they get me ready for surgery they start the IV wheel me down the hall I said goodbye to my wife they burst open the doors of the surgery room and I thought man it's freezing in here but you know I'm still 104 fever they slide me over onto the surgical table I looked to my right and out of nowhere Jesus is standing there the physical person and everything else just kind of disappeared there were no other people in the room and I look and I'm like really confused I'm thinking what is going on here and
then I thought to myself did I die and I thought you know I've heard of people when they die they see themselves floating up above their body and I thought I didn't do that so I must not be dead but what's going on on it wasn't like it was a dream it was like heightened reality and it started right when Jesus stood there everything was different my name is Mike McKenzie I grew up in loai California the Infidel capital of the world when I got married we moved down to Southern California I was working as
a uh as a Salesman for uh a tile company and I did really well I mean I was like one of the top salesman in the company and so they gave me a a store of my own in Anaheim so that's that's what I did till my wife got pregnant then we decided to move back up to Central California and raise family up there we ended up raising four kids and they were all real athletic they all played sports did a lot of coaching of soccer and football and baseball especially I think over uh about
a 19-year coaching career I coached over 30 different teams everything from t-ball to high school my oldest son Ben was going to school in Santa Barbara he graduated he got his license to be a nuclear medicine technologist and he met someone and in church and they decided to get married it was the last weekend of Summer before the younger kids had to go back to school wedding was set for a Saturday we thought we'd go down there on a Wednesday because you know we wanted to kind of make it a short little mini vacation say
goodbye to Summer and you know before the kids go back to school so we got there um on a Wednesday afternoon uh and of course my two younger boys brought the wful balls and bats and they saw this big Park right next to the to the hotel so the kids said hey Dad we're going to go play some Home Run Derby why don't you come and join us after you get checked in so I said yeah okay sounds good and we played baseball just hung out played for probably a couple hours that night I started
feeling like I was getting sick like I was coming down with the flu and I thought yeah boy you know great time to get a flu right before your son's wedding um didn't think much of it cuz it wasn't that bad but then Thursday I just kept thinking man I'm my stomach's getting worse and worse uh This Ain't Good Friday rolls around by now I'm running a little bit of a fever and I'm starting to sweat we made it through the rehearsal dinner and I was joking around with some of the guests I said you
know I'm getting the flu but this thing's costing me a lot of money so I'm going to have one of every dessert I'm having your leftovers and you know I'm getting my money's worth we left we went back to the hotel my son and I are sitting at the bar he's in the medical field so he's trying to diagnose what's going on with me and he says have you had your appendix out and I said well you know I don't think it's my appendix because they always say you have that that point tenderness you know
like when your appendix swell up there's one spot on your abdomen that you push on and it hurts really bad that didn't happen with me but I thought you know it's just it just didn't make sense I decided at about 1:00 in the morning to go to quick stop and get some Tylenol kind of break that fever so I came back home took the stuff and it it didn't work the Tylenol cut the pain a little bit but I was still running a pretty good fever you know now I'm sweating pretty bad I didn't sleep
at all that night not one week before my son's wedding I was starting to look pretty pale we get through the the whole wedding and then a few of the guests started leaving and I said guys I got to go get checked out I mean something's really bad wrong so we drove to the hospital I finally get back to see the nurse in the ER and she takes my temperature was 104.3 I was feeling just miserable I mean miserable I hadn't slept in over 24 hours and she's poking around on my abdomen she says does
that hurt and I said no it doesn't and she takes out the this little Mallet like they like what they check your reflexes with she Taps on the bottom of my foot and she says does that hurt and I kind of laughed I said no and she tapped the other foot and man the pain in my abdomen made me scream and she says okay that's your appendix I'm going to call a surgeon she says have you done any physical activity lately and I said oh you know I played baseball with the kids Wednesday afternoon and
she her expression Chang changed she says Wednesday this is Saturday night and she's thinking Thursday Friday Saturday 3 days if my appendix ruptured when I was playing baseball 3 days later I'm in trouble about a half an hour later surgeon comes in he says your white blood cell count is really high so I think your appendix are probably ruptured and um he says if they ruptured you know Wednesday we got to get in there quick they get me ready for surgery they start the IV they wheel me down the hall I said goodbye to my
wife they burst open the doors of the surgery room and I thought man it's freezing in here but you know I'm still 104 fever but and I was sweating but I thought gosh it's so cold I mean how do these people work in this condition they slide me over onto the surgical table and I thought this thing is Tiny you know I'm going to fall off I felt like I had no where to put my hands I look to my right and out of nowhere Jesus is standing there the physical person and everything else just
kind of disappeared there were no other people in the room and I look and I'm like really confused I'm thinking what is going on here and then I thought to myself did I die and I thought you know I've heard of people when they die they see themselves floating up above their body and I thought I didn't do that so I must not be dead but what's going on it wasn't like it was a dream it was like heightened reality and it started right when Jesus stood there everything was different his skin was much darker
than I'd seen as a kid he almost looked like an Arab man he was wearing a white robe he had like wavy brown hair and he had these dark greenish blue eyes and when those eyes looked into my eyes he looked into my soul I could just feel this love emanating from this man that was what convinced me that it was Jesus everything about him just radiated love he holds out his hand and he says I want to answer your prayer and I'm thinking my prayer what the heck I didn't make the connection right away
but I thought I used to pray as a kid that Jesus would show me heaven I remember my grandfather passed away and he was a Catholic so we went to his funeral and there was a priest up there and he was holding this ball on a chain and it had holes in it and there was smoke coming out of it and the Smoke's going up and the priest says the smoke represents our prayers going up to heaven they were talking about Grandpa's in heaven now he's there's no more pain there's no sadness there's no tears
and I remember thinking as a kid wow sounds like a great place you know I'd like to see that I reached out I took his hand immediately when I took his hand we were standing on a hill everything around me is white like the whitest white I've ever seen it's almost blinding but I look down at my feet and I'm I'm Barefoot I'm still in a night gown you know the surgical gown and I see this beautiful green grass it's like it's manicured it's perfect it's bluish green prettiest grass I've ever seen and my senses
were heightened to the point where I could count every single blade of grass under my feet I could feel every blade of grass I knew how many Blades of grass were touching my feet it was it was crazy and I look around I'm trying to adjust my eyes to this white so I can see and I look and off to my right is a another brighter White but this is like a light and I look at that light and I think wow that's really cool you know and all of a sudden out of that light
it starts sending these light beams they're like they look like fluorescent light tubes you know like you use in your shop you know 4ot things but they're only about 2 feet long they're about this big around they're smooth and they're glowing like the light and so they start flying by me here and everything is white but these things are glowing white almost like shimmering it's it's weird when I was looking at this I was just in in awe and you know obviously confused still I I spent a lot of time confused because I'm thinking what
is this where am I and I'm watching these things and one of them is coming straight up my head and I'm looking at this thing and I'm like what am I supposed to do you know should I dodge this thing or what you know it hits me right in the forehead and as it does it makes this kind of buzzing sound a light buzzing sound as it goes through me and it warmed me like all the way down to my feet so that cold that I felt in the surgical room now is replaced with this
beautiful warm feeling all of a sudden it's like somebody is pulling a curse curtain from my right to my left and the white whatever it was the white fog or Veil or the just the whiteness just gets pulled to the side and now I'm looking at this beautiful scenery I see that I am standing on a hill below me are these little flowers They're they're almost like describing like sweet peas you know like they're they they have like these little they're like little petals little soft petals but they're all uh like a pastel color they're
purples and and yellows and orange and and pinks and just beautiful and they're they're moving like they're Dancing In The Wind but there's no wind so I'm thinking well why are they why are they moving and then at the bottom of this hill the white that was pulled away from from me is now settled in the valley and there's a great big city down there but I can only see the rooftops because it's like it's it's like there's fog on top of the city so I can't see the whole city but I can just see
the rooftops and there's there's one real big gold Dome like a capital Dome and there's other smaller gold domes I mean the city's huge it's like miles a apart and and there's some other white things sticking through almost like church Steeples like spires behind that City on the other side of the valley there's another mountain and it's pretty big and it's covered in these pine trees but they're like perfectly shaped pine trees they're all beautiful green and then above that is like the most beautiful sunset I've ever seen right above the trees it was like
Reds and oranges and and yellows and then it turned into the purples and greens and blue like bright blue at the very top and so now these tube lights are still bouncing around going by me but now they're going across the valley and one of them goes and it hits the edge of the tip of one of the trees and it's like it had a diamond on it because when that thing hit the tip of the tree it burst into hundreds of tiny little light streaks and pretty soon the whole mountain is lit up with
these these bursting white beams of light and they kept going too they would go all over the place I mean it was just like it was like a big giant firework show but it was all white like glowing floresent white you know I'm just looking at it just going this is amazing and and when I when I look back at the light where they were starting from emanating from Jesus says to me it's the glory of the Lord and when he said that I just got weak in my knees and I I couldn't die I
fell to my knees and the instant my knes hit the ground they shocked me and they brought me back so now instead of this beautiful scenery I've got a doctor leaning over me wearing a mask and he says do you know your name I opened my mouth to talk and my mouth was just so dry but I was able to get out the words Mike and he says oh good um he says do you know where you are and now I'm confused again because I'm thinking well I you know where's Jesus where's heaven where's the
scene you know and he says again do you know where you are and I'm running through my mind okay oh the wedding oh yeah what I'm in Ventura so I said Ventura and he looks at me and he says okay and he he says something to the people in the in the room and now I realize there's like five other people people in the room all dressed in Scrubs he says uh he's going to be okay or he's back something like that and I'm just and he says let's get him up to ICU I looked
over and I saw the crash cart and I saw that one of the paddles was kind of laying aside and the cords were hanging down and it was obviously obvious that they had used it somebody was over there putting them back together and I thought oh boy you know I did die the surgeon came in to see me the next day as he's kind of checking out the stitches and you know poking around and checking my temperature he says to me that's the worst case I've ever seen and I said you're kidding and he starts
to walk out of the room and he comes back in and he says I've seen worse but they didn't live and he says yours was the worst case I've ever seen where the patient lived my wife came in to see me a couple hours after that she said how are you feeling and I said well not till good yet you know but I said you're not going to believe what happened she goes really what and I opened my mouth to tell her and I just started crying and I thought I'm I'm not even going to
try and tell her about this whole thing with Jesus uh yet so the next day she comes in and she says um so what happened and I open my mouth to tell her and i' cried again and it took me 3 days before I could finally tell her the whole story and you know makes me cry at this point it was it was really just a super emotional emotional thing um when I told her of course she starts crying and I thought you know it's really it's really an amazing thing that happened to me it's
an emotional story from me because I think that really started a relationship with Jesus I would describe myself as kind of a Sunday Christian you know I went to church on Sundays I just didn't really get it after that incident I knew he's a real guy he's a real physical person I mean that changed everything that I know or thought I knew about a heaven and I thought well maybe it really is a physical place like right now God could just hide it from us I mean God could do anything I was on a liquid
diet for probably 6 days I was still running a fever and until you get down to normal they're not going to let you go and so at some point the doctor said okay put him on semi-solid food let's see how he does so one of the first things he gave me to eat was a banana and I thought okay you know finally I get something other than beef broth cuz I spent 12 days in the hospital I lost 34 lbs I mean I was a rail so I was so happy to get that banana and
as I start peeling this this banana I'm just it like it's like God's creation just hit me like a ton of bricks and I start balling and I'm thinking I'm eating something that grew out of the ground out of the dirt from thousands of miles away and it's going to help me get healthy again it was like the weight of that creation just hit me walking's big in in the hospital after you've had surgery they want you on your feet and I remember the nurse comes in and he says I need you to get up
and walk today's the day you're going to walk so he helps me out of bed and I had four different tubes on the IV stand you know I had tubes coming out of me that I didn't know they could put tubes in it was crazy uh so I'm I get out of bed I take my little IV stand and I start walking down the hall and the guy's helping me the nurse and I walked by a couple of pictures and this was a a Beach town so there's pictures of the ocean there's pictures of sunsets
and man I remember looking at those and I'm thinking what have I been missing I'm just so stressed out and it it just changed everything changed the way I I look at life here's the way I describ my life before the nde I'd go to work early in the morning very stressful job I was a superintendent for a real estate development company and I had between 30 and 35 houses at different stages of construction I would come home I would throw the baseball equipment or whatever in the back of the truck race off to a
baseball game or practice and somewhere along the line trying and figure out where we're going to get dinner because we'd get done at 600 6:30 kids had homework you know that I had to help them with and it was just lather rinse repeat every day same old thing stress one of the biggest changes for me after that nde was I put into practice what I noticed in the hallways walk walking back and forth and looking at those pictures I thought I'm just going to slow down I'm going to stop and I'm going to enjoy every
moment of my life I'll be walking through a park or something I'll see a flower I'll been down and smell the flower I don't care who sees me or if they think it's weird or whatever my phone is full of sunset pictures full of pictures of flowers I think I'm more like seeing the World Through The Eyes of a kid Jesus didn't give me an assignment but I think that's what he wants me to do is tell everybody you know slow down man just appreciate the beauty of his creation I think that's why we're created
to spread God's love I'm nothing special I'm I'm not loved more by God than anybody um I always tell people now ask God to reveal himself to you and he will but be patient cuz this one took 40 years this prayer took 40 years to answer um but what's 40 years to God definitely not afraid of death I always think now when I do die for the final time and don't come back uh I Think Jesus is going to meet me on that hill and he's going to say Let's go see what you you didn't
get to see that day let's spend some time in the city I'll show you around but I always say but not today not yet cuz there's there's a lot of Life to Live you know I mean I have now I have 13 grandkids if I would have died back then I wouldn't have met any of them but I think that's probably why he let me live
