Let me go straight into an NDE that was so profound I listened to it three times and ended up buying the book.
Jim Woodford was a Canadian airline pilot — driven, successful, always chasing the next thing. Faster plane. Bigger boat. Larger bank account. His wife Lorraine was a devoted Christian who prayed for him without ceasing. Jim gave God exactly zero thought.
In 2014, he collapsed alone in his truck after taking too many pain meds for his Guillain-Barré syndrome. By the time anyone had found him, rigor mortis had set in. He was rushed to a hospital in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and pronounced clinically dead. His doctors told Lorraine that if he survived, he would likely never be himself again.
He was gone for eleven hours… ELEVEN HOURS!
When he woke up, the first thing he said to Lorraine was:
“I saw Jesus. And Jesus has horses.”
Lorraine had been praying for years that God would break Jim to remake him. Standing in that hospital room, she knew that He had done exactly that.
But here is the part most people never hear.
What happened after Jim woke up was not all joy and hallelujah. Coming back was one of the hardest things he ever did. His Guillain-Barré pain was gone — that was miraculous. But he was also grieving. Missing heaven. Struggling to describe something that most people around him had no framework for. Quietly wondering, in the dark, why God had sent him back at all.
That is what this post is about. Not just what people see on the other side — but what it means to return to this side. And keep living.
After a Near-Death Experience, the Fear of Death Simply Disappears
After a near-death experience, the fear of death does not shrink. It does not become more manageable. It is simply gone.
And I want to be clear — this is not recklessness. It is not indifference to life. It is something far more significant than either of those things.
It is the difference between hoping there is something after death and knowing there is.
People who have NDEs do not come back with stronger beliefs. They come back with a memory. They have been there. They felt what waits. And the quiet dread that sits underneath so much of what we do and fear and avoid — what Paul called the sting of death — is simply not there anymore.
Researchers have documented this consistently across thousands of cases. It is one of the most reliable aftereffects in the entire field.
And when you sit with what Jesus promised, it makes complete sense.
“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” — 1 Corinthians 15:55
Paul was not writing poetry. He was making a declaration. And these people come back living that declaration. Not quoting it. There is a profound difference.
One of the Most Common NDE Aftereffects: Love Becomes the Only Thing That Matters
After a near-death experience, love stops being one feeling among many.
It becomes the foundation of EVERYTHING.
Relationships take priority over all of it — the status, the income, the reputation, the achievement. Not because someone decided to care less, but because they saw, from somewhere most of us will never stand, what this life is actually for.
It was never the title.
It was always the love given. The love received. The moments of full presence with the person right in front of them.
Before his NDE, Jim would wake in the middle of the night with a yearning he could not name. He kept trying to fill it with planes and boats and properties. After his NDE, Lorraine described him as “much gentler.” The man who had no time for God came back with nothing but time for Him.
And Jim is not unusual. This is one of the most thoroughly documented aftereffects in the entire field. Thousands of people, across every background and belief system, return saying the same thing. Love is EVERYTHING. Not because they decided to be better but because they saw, from a place most of us will never reach, exactly what this life is for.
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.” — 1 Corinthians 13:13
Scripture said this two thousand years ago. These people come back having witnessed why it is true.
Material Things Lose Their Grip Almost Overnight
This one will make you pause the next time you reach for your phone to add something to your cart.
After a near-death experience, material things stop mattering. Not as a philosophy. As a felt reality. People genuinely cannot reconstruct why any of it ever felt so important. The promotion. The bigger house. The car they spent years saving for.
Gone from the priority list. Almost overnight.
Jim spent his whole life acquiring. Planes. Businesses. Properties. Always reaching. After his NDE, he described his former self as a man who had mistaken a yearning for God for a need for more things.
How many of us are doing exactly that right now? I know that I myself have been guilty of this very thing.
Filling a space that was never meant to be filled with a purchase. With busyness. With the next goal, the next achievement, the next thing that promises to satisfy — and never quite does. Distraction from what truly matters.
Jim had to die and spend eleven hours in heaven to understand that. We do not have to wait that long. Thank God!
“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” — Matthew 6:19-20
Jesus was not filling time in a sermon. He was describing a real place with real treasure. And the people who come back from NDEs return having touched it. Nothing in this world compares.
A Sense of Purpose That Will Not Let Go
Almost universally, people who have had near-death experiences return knowing — not hoping, KNOWING — they were sent back for a reason.
Not in a vague way either.
Specifically. A particular person to reach. A specific thing to do. A message to carry.
A mission.
In Jim’s experience he had no desire to tell anyone at first. He did not think that people would believe him. He kept it inside, slid into depression, struggled to re-engage with a world that suddenly felt grey and thin by comparison. It was only after opening up to a pastor friend and being invited to speak at a church that he discovered what he had actually been sent back to do.
He has been telling his story ever since.
And that pattern — the reluctance, the darkness, the eventual discovery of the purpose — appears in account after account after account. God does not waste an experience like this. It is all by design.
He does not send anyone back empty-handed.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” — Ephesians 2:10
Faith Is Born or Completely Transformed
People with no faith return with an unshakeable one. People with a casual, inherited, Sunday-morning faith come back with something alive and personal. And people who already had deep, doctrinal faith sometimes return to find their experience does not map cleanly onto the theology they were raised with — which carries its own quiet confusion.
Jim was never a religious man. He believed religion was a crutch. He gave God about as much thought as he gave the weather on a day he was not flying.
And then he met Jesus.
Face to face. In a place of beauty that had no earthly equivalent. He came back saying: “You have to open the door of your heart to let Him in — and the door of my heart has now been opened.”
That is not a man who reconsidered his position on God.
That is a man who met Him.
“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” — John 14:6
The NDE Aftereffects Nobody Talks About: The Hard Parts of Coming Back
Here is where I want to be honest with you. Because this part matters, and most accounts of near-death experiences skip right past it.
Coming back is not easy.
For many people, it is one of the most difficult things they will ever go through.
You have just had the most real, most beautiful, most love-saturated experience a human being could ever have. And then you wake up in a hospital bed with a tube in your arm, staring at fluorescent lights, while someone asks if you know what year it is. The contrast is not subtle. It is glaring.
Many experiencers describe a grief that is nearly impossible to put into words. Not grief over being alive. Grief over leaving. Missing the light. Missing the love. Missing the place that felt more like home than anywhere on earth ever had.
Jim lived this. He kept his experience to himself. He fell into depression. He struggled to reconnect with a world that felt colorless compared to what he had seen.
He did not think anyone would understand.
Relationships shift too, sometimes painfully. The person who returns is not the same person who left. Different priorities. A different center of gravity. A different sense of what this life is even for. The people around them — spouses, children, friends — sometimes do not know what to do with that. Some relationships deepen. Others fracture. Some do not survive.
This is documented. This is real. And it deserves to be said.
Then there is the spiritual disorientation. Some experiencers return with an encounter that does not fit neatly inside the tradition they were raised in. They met Jesus — but their community does not have language for what they are describing. That gap between what was lived and what can be held is one of the loneliest places to stand.
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” — Matthew 5:4
Even the grief of leaving heaven is something God sees.
Even that mourning is held.
Heightened Sensitivity and Spiritual Awareness
On top of everything else — as if returning from death were not already enough — many experiencers come back with a sensitivity they simply did not have before. Like returning from a journey with something tucked in your pocket that wasn’t there before.
An awareness of the emotions of those around them that goes beyond normal empathy. A deeper capacity to feel. An intuition so strong they describe it as being tuned to a frequency that was not available to them before. Some come back more sensitive to light. Others to sound, or to crowds. As though whatever controls how much of the world a person can perceive was opened all the way up on the other side — and never turned back down.
Researchers have documented this consistently. Some point to neurological changes. Others acknowledge the explanation cannot be categorized.
Many experiencers describe it simply as being more awake. As if something that had been dimmed in them their whole lives was finally switched back on.
“The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” — Matthew 6:22
The Ripple That Never Stops
The near-death experience itself lasts minutes, sometimes hours.
The aftereffects last decades.
And they never stay contained to the person who had the experience.
Jim came back from eleven hours of clinical death and began telling his story — quietly at first, at a friend’s church, uncertain whether anyone would believe him. That ripple has since moved through books, interviews, podcasts, and thousands of people who heard his account and went home different because of it. I am proof of that ripple as I sit here writing about his experience.
And consider this: Lorraine’s prayer — that God would break Jim in order to remake him — was already sending a ripple outward before Jim ever died.
None of these people ever know how far the ripple will travel. They never do.
That is the quiet truth this site exists to follow. Every genuine encounter with God — whether through a near-death experience, a moment of prayer, or an unexpected grace — sends something outward that does not stop moving.
Now here is the part of Jim’s story that continues moving through me.
First time I heard it. Second time. Third.
While in heaven, Jim was brought into the presence of Jesus. And Jesus silently read him the book of his life. Every chapter. Every page. Every choice he had ever made — laid out before him in the most beautiful place he had ever stood.
The book was thin.
Jim was embarrassed. A man who by the standards of this world had lived a full life — planes, businesses, properties, success stacked on success — and the record of that life was thin. Because heaven does not record what we accumulate. It records what was given. Who was loved. How present someone was for the person right in front of them. The moments they chose someone else over themselves.
Those are the pages.
And Jim did not have enough of them.
That image rearranged something in me personally. Permanently. I think about my own life’s book now — EVERY DAY. Every interaction. Every choice. Every moment I have the chance to add a page worth keeping.
Because one day I will stand before Jesus and we will go through it together.
And I want it to be so thick that He could barely carry it.
Here is the ripple I never expected. Jim’s story found me through a podcast I stumbled onto — or what felt like stumbling. I listened three times. I bought the book. And now I think about a thin book every single day of my life.
One detail. Out of eleven hours in heaven. And it is the thing that changed how I actually live.
I have never met Jim. Jim has never heard of me. And yet — here we are.
That is the ripple.
That is exactly what a ripple does.
“For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” — Ephesians 2:10
New to this topic? What Is a Near-Death Experience? A Beginner’s Guide
Curious what people actually see? What Do People See During an NDE?
Want to understand the science? Is There Scientific Evidence for Near-Death Experiences?
Frequently Asked Questions
Do near-death experiences change people permanently?
Yes — and this is one of the most well-documented findings in the entire field. The changes hold steady across cultures, ages, and belief systems, and they do not fade with time. Researchers including Dr. Bruce Greyson at the University of Virginia have tracked these aftereffects across thousands of cases.
Why do some people struggle after a near-death experience?
Coming back can be genuinely hard. Many experiencers grieve what they left — the light, the love, a sense of belonging that felt more like home than anywhere on earth. Some cannot find words for what happened to them. Others find that their relationships, careers, or faith communities no longer fit the person they have become. This is real, documented, and worth taking seriously.
Do near-death experiences increase belief in God?
Consistently, yes. People who have had NDEs — including those with no prior religious belief — return with a significantly increased belief in God and in the continuation of life after death. Many do not describe it as belief at all. They describe it as knowing.
What is the most common aftereffect of a near-death experience?
The loss of the fear of death. Across thousands of accounts, in every kind of person, that dread simply disappears. Close behind it: a profound reorientation toward love and relationships, and away from achievement and material things.
Can a near-death experience change someone who was not religious?
Absolutely — and some of the most dramatic transformations in NDE research involve people who had no prior faith. Jim Woodford believed religion was a crutch. Howard Storm was a committed atheist who became an ordained pastor. Faith does not appear to be a prerequisite. If anything, the accounts from those who had none make the transformation even harder to explain away.
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