The witness today is about Dr. Mary Neal. I saw her story on YouTube. Dr. Mary Neal is a board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon who drowned while kayaking on a South American river. She experienced life after death. She went to heaven and back, conversed with Jesus, and experienced God's encompassing love. She was returned to Earth with some specific instructions for work she still needed to do. Her life has been one filled with miracles and the intervention of God. Her story gives reason to live by faith and is a story of hope. I will retell the story that I heard on YouTube. I will also link the interview below so you can watch it yourself if you want to. We have all seen God working in our lives. However, we might not all be aware that God is working in our lives. This is why it is so important we start talking about it more. The more we share our experiences, the more people understand how God works and how much He truly loves us. If you would be willing to share any experience you have had of how God has worked or is working in your life, please email me at catherine@findingtruenorthcoaching.com. It won’t take up much of your time, and your story could be just the story that someone needs to hear today. Prayerfully consider sharing. Everyone has a story, and the world needs to hear them. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The witness today is about Dr. Mary Neal. I saw her story on YouTube. Dr. Mary Neal is a board-certified orthopedic spine surgeon who drowned while kayaking on a South American river. She experienced life after death. She went to heaven and back, conversed with Jesus, and experienced God's encompassing love. She was returned to Earth with some specific instructions for work she still needed to do. Her life has been one filled with miracles and the intervention of God. Her story gives reason to live by faith and is a story of hope. I will retell the story that I heard on YouTube. I will also link the interview below so you can watch it yourself if you want to. CLICK HERE to watch the video.
Neal and her husband are avid kayakers. They have friends who are professional boaters who run trips to Chile. One year, their children were old enough so the parents could go away on vacation without them. They went on one of these trips to Chile for her husband’s birthday. They paddled all these rivers and had a great time. On what was going to be their last day of paddling, they decided to paddle a river well known for its waterfalls or drops, not like Niagara Falls, but 10-15-foot drops. These would be exhilarating and challenging but certainly within their skill set.
That day, her husband woke up for the first and only time in his life with back pain. Dr. Neal went on the river that day without her husband. She went on the river with her friends, who are professionals, and a few American clients. When they came to the first significant drop, one of the clients passed Dr. Neal and blocked the path to the channel they had selected to go over. This left her with one option: to go over the main part of the waterfall, which is what she did. As she got to the crest of the waterfall, she could see the bottom and the turbulence and flow. She knew it wouldn’t be pretty, but she figured she would hit the bottom, her boat would flip over, and she would have to get out of the boat, get tumbled around a bit, and then get spit out downstream. She said this is not a fun experience, but it is a part of boating occasionally, which is fine.
What happened next was something she could not have dreamed up. At this point in her life, she had never lost anyone close to her, so she had never really thought about death or what happens when you die. She hit the bottom, and her boat got stuck under rocks. She is a spine surgeon and is very calm in high-stress situations. She didn’t panic. She set about trying to free herself or the boat, but the weight of the water was too great for her to do anything. She thought about her options, and she realized she was going to die. She made a very active choice that God’s will be done. She felt like she had a choice. She could choose God’s will or fight it. Either way, she was going to die. The minute she chose God’s will, she immediately felt comforted and held by Jesus and reassured that all would be okay. She knew her husband would be ok. It took her a while to admit that she was being held by Christ because she didn’t think she was worthy. She learned in that moment that we are all individually known and loved by God.
She is very pragmatic and concrete thinking. God’s time is different. She could experience all of eternity in every moment. She thought she was hallucinating. She was still conscious of what was going on under the water. She could feel the weight of the water. She could feel the water pulling her out of the boat. She could feel her legs breaking but with no pain. At the same time, she was being held by Christ, taken through a life review, and then she felt her spirit leave her body. She said her spirit floated above the river, and when she was up in the sky, Jesus released her to the heavens. She was greeted by spirits. She knew they were people who had loved her during her entire existence. She knew they were tied to her story, but she didn’t recognize them because she didn’t know anyone who had died before. But it could have been like a great-grandparent who would know her, but she didn’t know them.
The beautiful thing is when we are reunited with people up in heaven. It is with an absolute understanding of the back story and its purpose. You are reunited with a purity of love. There is just no room for any destructive emotions. She really believes that the destructive emotions we feel on earth are an absence of love. She said you do not hold onto those feelings when you are up in heaven.
She would have claimed before this experience that she was a Christian. She said she was a cultural Christian. She went to church because she happened to grow up in the Midwest. That was about it. Now, her number one identity is that she is a beloved child of God, and everything else is secondary to that. She loves being a wife & mother. Those two jobs are critically important to her. However, the only thing that truly matters is that she is a beloved child of God. This experience changed her experience of life & death. It transformed what it means to be here on earth. We are not meant to be here and waste our lives. We are meant to go out and experience life.
She did not get to stay in heaven. She came back to life. They did not go into how that all happened, as it was a quick 20-minute interview. However, an article said she was underwater for 12 minutes, and she was without oxygen for 24 minutes, and yet she had no brain damage. When she was sent back, she was given a laundry list of things she still had to do. She was told about the coming and unexpected death of her son. He was nine at the time, and he was really healthy. She tried for a long time to come up with an alternate explanation of what had happened to her. She didn’t want it to be real. She didn’t want to do any of the things on the list. She didn’t feel qualified to do anything she was sent back to do. God always gives us things that will push us out of our comfort zone because it is only then that we truly discover our gifts and abilities to glorify God. There is so much more to her story. She has written two books about it. The books are called 7 Lessons from Heaven & To Heaven and Back. There is also a movie about her story.
Her film is now in theaters. It is called AfterDeath. It is a film about her story. She is hoping people bring their friends to the film. We are all going to die, and this film does a great job of making you think. She hopes everyone leaves this film feeling challenged. Challenged in your own assumptions of what death means and what happens afterward. If you get to a point where you accept life after death, then that leads you to a path where you discover meaning, purpose & joy. This is the life she believes we are meant to live.
God is so remarkable. It always amazes me when people have these after-death experiences and then come back to tell us about them. There is so much mystery surrounding God, yet so much that he reveals to us if we listen. I hope to learn more about her story and see what God sent her back to share.