A man who says he died for 45 minutes claims Jesus showed him a glimpse of heaven while answering two prayers he had whispered as a child more than 40 years earlier.
Keep reading to learn more.
Mike McKinsey had spent months looking forward to watching his son get married. By the time the rehearsal dinner arrived, however, the Tennessee construction superintendent was fighting a fever and struggling to stay awake.
Convinced it was nothing more than the flu, he refused to let it overshadow the family’s celebration and tried to push through, even as those around him noticed something was seriously wrong.
“He was the first kid to get married,” McKinsey recalled on the Round Trip Death podcast. “I don’t want to be a distraction.”
Only after the wedding did his son finally convince him to go to the hospital.
Doctors initially suspected appendicitis, but one simple test left McKinsey screaming in pain. Within hours, he was being wheeled into emergency surgery.
What happened next, he says, changed his life forever.
Took the hand of Jesus
McKinsey insists the extraordinary experience happened before doctors even placed the anesthesia mask over his face.
“Before they put a mask on or gave any medication, I looked to my right and there’s Jesus standing there.”
Describing the moment on the podcast, McKinsey – the author of “I Held the Hand of Jesus in Heaven”– said the figure appeared as a real person wearing a white robe, looking different from the image of Jesus he had known.
“His skin was darker than what I had been shown as a kid. His eyes were these dark greenish blue eyes, beautiful eyes,” he said, telling the host of God Encounters with Janie Duvall that despite the differences, he “knew instantly it’s Jesus.”
As he tried to make sense of what he was seeing, everything around him disappeared.
“It was like the surgeon walking in to do my surgery, but it’s Jesus,” he recalled. “He holds out his hand and he says, ‘I want to answer your prayer.’”
The words caught him completely off guard.
“Am I dead? What the heck’s going on? And what prayer? It didn’t make sense to me,” he said as he reached for the figure’s hand.
The moment their hands touched, McKinsey says the operating room vanished.
‘Glory of the Lord’
According to McKinsey, he suddenly found himself standing barefoot on what looked like a grassy hill surrounded by brilliant white light.
“I was standing on beautiful, lush green grass, a very dark green,” he recalled. “The blades of grass were perfectly manicured. My senses were heightened to the point that I could feel every blade of grass touching my feet.”
As the bright white light slowly pulled away, he said another scene appeared before him.
Beyond a hillside covered in flowers sat what he described as an enormous city, partially hidden beneath what looked like a glowing white veil. Rooftops, white buildings, towering steeples – with “no crosses” – and a large golden dome rose through the mist, while another mountain covered in perfectly shaped green trees stretched into the distance.
Above it all, the sky glowed with vivid shades of red, orange, purple and blue.
“There was a giant golden dome almost in the center,” McKinsey said. “There were other smaller domes around the city too as well as lots of tall steeples, all white, sticking through the fog.”
As he looked on, beams of light streaked across the sky before striking the treetops, scattering into what he compared to dazzling “white fireworks.”
Then, he said, Jesus quietly explained what he was witnessing.
“It’s the glory of the Lord.”
Overcome with emotion, McKinsey said he fell to his knees.
The next thing he remembers was waking up in intensive care after he had flatlined and been revived.
The prayers he’d forgotten
For a long time, one part of the experience continued to puzzle him.
“He said, ‘I want to answer your prayer.’ What prayer? I mean, the last prayer that I prayed before going into surgery was hope thing go well, you know, guide the surgeon’s hands.”
After digging deep, McKinsey realized that the answer stretched back more than four decades.
As a five-year-old attending his grandfather’s funeral, he remembered listening as a priest described heaven as a place without pain or sorrow.
“I remember thinking, ‘God, that sounds like a really cool place. Could you show me heaven?’”
That simple request, he said, became part of his nightly prayers throughout much of his childhood before eventually fading from memory.
There was another prayer he had forgotten too.
While watching A Charlie Brown Christmas as a boy, McKinsey recalled hearing Linus recite the Bible passage describing “the glory of the Lord.”
Curious, he quietly added another request to his prayers.
“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, what does that look like? That’s got to be really cool. Could you show me? Could you show me the glory of the Lord while you’re showing me heaven?’”
Lying on the operating table decades later, he said neither childhood prayer had crossed his mind.
Only afterward did he connect the pieces.
“40 years later… he answered both those prayers.”
Even now, McKinsey says the images remain as vivid as the day he experienced them.
“If I close my eyes, I can almost feel like I’m back there now.”
Please let us know what you think of Mike McKinsey’s claims about Jesus, and then pass this story along so we can get the conversation started!
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