A good prayer: that here and now — while we’re on earth, in these precious moments of opportunity — we pray for the “eyes of Heaven.” That is, ask Jesus to grant realization now of things you otherwise will not realize until you’re on the “other side” (of the veil). Pray to see through God’s Eyes.

Knowing how you and how you’re conducting your life are being viewed by God makes for a good prayer. Does it not make sense to seek such a perspective? (Why have regrets afterward? “If only I had known,” we might lament. “If only I knew.”)

The eyes of Heaven: Sometimes we’re afforded glimpses of just this — the eyes of Heaven — through those who have returned after clinical death.

Now, with near-death experiences, one has to be cautious. No question. Often, they veer onto non-Christian channels. There can be misinterpretation. There can be deception. They are to be left alone when Christ is left out. Often, it’s difficult to separate the wheat and chaff. What such witnesses encountered can be twisted.

But also often, it’s worth the cautious effort of discernment.

Jeffery Olsen is a man who had such an experience after a car accident in 2003. On a cold winter night, Olsen was driving along a rural road in Utah when his car hit a patch of black ice. He lost control and the vehicle flipped half a dozen times, tumbling down the highway at seventy-five miles an hour.

Miraculously, Olsen survived the crash (with major injuries). His wife and youngest child (they had an older one) were not as “fortunate.” But for a brief time, it was otherwise; he “died.”

And when he did he says he was bathed and suspended in what he calls a bubble of light.

His wife, who he knew was physically dead, allegedly communicated with him.

“She kept saying, ‘You gotta go back. You gotta go back. You can’t come; you can’t be here.’ We had a conversation about how if I stick with her, our oldest son would be orphaned. We literally made a choice that I would come back and raise our son. So, ‘purpose’ for me has a lot to do with free will and choice.”

“My soul left my body in that moment,” he told a website. “I was more alive than I’d ever been. I was super-conscious.”

Raised in a conservative Christian household, Olsen says the experience brought him closer to the teachings of Jesus. “I am the man in prison; I am the beggar in the street. There was this profound, unconditional love that surrounded that experience. Judgments and comparisons literally just went out the window.”

Olsen doesn’t necessarily believe that his life’s purpose is about becoming a best-selling author or the leader of a megachurch. He doesn’t even have social media anymore. Instead, says this man, purpose is much more “granular.” “If I really want to change the world,” he says, “I’ve got to focus on the people under my own roof, in my own community, and make hands-on connections. Being a husband, a father, and a friend is a big deal. That for me is the purpose. It’s a very personal thing.”

Adds Olsen, who had a leg amputated, another held together by plates and screws, and collapsed lungs, “Pain can often be the carrier of wisdom, and wisdom brings peace. But make no mistake that both come with a price and are found only at the end of a path every soul chooses to travel.”

Perhaps worth some prayerful consideration.

That’s one experience. Discern.

Another:

Ingrid Honkala had her brush with death as a toddler in Bogota, Colombia, when she drowned in a water tank. Despite her young age — four — she found herself in a realm where there is no age and to this day remembers every moment.

“​​There was this clarity that, oh, we [humans] are clearly a spirit and are eternal beings,” she says. That, she adds, made her detach from the world as we know it. “This is what I have found with a lot of the people that have had near-death experiences. We are less attached. There’s what I call the deeper reality that we are more [than] the role we play [on earth]. For me, the true purpose [of life] is to remember that we are the light of the universe.”

“Nothing in the universe lacks purpose,” says Ingrid. “And everything that ever happened brought me to this moment. The purpose and the true mission is to shine that light in whatever we do. You are a doctor, you’re a carpenter, a housekeeper — whatever — being of service, being creative starts shining that light for others. That’s the purpose. We’re here to help each other. How can I, in my daily life, bring light to the world?”

A key purpose of life, then: just holding up His Light, through what we do, how we live, through what we give others.

There is the lawyer, Lucas Abbot, out of Maryville, Tennessee, who now has his own firm (known as Shield Wall Legal).

He never expected his life and career to turn out the way they have. But everything changed after an ice-diving accident sent him into cardiac arrest.

He began to look at life differently.

“I was dead for about 40 seconds,” Abbot told the publication Living. “When I came out of it, I decided, I’ve got to do something with this life.”

That took the form of criminal justice: realizing he enjoyed this field, he decided to help people as an attorney.

Today Abbot is dedicated to changing what he considers archaic laws, exposing corruption, building businesses, and providing legal services for those who can’t afford them. “I’m really just here to focus on people. It’s not about me, it’s about them,” Abbot says.

So many who have had these experiences (tenets of the true spirit of Christianity: helping those who need help) recite the same.

Can such episodes turn “new agey”? Without question. And when experiencers use terms like “light-workers,” one must discern, knowing that Scripture warns Satan can come as a being of light.

But the idea of bringing His Light?

Helping each other is what life and Christ are all about, and good to realize while we’re still here.

[resources: What You Take To Heaven and The Other Side]

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