When 20-year-old Beverly Brodsky climbed onto a motorcycle in 1970, she had no idea her life was about to take a turn so dramatic it would shatter her beliefs, transform her faith, and leave her with a story people around the world still talk about today.
What she says she encountered during her near-death experience wasn’t a tunnel cliché or a dreamlike haze — it was something she describes as God Himself, but in a form she never imagined.
Raised in a conservative Jewish home in Philadelphia, Beverly’s faith collapsed at just eight years old after learning about the horrors of the Holocaust.
By 1958, she considered herself an atheist. But all of that changed years later on a sunlit road near Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.
A crash that changed everything
Beverly was riding as a passenger on a motorcycle when an accident left her with a fractured skull and devastating facial injuries — so severe that doctors told her they only saw wounds like hers “on the battlefield.”
She spent two weeks at UCLA Hospital wrapped in salt-soaked bandages and was sent home without pain medication.
Broken physically and emotionally, Beverly finally cried out to a God she didn’t even believe in:
“God, if you’re out there, you can have me now because I’m finished.”
What happened next is something she’s spent her life sharing.
“I was me, but not in my body”
Beverly says she suddenly felt her pain disappear and saw herself floating above her physical body. On the ceiling, she noticed a being she believed to be an angel; radiant, glowing, and male in presence though without wings.
She told author Kenneth Ring:
”I barely had time to realize the glorious strangeness of the situation – that I was me but not in my body – when I was joined by a radiant being bathed in a shimmering white glow.”
The being took her hand and, she says, the two of them drifted effortlessly through the window and toward the Pacific Ocean.
A passage into light
Hand in hand with the angel, Beverly felt herself guided toward a small, dark passageway.
”There, before me, was the living presence of the light. Within it, I sensed an all-pervading intelligence, wisdom, compassion, love, and truth.”
She described the being as neither male nor female—simply pure, perfect presence.
”It… contained everything, as white light contains all the colors of a rainbow when penetrating a prism. And deep within me came an instant and wondrous recognition: I, even I, was facing God.”
Asked every question she’d ever had
Overwhelmed, Beverly says she confronted this presence with every painful question she had carried since childhood, especially the injustices she had seen in the world.
”I discovered that God knows all your thoughts immediately and responds telepathically. My mind was naked; in fact, I became pure mind.”
Then came what she describes as a flood of understanding:
”I was given more than just the answers to my questions; all knowledge unfolded to me, like the instant blossoming of an infinite number of flowers all at once.”
Before the experience faded, she recalls seeing what she described as a “glorious fire,” like the center of a star — a final vision she believed symbolized a blessing.
A New Life, A New Faith
Beverly returned to her injured body, and to a completely changed life. Once an atheist, she became a devoted Christian and eventually shared her story worldwide.
Her near-death experience has been featured in McCall’s magazine, a BBC documentary (The Human Body), Israeli public radio, and the book Lessons From The Light, where Kenneth Ring called her account “possibly the most moving in my entire collection.”
Now a longtime church member, Beverly continues to speak openly about the moment she believes she met God — not in the form she expected, but in a way that reshaped her understanding of life, death, and everything in between.
READ MORE
- If you meet this single requirement, you qualify for Trump’s $2,000 tariff dividends
- Prince Harry mocks Trump with brutal joke in late-night show
