Chapter 9

Jesus Meets the Dying

Encounters with Christ in NDEs and DBEs

The pastor sat in a hospital room on the maternity floor. The mother was twenty-eight years old. Her baby slept in the bassinet beside her — a perfect little girl, born three nights ago after a delivery that had gone wrong. The mother's heart had stopped. For something close to ninety seconds, she had been clinically dead. The doctors had brought her back. She came home with a baby and with something else.

She had not told anyone yet. Not her husband. Not her own mother. She was afraid of the look she would get. But that afternoon, when her pastor came by to pray and to bring a casserole from the women's group, she looked up at him and started to cry. She wiped her face and tried twice before she could speak.

"Pastor," she whispered. "Pastor — I saw Jesus."

She watched his face. Looking, the pastor knew, for the small flicker of doubt. For the polite nod that says, I'll humor you, but I think you imagined it.

He didn't give her one.

"I'm not making it up," she pressed on, almost begging. "It was Him. I knew Him. He was standing there — just standing there — and He knew me. He loved me. He told me to go back to my baby."

She broke down completely. The pastor — who had spent the past two years carefully reading the medical and theological literature on near-death experiences — had finally come to the place where he could simply hold her hand and say the only thing that needed saying.

"I believe you. And you are not alone."

Jesus in the NDE Research: Not a Footnote, a Headline

The first thing to know is that this is not a niche claim made by a few enthusiastic Christian writers. Multiple researchers — many of them not Christian, some openly skeptical — have documented Jesus-encounters as a recurring, statistically significant feature of near-death experience accounts.¹

Dr. Michael Sabom, an Atlanta cardiologist who began his NDE research as a skeptic, found that in his Atlanta Study, thirty-six percent of conservative Christian experiencers and thirty-one percent of liberal Christian experiencers identified the figure they encountered as "Jesus" or "Lord." Even some of his "God-believers" — non-Christians who believed in God — reported the same.² Sabom is a careful researcher. He does not overclaim. But the data, as he reports it, is striking.

The scholar J. Steve Miller, working through one hundred and forty-one consecutive NDEs from Dr. Jeffrey Long's Near-Death Experience Research Foundation database, found that roughly one in five — about eighteen to twenty percent — reported encountering Jesus by name. That is approximately the same rate at which experiencers report having a "life review" — one of the universally recognized core features of the NDE.³ In other words, Jesus-encounters are not rare anomalies tucked into an obscure corner of the literature. They sit alongside tunnels and life reviews and reunions with deceased loved ones as part of the experience's central pattern.

What does the encounter look like? Across the cases — drawn from researchers as different as Sabom (cardiologist), Long (radiation oncologist), Burke (pastor), and the Fenwicks (neuropsychiatrist and palliative researcher) — a remarkably consistent picture emerges. The figure is recognized, not deduced. Experiencers do not say, "I saw a being of light, and I think it might have been Jesus." They say, "I saw Jesus." The encounter is marked by overwhelming love, complete acceptance, and a sense of being fully and instantly known.⁴ Many experiencers spontaneously identify the marks of crucifixion. Many describe Him as the Christ they had read about, only more real than they had ever imagined.

For the grieving Christian, this matters enormously. The husband you buried, the mother you lost, the friend you said goodbye to — if they died in faith, the research is not the basis of your hope. Scripture is. But the research is one more voice in a long choir, telling you the same thing the Bible has told you all along: you do not need to wonder if Jesus showed up for them. He shows up.

Crystal McVea: A Skeptic Who Met the Lord

One of the most carefully documented Jesus-encounter accounts in the recent NDE literature is the experience of Crystal McVea, recorded both in her own book and in John Burke's Imagine Heaven.⁵

Crystal had reasons to doubt God's love. From age three onward she had endured ongoing sexual abuse. As a child she briefly clung to Jesus and was baptized, but the abuse continued and her trust in God's goodness slowly eroded. By adulthood she had walked through teenage pregnancy, an abortion, suicidal despair, broken marriages, and a child catastrophically injured in an accident she had tried to prevent. She would not have called herself an atheist. She would have said God had abandoned her — if He existed at all.

At age thirty-three, Crystal was hospitalized for pancreatitis. Complications stopped her heart. For nine minutes she was clinically dead.

What happened during those nine minutes she now describes as the most real thing that ever happened to her. She found herself in the presence of God — and the presence was specifically the presence of Jesus. Burke summarizes from her own account that her encounter centered on a stunning revelation: God allowed her to see herself as He saw her. The little girl she had been at age three — the one she had grown up believing was worthless and dirty — was loved, cherished, perfect in His sight. The truth set me free, she said.⁶

Crystal returned to her body and to the long, hard work of letting that truth seep into the corners of a life that had been built on the opposite belief. Her testimony matters here for one specific reason: she was not a believer expecting Jesus. She was a wounded skeptic. And the One who met her was not a generic "being of light" she later interpreted as Jesus. It was Jesus.

The Cases That Will Not Fit the "Cultural Projection" Theory

The most common skeptical response to Jesus-encounters in NDEs is what we might call the cultural projection hypothesis: People who grew up with Jesus simply project Jesus onto whatever spiritual experience they have. Hindus would project Krishna; Muslims would project Muhammad; atheists would project something else.

It sounds reasonable. The trouble is, when researchers actually go and look, the data does not cooperate.

Miller, who has done some of the most careful work on this question, ran two parallel studies on the NDERF database. He searched the entire collection of more than five thousand experiences for sightings of Krishna — one of Hinduism's most beloved deities. He found four claims in total, two of which had clear red flags. He searched the database for Muhammad. Of eighty cases where the experiencer self-identified as Muslim or as coming from a majority-Muslim country, none reported seeing Muhammad. In the entire five-thousand-plus database, there was a single hesitant report — "I saw a light, which I believe may have been Muhammad."⁷

Now compare this to Jesus, reported in roughly one of every five NDEs.

If the cultural projection theory were true, we should see Hindus reporting Krishna, Muslims reporting Muhammad, and Buddhists reporting Buddha at rates roughly comparable to the rate at which Christians report Jesus. We do not see this. What we see instead is a very specific Person — Jesus of Nazareth — appearing in NDEs across religious backgrounds, including the experiences of Hindus, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and former agnostics.⁸

One of the most famous examples is Howard Storm, a tenured American university professor and committed atheist who had a harrowing distressing NDE during a hospitalization in Paris in 1985. In the depths of his experience, broken and despairing, he remembered a fragment of a children's song from his childhood — Jesus loves me — and called out for help. The figure who came for him in the darkness identified Himself as Jesus, and the encounter so changed Storm that he eventually left academia, attended seminary, and became a Christian pastor.⁹ Storm's case is treated more fully in Chapter 13, in connection with the question of postmortem opportunity. For our purposes here, the point is simpler: Jesus showed up to a man who was not looking for Him.

Jesus in Deathbed Visions

The pattern is not confined to near-death experiencers — people who briefly died and came back. It also appears, often even more clearly, at the actual deathbeds of the dying.

Dr. Diane Komp, professor of pediatrics emerita at Yale University and a longtime cancer specialist, describes the death of one of her teenage patients named Tom. Tom had refused to believe his cancer was terminal. Then he reported a vivid experience of walking with a man in a beautiful garden. The man told Tom he could not go with Him yet. Komp asked him who the man was. Tom answered with confidence: I know it was Jesus. Two days later, against all medical prediction, Tom told his parents he would not live through the night. He died peacefully in his sleep.¹⁰

The pioneering deathbed-vision researchers Karlis Osis and Erlendur Haraldsson recorded a striking case in their cross-cultural study. A Christian patient, recovering well from a hip operation and expected to be discharged, told his startled physician that he had just seen Christ slowly descending toward him. Christ had waved to him. The patient said calmly, I am going, and died within minutes — to the medical team's astonishment.¹¹ The vision predicted the death. The death confirmed the vision.

Sabom himself reported the case of an open-heart surgery patient who entered surgery without fear and only learned afterward that he had died on the table. He recalled walking across a wooden bridge over a stream and seeing Christ in a brilliant white robe on the other side. I knew very well that I had died, he told Sabom. And I looked at his hands and there were the scars where the nails had gone through.¹²

The evangelist Billy Graham, in his book Angels: God's Secret Agents, described the death of his maternal grandmother. As she lay dying, the room seemed (to those present) to fill with light. She sat up in bed and almost laughingly said, I see Jesus. He has His arms outstretched toward me. I see Ben — her husband, who had died years earlier — and I see angels. Then she slumped over, in Paul's words, "absent from the body but present with the Lord."¹³

These are not the visions of confused, drugged minds. They are reported by lucid patients, often by those who were not even expected to die imminently. They distinguish carefully between angels and Jesus, between deceased relatives and the Lord. They describe specific features: the wounds in His hands, the white robe, the outstretched arms. They are accompanied by the kind of peace that, in many cases, marks the dying person all the way out the door.

The Biblical Pattern: Jesus at the Threshold

None of this should surprise the careful reader of Scripture. The Bible describes the same pattern.

The clearest text is Acts 7:55–56. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, is being stoned to death by an enraged crowd. Luke writes:

Notice three things. First, Stephen sees this before he is dead — at the very threshold of dying. Second, what he sees is specifically Jesus, identified by the title Jesus most often used of Himself in the Gospels: the Son of Man. Third, Jesus is standing. Throughout the New Testament, the risen Christ is described as seated at the right hand of God; here He stands. The early church read this as a posture of welcome, of attention, of greeting. Jesus rose to meet His servant.¹⁴

This is the same Jesus who told the dying thief on the cross beside Him, "Today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43) — a passage we explored in Chapter 2. It is the same Jesus to whom Paul the apostle was caught up to the third heaven, hearing inexpressible words (2 Corinthians 12:1–4). It is the same Jesus who appeared in glory to John on the island of Patmos, terrifying him into a faint and then laying His right hand on him with the words, "Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore" (Revelation 1:17–18, ESV).

The biblical pattern and the modern pattern are the same. Jesus shows up at the threshold. The book of Acts and a hospital room in Atlanta tell the same story. The God who met Stephen meets the dying still.

What This Evidence Means — and What It Does Not

Let me be careful here, because this is one of those places where pastoral overreach can do real damage.

The research does not prove Christianity. NDEs are not Scripture. They are not infallible. They are not the same thing as final death — they are, by definition, near-death — and we should not pretend otherwise. The biblical case for the truth of the gospel rests on the resurrection of Jesus and the witness of Scripture, not on the Atlanta Study or the NDERF database.

What the research does offer is independent corroboration. The central Christian claim — that Jesus is alive, glorified, present, and meeting His people in death — is not wishful thinking generated inside the church to comfort frightened believers. It is a claim that, when carefully tested against the experiences of thousands of people from every walk of life, including many who were not Christians and had no expectation of meeting Him, holds up remarkably well.¹⁵

For the grieving Christian, this corroboration is staggering. It will not bring your loved one back. It will not erase the empty chair at the table. It will not make the holidays easy. But it can, by God's grace, set a small candle burning in the corner of a very dark room. You did not lose them into nothingness. You did not hand them over to a void. The hands that received them were the hands that bear the marks of the cross.

For Your Reflection

1. What images of Jesus have shaped your imagination over the years? Are they images of a Jesus who would meet your loved one tenderly — or images that make tenderness seem unlikely?

2. If you were able to know — really know — that Jesus met your loved one at the moment of their dying, what would change in your grief today?

3. Are there fears or doubts that have made you afraid to let yourself believe this? What would it take to lay one of them down this week?

4. Crystal McVea was met by Jesus while still believing herself to be unloved. Are there places in your own heart where you, too, have decided you are beyond His reach? What might He be saying to that part of you?

5. Stephen "gazed into heaven" while still on the earth. Is there a moment in your own life when, looking back, you sense that the curtain between this world and the next was thin?

6. If your loved one died in faith, what specific comfort do you take from the consistent biblical and modern pattern of Jesus meeting His people at the threshold?

7. If you don't yet know Jesus the way Stephen knew Him — would you be willing to ask Him, simply and honestly, to make Himself known to you?

For Pastors and Caregivers

Of all the material in this book, the pattern of Jesus-encounters in NDEs and DBEs may be the single most pastorally important data set you can carry into a hospital room. Here is what to do with it.

Key pastoral observation. Many people in your congregation have either had an experience like the young mother in this chapter's opening vignette, or have lost a loved one whose final words were a vision of Christ — and they have never told anyone. They are afraid of being patronized. Some are afraid of being scolded for "trusting an experience over Scripture." Most are afraid of having the most precious moment of their lives gently dismissed. Your steady, informed willingness to believe them may be the most pastoral thing you ever do.

What to say. When a parishioner tells you, hesitantly, that their dying mother saw Jesus, or that they themselves saw Him during a cardiac arrest, the right response is not silence and not enthusiastic over-claiming. It is something like this: "I'm so glad you told me. Across thousands of carefully studied cases, this is one of the most consistent things people report — and it's deeply consistent with what we read in the Bible. Tell me everything. Take your time."

If you are sitting with a believer whose loved one died and the family is asking what happened in those final moments, you can say with calm confidence: "Across both Scripture and the medical research, the Lord meets His people at the threshold of dying. We can't replay the moment. But we can trust the pattern. They were not alone."

What NOT to say. Do not say, We can't really know who they were seeing — that is technically humble and pastorally crushing. The biblical and research pattern is clear enough to ground real comfort. Do not say, That's interesting; the brain does strange things at death — that is the language of dismissal dressed up as humility. And, on the other side, do not say things the data does not say: This proves your loved one is in heaven — even when their faith was clear, our hope rests on Christ's promises, not on someone else's vision. Speak with confidence, not certainty beyond your station.

Watch-out 1: Do not let this become evidence that everyone goes to heaven regardless of faith. Some experiencers encounter Christ as Savior; some encounter Him as judge; some are sent back to keep walking with Him; some, like Howard Storm, are pulled out of dark places. The data is not universalist data. It is the data of a real, living, loving, holy Christ who shows up. The question of postmortem opportunity is taken up carefully in Chapter 13.

Watch-out 2: Do not let your own embarrassment about NDEs hide this pastoral resource from your people. Many pastors, having been burned by the "heaven tourism" publishing fashion, dismiss the entire NDE field. That is understandable — but it costs your people a real and biblically corroborating gift. You do not have to endorse every popular book on the subject to be conversant with the careful research.

Next steps. When a bereaved family member shares such an experience, write down what they said, ask if you may pray with them, and offer to walk back through the relevant Scripture together (Acts 7, Luke 23, Revelation 1). For someone newly grieving, the chapter you are now reading can be left, gently, on a side table. Many will pick it up at three o'clock in the morning.

For Further Reading

John Burke, Imagine Heaven (Baker, 2015) — A pastoral synthesis of more than one thousand NDE accounts, including extensive treatment of Jesus-encounters; written for the same kind of reader as this handbook.

J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? (Wisdom Creek Press, 2022) — The most careful Christian-scholarly evaluation of Jesus in NDEs and DBEs, including the percentage studies cited in this chapter.

Crystal McVea and Alex Tresniowski, Waking Up in Heaven (Howard Books, 2013) — McVea's full firsthand narrative.

Jeffrey Long with Paul Perry, God and the Afterlife (HarperOne, 2016) — A statistical analysis of God-encounters in more than four thousand NDEs.

Michael Sabom, Light and Death (Zondervan, 1998) — A cardiologist's careful research alongside biblical evaluation.