Jim Woodford Died and Spent 11 Hours in Heaven! Find Out What He Saw | 2 Christian Dudes Episode 4

welcome back to another episode of the two christian dudes podcast as you probably already have figured out if you've been following us throughout season one we are continuing our conversations about near-death experiences we have another pilot on today you may have heard our interview a number of weeks back with captain dale black and today we are going to be speaking with jim woodford and i'm going to pitch it to randy to give us a quick intro to jim and we will get into his exciting story all right jim jim randy welcome to the conversation randy take it away sir jim it's great to have you uh jim has a fascinating story he was a successful businessman uh pilot as sean mentioned and then a rare disease killed him and he had an experience with heaven you're not going to wish you're not going to want to miss this episode and uh you'll want to hear it straight through because at the end you're going to hear something very encouraging so jim it is great to hear you please uh share your story it is absolutely fascinating well thank you randy and sean for having me and for um and for the opportunity to i think give people hope uh because um if you ever considered yourself a lost cause i'm the walking billboard when it comes to god so um my my book that i wrote having an unexpected journey truly was that an unexpected journey so to give you a little background and randy feel free to interrupt me because i there's so much to tell you in such a short time i always feel a little panicky because i i feel if i leave something out it may be the one thing that would bring someone closer to god so please bear with me so um i this happened to me back in 2014 um august 21st or april 21st sorry april 21st of 2014 and uh look you know i um i was not a christian so to speak i was raised catholic uh didn't mean a whole lot to me except it was a good hockey team uh at the church and i was born i'm canadian i was born in newfoundland canada which is sort of in the north northeast and uh where summer is on a wednesday from two to four [Music] but i loved it and it was my home uh and uh my dad died when i was very young i was only two and my mom was left a widow with two young boys and she was only 23. so um but i had a you know a wonderful upbringing we live with my uh paternal grandparents and uh they were wonderful irish catholic family and so nothing traumatic happened to me i don't remember my father of course but we were surrounded by love in a remote area of the canadian hinterlands and it was had a good life you know uh one of the things that i got used to as a young boy was watching uh the seaplanes that would come in and land on the lakes to uh to bring uh supplies and that sort of thing and i became enamored with aviation and so by the time i reached 18 that was what i wanted to do with my life and although we were quite poor my mom arranged somehow for me to borrow the funds to put myself through to put me through aviation school and so at 18 i graduated so i was back in 1967. if you can imagine a world without cell phones or satellites and of course growing up in the bush i was able to land a job with with a bush flying company and from there my career eventually blossomed into flying larger aircraft and working all over the world and so like anyone starting a new job i uh i loved it if if you're lucky enough in life uh to have a profession that you love so much you do it for free and on top of that they paid you ridiculously large amounts of money to do it you're very fortunate and that that indeed was me and i so i i loved it i loved the travel um and eventually did a lot of work out of england and into africa south america on special freight airlines so yeah i had a a good career and but you know i look back now in the clear light of hindsight and i remember those uh endless hours in in a on a night flight over say the south china sea where you it's so black you can't even see where the sky ends and the earth begins and i'd look up at the stars and you would think that i would have thought more about god than i did and i suppose i was never agnostic and i think like most people i hoped that someone was in charge of the chaos but i never sought it out and so i continued to live a life that became quite successful and invested my money wisely at the beginning of the tech boom in the 80s and i had a good life my nickname by the way was diamond gym whether it was an engine failure at 35 000 feet or a business deal that uh that just blossomed uh not out of any kind of particular intelligence just keeping my ear to the ground from the smart people i was around and that made me very comfortable in life shall we say so life was good and i married i met on horseback my wife and i mentioned horseback because horses play an important part in this story and when i grew up as a child in a remote area where we lived my grandfather logged with horses and so i grew up crawling under the bellies of horses and watching my grandfather and learning from him so i've always had a love and as i'm sitting here talking to you i'm looking at the window at my horses as we speak so and they they play an important part in the story so life was good and but i suppose like a lot of people not just of my generation but going back since the beginning of mankind my main focus in life was the achievement of wealth because wealth gave you freedom so i thought and i became good at it and was rewarded accordingly but little did i realize uh how hollow that is and what i mean by that is whether uh it was my collection of british sports cars my large boat new airplane i would i would enjoy those but then i remember laying awake at night and thinking is this all there is is this all there is and i would interpret that as meaning i needed more cars or a faster airplane or a bigger boat and so the next day i would go and buy them but what i was searching for was something far beyond uh the wealth of this world i just didn't know it i look back now in absolute amazement that i never uh really realized it was the absence of god in my life that was creating this emptiness and so uh you know a charmed life a beautiful loving family um and uh wealth sufficient to take pretty care of pretty much anything i wanted or needed and on top of that i was blessed with a good health all my life and and never had so much more much more than i had gold but in 2009 2010 i began to feel different and uh i of course put it to one side because with my nickname of diamond jim i can overcome anything so arrogance is a different is a difficult thing you're not you don't really realize how arrogant you are until you're faced uh with a true calamity in your life i have learned the hard way gentlemen and viewers that you have to come to the end of yourself before you find the beginning of god and that's what happened to me so to get to the point i became more and more ill and uh then woke up one morning and was unable to stand or uh and was quite ill i remember that that sunday morning my wife had gone to church and of course i never went and uh but when she came home and she's a nurse she immediately it was a sunday so i'd wait till monday to see my doctor and i went to see him and and he examined me and said well i think you just have maybe a flu that's coming on so just go home and rest and so i did and if nothing improved in fact it went downhill and a couple of days later i i couldn't keep food down and the paralysis was becoming more pronounced i was having difficulty walking so i went in again and now he was annoyed with me and assured me i was fine the blood work had not come back yet but just go home and rest well two days later i dragged myself in there again and this time i collapsed in the parking lot now they pay attention and my wife advocated very strongly that i'd be admitted to the hospital and so this was uh 2009 2010 and um i don't blame the physicians for this uh no one could pinpoint what was wrong with me that first they thought i had ms multiple sclerosis uh but that proved not to be true and actually what was happening was i had contracted the disease called guillain-barre and for those of your listeners who may not be familiar with it uh it was first isolated by dr guian and dr baray of paris who first isolated the disease after uh right around world war one and uh not not a lot of people have it although there's more transmission of it now with the zika virus guillain-barre named after the two doctors is the uh erosion of the myelin sheath on your brain stem and so you the nerves react by not being able to perform the functions that they were or created for a lot of pain tremendous pain and nothing that worked so i'm in the hospital and they can't figure out what's wrong with me many physicians never see this disease in their entire career and so they they don't recognize it i had one doctor telling me it's a small footnote in their studies guillain-barre uh so anyway uh one but they did bring in a consulting uh neurologist who uh had had one patient in his lifetime and so they uh they did a test that required um taking fluid from my spine and uh finding very elevated protein levels and and immediately diagnosed it as guillain-barre but you have a window of opportunity to stop it and they use plasmapheresis and autoimmunoglobulin therapy but by this time two weeks almost two weeks had passed and i was really in the throes of of of of being quite ill and this paralysis creeps up and if it gets into your lungs you simply die so they started intensive uh blood transfusions and uh to try and overcome but it went into full-blown um guillain-barre but slowly but surely and you know i started to get better and you would have thought having faced that i might have taken the time to cast my eyes heavenward and said god i may not have believed but thank you not me arrogance as i said is a terrible thing and uh you know uh and i say this with all respect uh airline captains are somewhat guilty of arrogance we don't come by it naturally but when you spend your life delivering hundreds of thousands of people safety to their destination you you feel quite good about that and you have to be careful because that sometimes becomes arrogance and you think about that for a moment you know you're flying through severe weather at 30 35 000 feet and sitting behind you or a couple of hundred people a couple of hundred sobs just uh wanting to get home to their family and it's my responsibility by the way sob stands for souls on board so before any of you have a heart attack uh i want you to understand that's how the manifest identifies you thanks for thanks for keeping us in the family friendly zone there's a practical reason if i might deviate for a moment souls on boards means live so in the event of a catastrophic crash and you had 297 passengers you find 301 bodies it means you had four coffins on board so there's a practical reason for it so uh anyway souls on board for those of you who almost had a heart attack and so it was uh you know it you come by arrogance naturally and so i'm laying there and i got through it went through a tremendous amount of physiotherapy uh learned to walk again learned how to swallow learn how to speak but was left with tremendous body pain all over and i'm not talking in convenient pain uh randy and sean i'm talking pain that's all consuming and and those of you who are listening who are going through or have had experience with that level of pain it eclipses everything else in your life and when i got well enough to travel i went to all the the best medical uh treatments around the world to try to find uh some sort of cure or relief and there is there was nothing uh as i said there's so few few cases relatively speaking of guillain-barre there's been very little research into it but i tried with standard medications and so on did not work a specialist did recommend that i try an experimental drug from england and i got permission from the canadian or my doctors got special permission from the canadian health authorities to import the uh the therapeutic drug on a temporary basis to see if it would help and you know something it did it did and uh it wasn't an immediate cure but i could have at least three or four hours of uh of of a day that were the pain had decreased by 75 and and that was a wonderful gift but i also discovered that if i took more than the prescription called for that the pain relief was greater and it lasted longer and here we enter the slippery slope of over medicating oneself and but having spent three years in absolute pain and isolation and having lost my ability to ride my horses to fly a plane to do all the sports that i loved to suddenly be able to get some semblance of that back i grabbed at it and unknown to my doctors and unknown to my wife i i began to take more of it and because i was still traveling a lot i was able to get prescriptions refilled easily and so that slippery slope of depending on medical outcomes prescription outcomes uh really can come back to bite you and um so fast forward to um to 2014 and as long as i kept the medication at a high level i was functioning still in a lot of pain but functioning and i realized that i had to divest myself of a number of my interests and so i was in the process of selling off companies and land and so on that evening in april i had received a request from a company uh that was acting as my surveying company to go and look at a large purchase a large large tract of land i had that i was trying to sell uh and to make sure that the markets were in the correct place and i so although i didn't drive much because of my medical condition it was all on back roads so i got in my truck and and uh drove to that field and it was late afternoon early evening in 2014 in april uh springtime and i managed to get to the field and when i drove into the field i didn't plan it this way but i i was facing the setting sun and i sat there and turned the truck off and sat there trying to get up uh the the strength to make my way around this large piece of property and check the markers and i remember thinking boy i don't know if i can do this that's a long way around and then i happened to and i got into the habit of hiding medication so that my wife wouldn't see that i was overtaking it and i moved some things in my glove compartment or the console of my truck and i i saw some of the medication and there was a bottle pop there and i thought well a few more won't hurt famous last words and so i i took them and knowing full well that i had already taken far more that day than the prescription called for and uh and i sat back in the truck seat waiting for that warm relief that that i had become accustomed to of the pain being dulled for a few hours but as i sat there something different started to happen and i remember the feeling of intense heat in my lower legs was so intense that i thought the truck must be on fire and i looked down quickly and there was no fire and this raging uh heat came rushing up my legs and then from my fingertips inboard toward my chest and i tell people you know you know when you've done something catastrophic and by catastrophic i mean life ending and suddenly it was as though as my lungs started to seize it was as though i was in the cab of the truck was filling with water and i kept raising my head to try to breathe and i could not and was at that moment of realization that i i was dying and remember i said i wasn't agnostic but i believe there are the old saying there are no atheists in foxholes there are no atheists dying in trucks either and i remember raising my hand and it was shaking violently to the setting sun and from somewhere already deep inside of me a place that i had never been to was this overwhelming feeling of not fear not fair i'd had engine failures i'd had landed in difficult situations it wasn't fair it was a feeling of remorse that i had lived what what many by a standard that many would have thought the ultimate success and that i'd never thanked the creator if he existed and so i raised my shaking hand to the setting sun and i cried out the first of six words the first three of six words and the first three words that i cried out was god forgive me forgive me and and it came as i said from a place inside of me i hadn't been to in a long long time and when i no sooner i got the words out then i collapsed on the steering wheel and hit my head violently and i was gone the next thing i'm aware of is a tremendous pain on my forehead and i sit back up and i'm in the truck and i'm looking out and i know time has passed because the sun is now on the horizon as it sets and uh then the realization flooded through me that i have no pain the pain is gone i finally got it right you have to take the whole bottle and i slide out of the truck and i walk about 15 to 20 feet away and i feel incredible it's as though i've taken off a heavy wet overcoat and with it the pain and i i feel like i'm 16 again and and i'm just overwhelmed and overjoyed and i and i'm looking out at the setting sun i can hear the birds it's springtime i can smell the grass and i am just overwhelmed that the medication finally worked and then i turn and look toward my truck and i'm outraged outraged someone is in my truck not only that he has the audacity to be sleeping on my steering wheel and so i turned to go over there and give him a good what for have you ever had a dream where you're trying to run from something and it's as though your feet can't move and i realized that as hard as i tried my feet would only move an inch or two at a time and and and i'm stunned why you know i feel so good why can't i just run over there and grab this guy but i do make slow progress and then i look up and gentlemen the realization that the man in the truck leaning over the steering wheel is no stranger it is me how can this be i am here and yet i'm there how can this be and of course being a guy that could fix anything and in my arrogance i immediately concocted the scheme that if i could just get over there and get back in my body everything will be okay and so i struggled to get over there and i know it's me because my head is turned this way on the steering wheel and there's blood gushing from my mouth and nose and i i struggled to get closer to get back into my body but suddenly i began to rise now as a as a pilot i'm a good judge of altitude and as i'm rising i i'm stunned because how can this be and and i look and now i'm i'm drifting slowly backwards but rising continuously and i i can look down and see the bed of my truck see my toolbox and and and i'm i'm stunned i rise a little higher and then something made me look up instead of down because i can see the surrounding area i can look through the back window of the truck i can see my body sloped over the wheel and then i turn and i look up and there right in front of me is this golden circle it's maybe 200 feet away it's about 60 feet in diameter and it's it's like a golden wedding ring and then suddenly the center of it filled with a golden light and i had the impression that it swung inwards and backwards like the door of an old-fashioned safe and immediately my body went into a reclining position of about 45 degrees and i mean unless you've lived under a rock in a cave i think everyone has heard of the tunnel of light but i never paid the attention to it and suddenly i began to go forward toward this tunnel of light and as i went through the the ring i could see what was an immense distance and all of it covered with cloud that was golden but a distinct path through the center and it seemed once i realized what this was it was as though i had pushed the throttles on an l-1011 forward on on v to achieve v1 on takeoff and i felt this tremendous force of speed and and i went a tremendous speed into this tunnel of light reclining backwards above 45 degrees and to give you an idea of the speed i could i could feel the stars streaming by see the stars streaming by i mentioned that in baltimore one night when i was speaking there was a young guy in the front row and he said sound sounds like the opening of the star trek to me and that's a pretty good analogy it was the stars streaming by and i was terrified because i being a technical person always understanding why things were happening wanting to learn i was absolutely baffled there was no rationale no technical reason i could attach to this and i'm i'm the other thing that i remember vividly was that when you're going fast whether you're in your convertible or in a speed boat or on your motorbike you hear the rush of the wind you hear the noise of the air nothing complete silence and yet the sensation of tremendous speed and so jim you just said you were at a kind of a place where you're kind of terrified and scared did you enter further into the light and immediately encounter jesus or angels or was there a darkness that tried to pull you in first i i i suddenly became aware of a a bright light at the end of the tunnel that was even lighter than the tunnel and as i came toward it i decelerated and came up right and i find myself facing i still don't know whether to call it a door or a portal it's covered in mist but i do know i have no choice because the i'm i sense that the the tunnel is closing behind me and so i step through this missed covered portal and gingerly put one foot inside because i cannot see what i'm stepping onto and felt something firm i brought my other foot in i look down the mist starts to clear and i'm stunned because i'm looking at the most perfect green grass i've ever seen each blade beautiful in its symmetry in its evenness i now know what they mean by the grass is always greener on the other side they're talking about heaven and and then the mist clears in front of me i look up and to my right there's this beautiful mist lifting off this field and the field is covered in flowers of of so many colors and colors that i can't i have no name for and i mean i've traveled on every 52 countries in the world uh i've been in the the most beautiful places and nothing compared to this and i'm stunned by the beauty of it and the rolling fields that seem to go on forever and uh this beautiful vault of a darker blue sky than we're used to here on earth but no sun because as a pilot i was trying to orient myself and i thought if i could find the sun i know in my southeast southwest no sun everything seemed to generate a light that created this this fusion of color and then i swung my vision to the left and as i left that beautiful vista on the right the the grass went from green to brown to black to scorched and i was really taken by looking for the technical reason why would there be this dichotomy between these two vistas and that darkness continued to the left and into what seemed to be a crevasse and i guess i'm just naturally inquisitive i made a few tentative steps to the left to see what was beyond this chasm and and as i looked down and it it was as though the walls of this chasm were covered with a shiny black coal anthracite and as i looked down uh the first thing i saw was at the very pit of this the bottom of this abyss was a fire a red red fire as though you would glimpse a campfire on a distant on a just in a distant valley and um but i was caught by the difference and not only that there was a sense of uh of of gloom uh a miasma um i've learned um a sense of dread i i think ever since we crawled out of caves we've always feared the darkness and so i started to turn away from this but then something happened the fire became greater at the bottom and as i'm looking down two things happened the brightness of the fire increased and i realized that down and looking sideways it was as though a door had opened a large door and i could hear a sound for the first time and the sound was the sound of two large doors being forced open on hinges that had not been oiled and you could hear them screeching and and so on and just rusty and and of course that flooded more light so i realized the light was coming from the side to the bottom and then to my utter amazement something shuffled out of that doorway the doorway was huge and so was the creature that came out and i'm looking down on it and it appeared to have a form uh large round it was on fire its body was on fire its head was squat on its shoulders and it seemed to be searching around the bottom of this pit for something and and i and then suddenly it was as though it became aware of me and it swiveled its head around and looked up at me and fellas i can tell you something the look of hatred that i saw in its glowing eyes not just for me but for all of mankind will stay with me forever on top of that there was this an odor that came out of that pit a sense of decay a sense of of all things bad as i said on the asthma and and i i turned because i couldn't bear the to look at it but just the second before i turned it began to scramble up the sides of that pit now for its size it was large it moved in amazing with an amazing nimbleness and it crawled very rapidly up the side of that pit and i scrambled backwards falling backwards on my on my elbows and it reared up out of the pit and i got and and i was confronted by this creature body on fire uh dripping saliva uh and and the most horrendous face but the other thing was there was screaming and the screaming was coming not from not from its mouth the screaming appeared to be coming from within the body it was as though this creature randy had consumed souls and they were crying out for mercy and it it stepped out of the pit and lumbered toward me and to keep my sanity i scrambled to my feet and turned my back to it and remember i said there's six words i said the first three god forgive me and then i turned and i raised my i turned toward the beautiful light and i i raised both hands and this time i cried out the next three words three words that i had never prayed in my life god helped me help me and instantly three points of light appeared in this in the in that beautiful cerulean blue sky converging toward me one was coming from about 90 degrees the other one from about 260 and the other one from about 310 and all converging into one at the same time this creature is behind me and then in addition to the streaming i heard it speak my name this creature knew me it knew me i i wasn't that bad a person i may not have gone to church but i i was not i what did i do to deserve this all these thoughts were racing through my mind and i gave to the poor if there was a tax receipt but what did i do to deserve this and it had a strange voice it it was in between a growl and a whisper and i could hear it saying jim jim we are here for you we are here for you join us come to us and i just i honestly believe that had i turned at that moment and looked into its face i would have been snatched but instead i concentrated on this beautiful light coming toward me and the and all of a sudden the lights fused together and i'm i'm looking at this light traveling toward me and the light washed over me and at that point i turned to look back and randy when that light struck that creature it screeched and screamed in agony and scrambled backwards like a rat running for cover darkness and evil cannot live in the light of god it must not live in the light of god and i turned back to look and i mean i might not have gone to church but i knew what an angel was and suddenly i'm looking at three magnificent beings coming toward me very tall very elegant silver long hair beautiful golden light which was as i learned later a refraction of their golden wings that creates this hey what we call a halo it's it's the light of their silver hair from their wings when their wings are extended and i i remember being astonished because the feeling of love and peace and safety that flooded over me when just mere seconds before i felt all this hatred and evil toward me was truly overwhelming and so they came right up to me and the first one approached me and of all the things that i will always remember about this incredible encounter were their eyes now imagine these creatures these beautiful creatures 10 feet tall another one about 12 feet tall and then the one coming behind dressed in warrior gear truly a guardian angel um about 15 feet tall so these are wonderful creatures so the first one walks up to me and looks down at me and the thing that i'll always remember their violet eyes violet eyes and and then they he spoke to me and his lips didn't move it was and it was more than telepathy he was in my mind and i was in his and and i say he or he look they i don't want to use the word androgynous but they looked like the best of all of us they had the gentleness of a female and the strength of a warrior and and and and and just this incredible combination of everything that's good and all of a sudden i feel this wonderful arm come up and come around my shoulder and and and and then i'm conscious that this magnificent huge feathered wing came out around his arm and he pressed me into his into his chest and i looked up into those violet eyes and i hear this in my mind this beautiful voice that said to me fear not james for we are your constant friends and now as you gentlemen probably know whenever you get an email or a text or a letter from me i always sign it you're a constant friend and so there i am cuddle up to something that i thought was just a myth a legend and i felt so safe and warm and i i have to tell you this an overrunning late but i have to tell you this as i'm being hugged i suddenly became aware of the incredible smell of warm tapioca now bear with me and i'm not here to start the church of the holy tapioca i'm not but here's something you should know because you will all experience this god knows what a huge difference this is for us to encounter him and his beings and so he gives us something that we loved as a child to to to make us feel we have come home and when i was a young boy walking home through a snowstorm in northern canada in the middle of june i'd get to my grandmother's house and i'd go in and on her wood stove she would have made warm tapioca for me isn't that wonderful and for some of you it may be the smell of your mom's perfume it might be the smell of your dad's burn it might be any of those things that brought you joy as a child and for me it was the smell of tapioca so i don't mean to digress sean i'll i'll help you digress a little bit jim because for me when i met my grandmother in heaven it was chocolate chip cookies really really yes that was when i visited her home that's what i uh smelled the first smell it was kind of a musty soda otherwise in the in the little bungalow but those chocolate chip cookies yeah and that was the fragrance uh in heaven you know our viewers jim um have noted the uh sometimes the variance in the stories that is each of us accounts something a little bit differently or some sometimes significantly differently than what others have mentioned um but i know it doesn't bother you or me uh in hearing that these different accounts because we can each uh reach a destination and along the way our account of our travels to that destination and even our expression of how that destination uh looks and appears uh to us is relevant very much to our own experiences our personality and all of those things i i just think it reflects the glory of god to know us and what we need and your account in meeting the creature i can identify to some extent having seen a battle between the angels and the demons as i was being pulled by that proverbial light i thank you for bringing us to the account where you had met the angels and the warmth of those angels and how they affected you the three of them but i've got to ask you this question jim because you are looking over at your horses there and i recall reading your story and by the way our our viewers and listeners have got to read jim's book it's it's fantastic um but one of the comments that you made uh in your in your book uh when when you woke up you had mentioned to your wife well there are horses in heaven [Laughter] you've got to get to the horses jim yeah and what you saw there all right i i i apologize i am guilty as i said at the beginning of the conversation of of uh trying to get as much into the story as i can because i'm afraid i'll leave something out that may help someone so anyway the the guardians were were wonderful i felt safe and then they they're very elegant uh i do have to tell you this because i think people would be very interested in this i i was taken by how they bowed to me they bowed to me and and i felt rather uncomfortable because uh i should be bowing to them and i i questioned why because it was such a bow of of um of respect and subservience and bowed very low and um and they spoke with kind of this victorian perfection in their voice i didn't hear any thou or thee or but a very measured tone that incredibly and with every word they spoke there was wisdom anyway i i i questioned the guardian that i eventually found out was mine uh all my life now that guy pulled that person that angel had pulled an awful tour of duty but i digress um but i asked why and they said james do you not know that when we look at mankind we see the spark of life of our master isn't that something we who consider ourselves the lowest of the low are looked at by the angels in awe of us anyway so we walk and i'll skip forward but they showed me many things told me many things i developed 360 degree omnivision i call it i heard everything i understood everything uh the beautiful flowers that spoke to me that that were that saying to me but eventually we come to this beautiful pasture and and uh i guess they knew my love of horses and again i think it ties in to your uh to your comment on your chocolate your grandmother's chocolate chip cookies and my love of tapioca uh and and because they wanted to show me something that that would really make me happy and the second guardian raised his hand and suddenly coming from around the grove of trees toward me and as they ran as they trotted across the grass the grass lit up with the with light from their hooves and there were three of the most magnificent horses coming toward me now i had never studied the bible i had no idea at that time that when jesus comes back he'll be riding a white horse it's in the bible and i'm stunned you know because as i stand there they come right up to the fence and and i had loved their kind all my life and they seemed to know that and they looked at me with such love in their eyes and i reached forward to stroke the neck of the lead horse and my hands sank right into the body of this being of light and when i pull it back randy the light of the horse's body stuck to my hand until i got a 10 to 12 inches be and then it came back into the horse's body and and it was just phenomenal to watch and to experience and i've come to call it the sticky love of god that's something you hear every day so uh yeah so that was the horses and uh so we went from there uh and i'll skip through to a really important part they were showing me more things and and i i suddenly was conscious of the of one of the guardians standing next to me and he said hold my cloak and so i reached over and held on and suddenly we were above looking down and i thought i was looking at a reflecting pool but it opened up and i realized i'm having an aerial tour of heaven and i hate using that term because you hear people that talk about our experiences randy and they call it heavenly tourism you know what what a lack of faith that is to hear that term of derision i believe with all my heart i know this is real i wasn't imagining it i wasn't hallucinating and so i was able to look and and i didn't know at that time that i wasn't being allowed to stay you have to remember that and people say to me did you see your family no uh i did not it was explained to me that later that um i could not set foot in the heavenly city but they would show me the heavenly city um i didn't connect it with the fact that i wasn't staying so anyway you know to see the halls of knowledge the halls of wisdom how heaven is laid out and yes the streets are gold but it's not the brassy gold that we come to think of on earth it's a different shimmer of gold um it's not the fort knox kind of gold uh so saw many things had and had the opportunity to ask many questions the thing i do want to talk about because this is a comfort to so many parents there was one building that stood out among all the rest and the buildings are made not of stone um not of wood but of a material that has a light in it now that i don't want it to sound too los vegasy but it was a gentle welcoming light but this particular building glowed with a light that had a warmth to it and i asked what building that was and i was stunned when they said that is the nursery and i responded nursery in heaven and they said yes james this is where the souls of aborted children or children who die in their innocence from disease or come back here and each soul is so precious to god that that they're cared for they grow at a different rate because they're they're not growing a physical body so they grow at about three times the rate that we do that a child does on earth and and this is where they they take care and so on of the the little souls that have been unwanted or have died and i had no idea how this part of the story would have such an effect on women who have lost children or who have had to have an abortion at a time in their life when they had no other option and it's been a blessing to explain to these parents that their child lives their child lives and so anyway i getting right to the the main event after showing me much more we came back to paradise the ground of paradise which was outside the walls i learned and uh i was looking once again at the horses and i and i realized i hadn't seen my guardian for a while so i turned the look for him and i saw him and he was about no more than maybe 40 50 feet away on a small rise and but when i looked he was bent over almost in a kneeling position and was holding up a book and facing him was a more magnificent figure than even the angels but i couldn't see the face you know and it was in profile to me do you know how you drive down a hot road on a warm summer day and uh and and there's a shimmer on the pavement there was this kind of shimmer covering the features of this magnificent being that was but clearly he was reading what the guardian was holding and i took note of the book that the guardian had taken out of his sleeve and it was as thin as a cheap roadside diner menu and suddenly the awareness came over me that what the guardian was holding was the book of my life and instead of it being a a book filled with good deeds and kindness all i had to show for a life that i thought was the epitome of success was this tiny tiny book thin you know charles dickens wrote a wonderful line when he wrote mankind should have been my business and instead it was all about the pursuit of wealth and all i had to show for it although i thought myself a kind person all i had to show for it was this little thin book i am determined fellas that to live my life now that when i go back if if they permit me to go back when they open the book of my life for this chapter they're going to need three angels and a forklift to get it open you know so anyway i'm i'm watching and and this figure is leaning forward clearly intent on the little bit that's written in there and and suddenly uh the figure straightened up and the angel put the full of the book put it in his sleeve and disappeared and then this magnificent figure turned toward me and as he turned from profile to direct on suddenly the shimmer gradually the shimmer that had covered his features vanished and i found myself face to face with none other than jesus christ the son of god someone that i thought was just some old jewish legend that that people have made up to create whatever and i'm looking at this figure and the magnificence of this figure the not just the look of intense love and concern for me uh but this golden light flowed out of him from all seemed to start at his head and flow down his body and it was light that behaved like slow moving water it it flowed off him and it flowed down that slope and i fell to my knees and tried to crawl toward him i had to get closer and it was as though i had finally come home that i had found what i had searched for all my life and and i started to crawl toward him and uh to get closer and then his eyes looked into mind and when i looked into those eyes of gray and green and blue i was lost in the love of eternity this magnificent creature knew me too but this was a creature of love and forgiveness and desire to know me better and for a split second and randy you probably experienced this too although my intellect knew better it was as though when i my eyes met his it was as though i was the only one in creation the only one he had ever created he knew me that intimately and loved me that deeply and was a it was a moment that i knew from that that whatever happened to me i was his forever forever and but i just wanted to be around him and i tried to crawl closer to him and two guardians appeared beside me and held me back and i struggled free and continued to climb toward him and suddenly he raised his right hand and there was no mistaking what the gesture meant he was still smiling in a gentle way but this was a definite command to stop and i remember the feeling inside of me of of of uh not being allowed to come closer and i i was i i've waited it was a baited breath i guess if i was breathing but i have just completely enveloped in the love of his eyes and then i i guess i must have taken another step or two or crawled on my knees and i heard uh all of a sudden he raised his hand even higher and randy when he raised his hand his cloak fell back and i saw the remains of the crucifixion and then he looked intently at me and he began to speak to me and people say to me what did it sound like how can i possibly i attempt to but how can i possibly be accurate but suddenly i heard his voice and with him unlike the angels who which was more of a telepathy not telepathy but a mind thing jesus's face moved just as you or i would speaking to each other and then i heard the voice of the son of god and it stunned me that he knew my name he knew me and he looked at me with a gentlest of smiles hands still raised meaning to not come forward and he said to me james my son this is not yet your time go back and tell your brothers and sisters of the wonders we have shown you and his hands slowly came down and crossed over his left and i was overwhelmed but the fact that he knew my name but more than that i was now coming to the realization that i wasn't being allowed to stay and i began to plead i began to beg i please let me stay this is what i've yearned for all my existence i just want to be wherever you are please don't send me away please let me stay and i remember saying this please let me stay i won't be any trouble you imagine saying that to the son of god i won't be any trouble but i was desperate and suddenly two guardians appeared beside me and lifted me from the ground and turned me around and were carrying me back down the path and i wrenched my shoulder away to turn to beg one more time to allow me to stay and jesus was gone but standing exactly in the place where he had stood was this magnificent warrior angel that i had that had greeted me and all of a sudden he began to expand he grew even taller than 15 feet and he put his wings out to their full magnificence and they spread out and upward in this beautiful gold and he was surrounded with light and the message was clear that he was bearing the way forward for me and suddenly i feel the angels hold me again everything goes dark and i'm in a a a black tunnel and i can hear water and it's cold and it's painful and and i'm i feel like i'm descending at tremendous speed but unlike the tunnel of light there's no beauty there's just darkness and and i'm i'm going down this steep descent and suddenly i guess they tell me that i scared the the daylights out of the nurses because i had been of course triaged and they had told my wife that uh there was no hope of me coming back that there was no brain sign no sign of dreaming no sign of hallucinating nothing and brain sign of course is the measure of death not heartbeat they of course have triaged me and had me hooked up to everything there was complete renal failure of all my organs and the doctors had said to lorraine that they would keep me until our children arrived to say goodbye and then they would recommend that she pulled the plug on the machinery that was flowing blood through my organs and and suddenly i come upright and scared the daylights out of the nurse she told me and later and screaming around all the tubes because i was intubated and uh and uh they ran and got my wife and said mrs what come quickly come quickly lorraine's a nurse she ran into the room and she couldn't believe it she said i was my eyes were as big as saucers i was trying to orient from the beauty of heaven to the to lying on a gurney and she climbed up on the bed with me and started to cry and and and they they were watching my blood pressure come back to normal all my organs start to operate again so eventually they pulled the tube out so i could speak clearly and my throat was terribly sore and raw and and i looked into my wife's pretty face and i said lorraine lorraine i saw jesus and jesus has horses of all the things i could have said to her jesus has horses and i'm back while there's so many directions we could go after everything you've shared um uh but i want to be conscious of our time because we are starting to get to the end of our time together today um you know in terms of what you understood is why you came back what your mission your calling was on this side of your heaven journey what shifted for you uh how was your your mission different on this side of your experience just let me quickly tell you this what the words that jesus said to me james he knew my name my son he's the father of the soul this is not yet your time that implies to me that if i live a good life there will be a time when i'll go back go and tell which i'm doing with you now your brothers and sisters of the wonders we have shown and that's what i try to do every day and uh you know and the cynics out there when they see me hocking a book the funds from this book go to help all the poor that we can find it's not a lot but we do what we can you know that's that's another thing that i think that has been noted by some of the listeners or viewers you know when um [Music] and i i too jam have authored a book um they think oh well you know they're just taking advantage of the opportunity really and that kind of discounts the story in itself in reality um many of the accounts that uh we've heard really are those that uh where the either the author has reluctantly entered into writing a book or has been compelled by this edict that they felt from the lord saying you need to share this story but i don't know if i've run across a single one who is a born-again believing believer in jesus christ who has profited through this process well there we go jim hasn't either you know so it all goes back into the ministry it all goes back to helping others sadly sadly as we all know there are shall we say people preaching that do it for money only and so the rest of us are tired with that brush i don't look for any of that i don't want any of that but we do want to help all we can yes and your story jim gives glory to jesus christ and that's what i think is the determinant of what is uh a test a testimony that the lord wants to be shared publicly in forms like this versus others who may share it and kind of give that glory to them they feel enlightened or something to that effect um i know jim and i share this i actually actually have to say jim to you that when i hear you and i've heard your story before of course read your book that i have an affinity for what you went through um and there may be a few others as well where i am just i'm with you in that experience that is i have a queen and ear relationship with what you've gone through um even though our accounts are are varied there is that very uh identifiable kind of feeling and gripping i don't know if uh viewers noticed i was tearing up because when you went there jesus i couldn't hold it in um there's that to me testifies personally testifies of uh the reality and also um the need to tell this story publicly and to give glory to the lord of his reality and his truth and his love so jim i just have one final question for you um you've shared very openly uh in your account um the question i have is and you've touched on it before but this experience in and of itself why do you think that the lord gave you this experience because not everybody does have this experience why do you think he gave it to you especially you and what have you done with it obviously we've done a lot of good things with it but what what's your kind of central message that you want to convey to uh to others you know that's that's something i've often thought about and why me and in the first few times that i started to speak publicly about this i said i have no idea why god chose me and there was an older pastor in the front pew of the church and he stood up immediately and said jim why not you why not you and he said you will you will live a life of criticism but none of that will matter because you are doing what god told you to do go and tell your brothers and sisters and so that's that's what what drives me and it was my friends at destiny publishing who i met through my co-author tom gardner who convinced me really to do the book because i too had concerns about being perceived as someone who did this for for for money and uh and sadly as i said earlier there are people that do it but uh it's it's i so coming back to your original question randy i really don't know but i'm trying to do the best job i can for god and when god when jesus asks you to do something man you get you get filled with a a feeling of power that you never felt before so i'm just doing what i was told well and i'll say for me in terms of jim's story a couple things that stand out as i try to think in my mind and contrast with what others have shared uh certainly the horses in heaven that that's an element that's unique we've had another guest talk about encountering her her dogs in heaven and not everybody experiences animals in heaven but that's certainly uh something unique from jim's story and then for me i just i love the interaction that he had with the angels not everybody has that depth or that much encounter experience encountering angels in heaven so that's something that really uh just stood out to me from his story randy i don't know if you want to comment anything uh for you that really stands out from jim's story yes and that is the moment that jim went in is the condition of his heart and i mean spiritual i'm talking about the soul that he went into this experience with versus uh some of the others uh that we've listened to for example jim uh testified that he wasn't an agnostic but he wasn't uh you know this person who uh you know was praise the lord hallelujah all the time you know he just wasn't he wasn't that type of person he was a successful person and the worldly success kind of reflected in what he thought would be a success in in god's terms so you take that account of somebody who um is is not the faith is not as firm as it is certainly today versus um somebody who goes into this experience um having known the lord served the lord served whether it be in church teaching whether it be just you know whatever it is in ministry and that experience is a little bit different but we have heard a number of accounts where people have experienced these kind of demonic elements and one of the some of the comments that we've received are i don't want to see that i don't want to go through that when i die i don't want to i want to go right straight to jesus right i don't want to go through what uh what these other accounts have said you know i don't want to be at the effect of possibly being called into uh into hell and um the good news is and and something that struck me jim with your account is that you knew to whom you had to cry out to uh that that's when your heart compelled you to testify of jesus christ and the need for him he brought you immediately into his presence and i think that uh speaks encouragement to those uh who have lost loved ones and they're thinking you know um you know they really didn't you know live the life and i don't know where they are today you know the lord loves his creation so much that he gives every opportunity for that person to know him and to receive him and to be with him forever in eternity in heaven and you know there is that period of time between as you as you mentioned jim the heart stops and the brain stops it's a short period of time you know the longest studies have shown maybe up to six minutes but no longer yours was hours i think if i'm not mistaken well that prepared me for interrupting but in the brief time we have left the reason it says 11 hours that was from the time that that's based on the time that i was found and the time i resuscitated in other words the the medical history uh but i time doesn't matter you know this time is different there uh you know it's time does time exists but it's different and i don't know if i was 11 hours or 11 years or 11 seconds all i know is that everything i needed to learn well everything they wanted me to learn i learned and and and you know as as i mentioned for the for the the cynics and the facebook comments that are rude and unbelieving and so on um that's nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands that have reached out to me and said you helped me so much you know and and just two nights ago i had a gentleman call me because my my my i'm easy to get and said i want you to know i was prepared to end my life and i saw you on this on on the tv program as i was getting ready to go out the door to leap off a bridge that is incredible and i hope that they have recorded that so that this time the book of my life if i'm chosen to go back will be worth the time for jesus to read wow that's a powerful testimony to certainly end on uh jim we want to make it easy for people to find you to connect with you uh or do we discover you on the web uh jim woodford ministries uh having an unexpected journey is available on amazon and just call me my phone number is on my website and like we do with every episode we'll put links uh links to jim's website places you can connect with him on social media and links to where you can pick up your very own copy of the new book as well uh we're so honored that jim came back a second time we had a technical issue with our first recording and it went by by and so we actually got to record this one again so we're glad jim came back uh sean i think that was satanic yes i'm not sure what was wrong with that first one but uh we did get the second one down but they can't he can't keep three christian dudes down right that's right as soon as we're done with this episode i'm like downloading this one putting it in the vault we'll keep it safe uh we won't let this one uh be taken away but jim truly and honor thank you for sharing with us pouring into our audience we really appreciate it um we just like everybody else is so touched and encouraged by your short story thanks for sharing it with us thank you god bless you both thank you bye thanks jim

Channel: Randy Kay

Views: 803,467

Rating: 4.8013344 out of 5

Keywords: sid roth, sid roths its supernatural!, jim woodford, jim woodford heaven, jim woodford sid roth, sid roth heaven, sid roth angels, jim woodford testimony, jim woodford story, jim woodford nde, sid roth heaven visits, sid roth supernatural, nde experience 2021, nde stories, jesus, angels, healing, near death experience, heaven, visitation with jesus, angelic, heavenly encounters, died and came back, life after death, nde, near death experiences reaction, near death experiences

Id: RfcTAoPSJEA

Length: 79min 40sec (4780 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021