. Distressing NDEs are real, and they require different pastoral handling — we treat them fully in Chapter 20. Fifth, remember that not all Christians want to hear about these accounts. Some will find the topic unsettling or distracting. Do not press. Let them ask.

Next steps. If a grieving Christian has come to you with an NDE book, offer to read a portion of it with them. Let them guide the conversation. Offer to lend them a more carefully written volume alongside — John Burke's Imagine Heaven is a reliable choice, as is J. Steve Miller's Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? for the more studious reader.⁴⁵ If they are craving more biblical grounding, walk them through Luke 23:42–43, 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, Acts 7:54–60, and John 14:1–3 over a few sessions. Set a follow-up. Grief about a loved one's eternal state, especially when the state was unclear, can return in waves for years. Plan to come back.

Finally, a word about your own heart, pastor. This chapter asks you to become comfortable offering a kind of specific, research-informed hope that many of us were not trained to offer. If you have spent a decade giving people the thin comfort of "resting in the Lord" because you did not know what else was warranted, you may have some grieving to do yourself — for the funerals you wish you had preached differently, for the widows you wish you had been braver with. Receive that grief. Then let it change how you pastor the next one. Jesus meets the dying. He has been doing it the whole time. Your job is to help your people see it.

For Further Reading

Crystal McVea and Alex Tresniowski, Waking Up in Heaven (New York: Howard Books, 2013). McVea's own account of her nine-minute encounter with God after cardiac complications during hospitalization for pancreatitis. Theologically rich and pastorally warm; a good first NDE book to put in a grieving person's hands.

Howard Storm, My Descent into Death: A Second Chance at Life (New York: Doubleday, 2005). The atheist art professor's now-classic account of being rescued by Jesus from a distressing NDE and transformed into a pastor. Hard at the beginning, tender at the end.

John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015). The most accessible pastor-written synthesis of the NDE research. Draws together many Jesus encounters and compares them carefully to Scripture. A reliable first book on the research.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2022). Careful scholarly treatment of the research, including the central study on the surprising incidence of Jesus in NDE reports. For the reader who wants sources and argumentation.

Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife (New York: HarperOne, 2016). Dr. Long's large-sample analysis of the God-and-heavenly-being component of NDEs, including Jesus encounters. A more secular framing than Burke or Miller, but a strong data source.

Michael Sabom, Light and Death (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998). The cardiologist's careful study of NDEs from a Christian perspective, including the Atlanta study showing high percentages of Jesus encounters among Christian experiencers.