SID: Hello. Sid Roth here. Welcome to my world where it is naturally supernatural. My guest was brain dead for 11 hours, went to Heaven, sent back with a message from Heaven. We have a Hebrew word, it’s called “bashert”, it means it’s meant to be. I tell you it is bashert that you be watching right now. My guest, I’ve just gotten to really know over the last day, he’s a retired pilot. You put it in a lot of hours flying. How many hours?
JIM: Just over 20,000.
SID: Just over 20,000. He’s not, he was not a believer in the Messiah. His wife was a believer. Is it fair to say that your god was things, T-H-I-N-G-S?
JIM: Yes, Sid, and I’m ashamed to admit it. I mean, I lived what I thought was the quintessential American-Canadian dream of a successful career, successful businesses. And yet I would wake up in the middle of the night and I’d have this yearning inside of me, and I foolishly interpreted that as meaning I needed a faster plane, a bigger car, a larger boat.
SID: But one day, again, he’s his own god, so to speak, he wakes up and something unusual, his arms and his legs are numb. He gets diagnosed with a disease, frankly I’ve never heard, is it Gillian Barre?
JIM: It’s Guillain Barre.
SID: I’m close. And if I understand this right, this is life-threatening and you could end up paralyzed. But actually if you don’t get treatment right away, which you did not, what did they tell you to expect?
JIM: Well it’s often fatal and Guillain Barre is the deterioration of the myelin sheath on your brainstem and it’s similar to if you strip the insulation from an electrical cord and all the signals from your brain become pain and interrupted. And I went from being a guy that flew jets and raced cars to someone completely dependent on nurses and my wife who is a nurse for my care.
SID: You told me that the pain was so bad that you had pain when you blinked your eyes.
JIM: I actually trained myself to blink one eye at a time.
SID: Because of the time.
JIM: Because every blink of my eye was pain, not just in my eyes, but through my whole body. My whole nervous system had been interrupted by this incredible debilitating disease.
SID: And all of a sudden, the pain gets so bad that you take a whole bottle of pain medicine. I mean, but didn’t you realize that could be fatal?
JIM: You know Sid, it was a gradual thing and yet to give me some semblance of normalcy, some ability to sleep two or three hours a night I began to take more of the medication than I should have. And I was trying to get up the energy to get into the truck and inspect the field that I was trying to sell, and I saw a vial of prescription medication. I should have known all I was consumed with stopping the pain. As I took the last of the medication that evening and I’m facing the setting sun, for some reason, I didn’t plan it that way, all of a sudden my feet began to burn as though they were in fire. My hands and fingertips started to burn and as that burning sensation made its way up my body in my arms toward my chest I knew that I had done something truly catastrophic. And it was then that I said the first three of the six words that I believe are responsible for me being here today along with the prayers of my family. And in that last instant in my consciousness I looked at the setting sun and I raised my hand, and I remember it was shaking violently. I cried out, “God, forgive me.” I cried out from a part of me that I didn’t even know existed, not out of fear. I faced death a couple of times as a pilot, never flinched, but I had this overwhelming sense in those last nanoseconds of my life that I had wasted this beautiful life that the Creator had given me, and I had never honored him for that life. And I was just trying to express my sorrow for not having led a better life.
SID: After that prayer, which is half of the prayer that got you back, what do you remember?
JIM: And suddenly I became aware that the horrific pain that I had endured for all those years since the onslaught of the Guillain Barre was gone. I felt more alive than I had ever felt before and the pain was gone. I felt so great. I slid out of the truck, I walked about 15 feet away and I’m feeling as though a heavy wet overcoat has been taken off from me, and all the pain has gone with it. And then I look back at the truck and there’s someone in my truck, and I’m absolutely enraged, who would dare get in my truck, and not only that, he’s sleeping on the steering wheel. The moment when I realized that the guy in the truck was me was truly earth shattering.
SID: The next thing that happened you’re flying but there’s no airplane.
JIM: Finally I’m saving on fuel. But I began to rise. I can look through the rear window of the truck and see my body slumped over the wheel and over the truck I can look down in the bed of the truck, Sid, and see my toolbox. And being a former pilot I’m a good judge of altitude, and I’m suddenly a hundred feet, 200 feet, I’m drifting slowly backwards and I’m rising. I’m rising, and I am terrified. I can look out over the countryside.
SID: I’ll tell you what, hold that thought. He finds himself in a very unusual place, almost a crossroads between Heaven and Hell. When we come back we’ll find out what he did about it. Hell was actually, he actually heard Hell and demons calling him by his name. Be right back.
