God's Timing (NDE Recovery Journal, part 6)

Post NDE, Days 16-102

Welcome new friends! You will note that I write two different types of posts. Half are portions of my recovery journal from my near-death experience (this one!) and half are insights that God has been teaching me since I returned. I seem to have audience members in each category so if this post doesn’t interest you, I hope you will check out the other posts.

Important- Thanks to those of you who are still checking on my health. I am doing much better! Please note that these NDE Recovery Journal entries were written in the days after my near-death experience. :-)

Day 24 Post NDE

I am supposed to meet a friend for lunch today but she cancels. Instead, I receive a call from a gal who has trained with me but not yet started a group. Confidentially, she shares some concerning information about someone who trained with her to co-lead, and also about her daughter. After we talk and I advise, I ask to pray with her. She starts crying halfway through the prayer. Afterward, she thanks me for my words and shares how blessed she feels. She badly needed the encouragement and knows God had my other appointment cancel just for her. I am so happy that God used me to support her today. I sometimes cry when people pray for me too. It is an important touch from heaven.

Day 83 Post NDE

I am feeling better about my recovery. You can probably tell that! I join a support group online with the IANDS organization and meet with my Coach a couple of times. Both are helpful. The facilitator of the support groups assures me that my experience is traumatic, even though it was positive. I thank my Lord I didn’t go to hell! Some people do during their near-death experiences. I also thank Him for the limits He set on my experience. I didn’t get to see Him and I saw people moving around, but they were behind the cloud. I’m pretty sure if I had seen Him and people who’ve gone before me, recovery would be much more challenging.

But I do wonder if my brother and others were waiting there for me, behind that gold cloud.

I continue to compile two anthologies, one of miracles/angels/healings and the other of near-death stories. And it’s become a priority to reprint “Then Along Came an Angel” that I published over 20 years ago. So far, I’ve only been able to connect with 14 of the 46 story authors, however. So I guess those 14 stories will become part of a new book and the used copies of the original will forever be overpriced in the used bookstores. Sigh.

Challenges at the day job continue. I can’t be in the office past three hours without coughing (gunk) and my voice going hoarse. I also have a hard time swallowing any food. After talking to my friend who has cancer, and very high radon levels in her home, I purchase a radon gas test and put it in my office. It needs to stay for 2-4 days. I cut my hours to part-time and only 10 hours a week of those in the office. I know this is stressful for the rest of the staff so that is tough. Some of my co-workers aren’t so healthy either.

100 Days Post NDE

As the immediate impact of my incredible experience wears off a little, I find myself returning to pre-heaven habits. It’s like having a spiritual experience at a summer camp or conference and coming home on fire for Christ. It never did last for me. My love for Him? Of course that lasts. My awestruck meanderings? Not so much. Maybe this is His way of centering me back here on earth.

Can I still be effective with the core of my heart in heaven but my ministry here?

He and I still meet regularly, but I’m not absorbing myself into the hours and hours of study that I did at first. This is classic me to take it all on at once – I really hoped this would change. My prayers do not go on for hours as they did – and I am more likely to run out of things to say! Argh! There was a time after returning that I didn’t care about the television anymore – I’d be reading and studying instead. But now a certain series (with redemptive qualities, of course) sometimes snags my attention instead.

I am again getting distracted by the world.

I’m still in full-time ministry and still writing – but I finally got back to working on Book 3 in my human trafficking trilogy versus heaven topics. It’s overdue, sales of book 1 and 2 have been brisk at holiday events and readers are asking. Once I complete that (April is the goal!), I will start focusing more on heaven writing. A Christian bookstore a couple of hours away invited me for another author event and also asked me to bring “upwards” of 15 copies of each book. They sell well there, even though they aren’t overtly the “Christian-ese” redemption stories.

I think that Christian publishers should pay attention to that. I don’t know any readers who like to feel “preached at” anymore. And stories with hard topics are often the best place for people to meet Jesus. We as authors have often been in their shoes.

(Look, I learned how to do Substack quotes) :-)

I record a podcast today with Jonnie T from Refuge Freedom Stories. You can listen on any of the platforms or here on Apple. We chat afterward about publishing and the projects God has called him to do. I encourage him to connect with us at Cascade Christian Writers. So much knowledge, wisdom, and affirmation there. An important launch pad for anyone serious about Christian writing.

He asks me an interesting question, however. Did my NDE experience shape my faith or did my faith beforehand shape my NDE experience? On the podcast, I tell him the second one. But now I am musing and sure enough, it’s been a bit of both.

102 Days Post NDE

Today I hear from two ladies grateful for trauma recovery services. One talks with me extensively on the phone and then tells her group leader that she feels so much more peace and she wishes she could talk to me daily. Ha ha. I’m just so glad she feels helped.

Hubby, just back from a work trip to Arizona, asks if we want to do a movie and builds a fire. It’s been in the upper 20’s and low 30’s here at night. I’ve been curling up with my heating pad while he’s been out of town and not just for the back pain that has fiercely returned.

“Netflix did a Mary movie. I hear it’s good.”

We chat about other things. “I can watch it later if you don’t want to. But it’s about Mary.”

“Wait. You mean Mary, Mary?”

Too funny. So, we watch. Well done, although of course, it doesn’t stick completely to the Biblical script. I am used to this in the writing/reading world. How many books have been written about Mary, and expounded on because we only get a few short chapters of her story in the Bible? I don’t think it’s wrong to imagine what she went through, what they all went through, as long as it is evident that it is a fictional account so that we are not adding to the Scriptures. In a way, that humanizes it and can make it more impactful. Historical fiction, at its best.

I’ve often considered Mary’s agony at watching her Son die on a cross, and her assumed sheer joy when He is raised again. But tonight, as I muse on the story of Jesus’ birth, I find myself dwelling on something I’ve never thought of before: how did she feel when arriving in heaven to finally spend all of eternity with Him?

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