Mike McKinsey's Near-Death Experience: Jesus Showed Him Heaven

The Week Before Everything Changed

Mike McKinsey. He wasn't particularly religious. He worked as a salesman for a tile company in Southern California, did well enough to get his own store in Anaheim, then moved back to Central California when his wife got pregnant. They raised four kids. Mike coached soccer, football, and baseball for nineteen years, more than thirty different teams, everything from T-ball to high school. His life was full and ordinary and stressful in all the ways a working father's life can be.

In the summer of 2015, his oldest son Ben was getting married in Santa Barbara. Ben had graduated, gotten his license as a nuclear medicine technologist, met someone at church. The wedding was set for a Saturday. Mike and his family drove down on Wednesday to make a mini-vacation out of it, one last goodbye to summer before the younger kids went back to school. The two younger boys brought wiffle balls and bats. They saw a big park next to the hotel and asked Mike to come play Home Run Derby with them. He did. They played for a couple hours.

That night, Mike started feeling sick. Like the flu was coming on. By Thursday, his stomach was getting worse. By Friday, he was running a fever and sweating. He made it through the rehearsal dinner, joking with guests that the thing was costing him a lot of money so he was going to have one of every dessert and eat everyone's leftovers. His son Ben, working in the medical field, sat with him at the hotel bar afterward and tried to diagnose what was wrong. He asked if Mike had his appendix out. Mike said he didn't think it was his appendix because there was no point tenderness, that specific spot on the abdomen that hurts really bad when you press it. That didn't happen.

But something was very wrong. Mike didn't sleep at all Friday night. He went to a quick stop at 1:00 in the morning to get Tylenol. It cut the pain a little but the fever wouldn't break. He was still sweating badly. By the time the wedding rolled around on Saturday, he was pale and miserable. He made it through the ceremony. Then he told his family he had to go get checked out, something was really bad wrong.

The Emergency Room

At the hospital, a nurse took his temperature: 104.3 degrees. She poked around on his abdomen. Does that hurt? No. She took out a little mallet, the kind they use to check reflexes, and tapped on the bottom of his foot. Does that hurt? Mike laughed. No. She tapped the other foot. The pain in his abdomen made him scream.

Okay, she said. That's your appendix. She asked if he'd done any physical activity lately. Mike mentioned playing baseball with the kids on Wednesday afternoon. Her expression changed. Wednesday. This was Saturday night. Three days. If his appendix ruptured when he was playing baseball, three days later, he was in serious trouble.

The surgeon came in about thirty minutes later. Mike's white blood cell count was really high. The surgeon thought his appendix had probably ruptured, and if they ruptured on Wednesday, they needed to get in there quick. They prepped Mike for surgery, started the IV, wheeled him down the hall. He said goodbye to his wife.

Standing on the Surgical Table

They burst open the doors of the surgery room and Mike's first thought was how freezing it was in there. He was still running a 104 fever, still sweating, but it felt so cold. How do these people work in this condition? They slid him over onto the surgical table. It felt tiny. He thought he was going to fall off. He didn't know where to put his hands.

He looked to his right.

Out of nowhere, Jesus was standing there. The physical person.

Everything else just kind of disappeared. There were no other people in the room. Mike looked around, really confused, thinking what is going on here. And then he thought to himself, did I die?

He'd heard of people who die and see themselves floating above their body. He didn't do that, so he must not be dead. But what was going on? It wasn't like it was a dream. It was like heightened reality. And it started right when Jesus stood there. Everything was different.

Mike describes Jesus in detail. His skin was much darker than Mike had seen as a kid. He almost looked like an Arab man. He was wearing a white robe. He had wavy brown hair. And he had these dark greenish blue eyes. When those eyes looked into Mike's eyes, he looked into my soul. Mike could feel this love emanating from this man. That was what convinced him it was Jesus. Everything about him just radiated love.

Jesus held out his hand and said, I want to answer your prayer. Mike thought, my prayer? What the heck? He didn't make the connection right away. But then he remembered: he used to pray as a kid that Jesus would show him heaven.

It went back to his grandfather's funeral. Mike was a child. It was a Catholic service. There was a priest holding a ball on a chain with holes in it, smoke coming out. The priest said the smoke represents our prayers going up to heaven. They talked about how Grandpa was in heaven now, no more pain, no sadness, no tears. Mike remembers thinking as a kid, wow, sounds like a great place, I'd like to see that.

Forty years later, Jesus was answering that prayer.

The Hill and the City

Mike reached out and took his hand. Immediately, they were standing on a hill.

Everything around him was white. The whitest white he'd ever seen, almost blinding. But when he looked down at his feet, he was barefoot, still in the surgical gown, and he saw this beautiful green grass. It was manicured, perfect, a bluish green, the prettiest grass he'd ever seen.

His senses were heightened. He could count every single blade of grass under his feet. He could feel every blade. He knew how many blades of grass were touching his feet. It was crazy.

He looked around, trying to adjust his eyes to the white so he could see. Off to his right was another brighter white, but this was like a light. He looked at it and thought, wow, that's really cool. And then out of that light, it started sending these light beams. They looked like fluorescent light tubes, the kind you use in a shop, four-foot things, but they were only about two feet long, smooth, and glowing. They started flying by him. Everything was white but these things were glowing white, almost like shimmering.

Mike was in awe. And still confused. He spent a lot of time confused, thinking what is this, where am I.

One of the light tubes came straight at his head. He thought, what am I supposed to do, should I dodge this thing? It hit him right in the forehead and made this kind of buzzing sound, a light buzzing sound, as it went through him. It warmed him all the way down to his feet. The cold he felt in the surgical room was now replaced with this beautiful warm feeling.

All of a sudden, it was like somebody was pulling a curtain from his right to his left. The white fog or veil or whatever it was just got pulled to the side. Now he was looking at this beautiful scenery.

He saw that he was standing on a hill. Below him were these little flowers, almost like sweet peas, with little soft petals, all pastel colors, purples and yellows and oranges and pinks. They were moving like they were dancing in the wind, but there was no wind, so Mike thought, well, why are they moving?

At the bottom of the hill, the white that was pulled away from him had settled in the valley, and there was a great big city down there. He could only see the rooftops because there was fog on top of the city. But he could see one real big gold dome, like a capital dome, and other smaller gold domes. The city was huge, miles apart. There were some other white things sticking through, almost like church steeples, like spires.

Behind the city, on the other side of the valley, was another mountain, pretty big, covered in these pine trees, but they were perfectly shaped, all beautiful green. Above that was the most beautiful sunset he'd ever seen. Right above the trees it was reds and oranges and yellows, then it turned into purples and greens and blue, bright blue at the very top.

The tube lights were still bouncing around, going by him, but now they were going across the valley. One of them went and hit the edge of the tip of one of the trees, and it was like it had a diamond on it because when it hit the tip of the tree, it burst into hundreds of tiny little light streaks. Pretty soon the whole mountain was lit up with these bursting white beams of light. They kept going too, all over the place. It was like a big giant firework show but it was all white, like glowing fluorescent white.

Mike was just looking at it, thinking this is amazing. When he looked back at the light where the beams were emanating from, Jesus said to him, it's the glory of the Lord.

When Jesus said that, Mike got weak in his knees. He couldn't stand. He fell to his knees. And the instant his knees hit the ground, they shocked him and brought him back.

The Return

Instead of the beautiful scenery, Mike now had a doctor leaning over him wearing a mask. The doctor said, do you know your name? Mike's mouth was so dry but he got out the word Mike. The doctor said, oh good. Then he asked, do you know where you are?

Mike was confused again. He was thinking, well, where's Jesus, where's heaven, where's the scene? The doctor asked again, do you know where you are? Mike ran through his mind: okay, the wedding, oh yeah, I'm in Ventura. He said Ventura. The doctor looked at him and said okay, then told the people in the room something. Mike realized there were five other people in the room, all dressed in scrubs. The doctor said he's going to be okay, or he's back, something like that. Then he said, let's get him up to ICU.

Mike looked over and saw the crash cart. He saw that one of the paddles was kind of laying aside and the cords were hanging down. It was obviously obvious they had used it. Someone was over there putting them back together. Mike thought, oh boy, I did die.

The surgeon came in the next day to check on him. As he was checking the stitches and poking around, he said to Mike, that's the worst case I've ever seen. Mike said, you're kidding. The surgeon started to walk out, then came back in and said, I've seen worse, but they didn't live. He said, yours was the worst case I've ever seen where the patient lived.

Trying to Tell the Story

Mike's wife came in a couple hours later. She asked how he was feeling. He said, well, not too good yet, but you're not going to believe what happened. She said, really, what? Mike opened his mouth to tell her and he just started crying. He thought, I'm not even going to try and tell her about this whole thing with Jesus yet.

The next day she came in and asked again, so what happened? Mike opened his mouth to tell her and he cried again. It took him three days before he could finally tell her the whole story. Even now, telling it, it makes him cry. It was really just a super emotional thing.

When he finally told his wife, she started crying too. Mike thought, it's really an amazing thing that happened to me. He says it's an emotional story from me because I think that really started a relationship with Jesus.

Before the NDE, Mike would describe himself as kind of a Sunday Christian. He went to church on Sundays. He just didn't really get it. After the incident, he knew Jesus was a real guy, a real physical person. That changed everything he knew or thought he knew about heaven. He thought, maybe it really is a physical place, like right now, God could just hide it from us. God could do anything.

The Banana and the Hallway

Mike spent twelve days in the hospital. He lost 34 pounds. He was on a liquid diet for probably six days, running a fever the whole time. Until the fever came down to normal, they weren't going to let him go. At some point the doctor said, okay, put him on semi-solid food, let's see how he does. One of the first things they gave him to eat was a banana.

Mike was so happy to get something other than beef broth. As he started peeling the banana, it was like God's creation just hit him like a ton of bricks. He started bawling. He was thinking, I'm eating something that grew out of the ground, out of the dirt, from thousands of miles away, and it's going to help me get healthy again. It was like the weight of that creation just hit him.

Walking is big in the hospital after surgery. They want you on your feet. The nurse came in one day and said, I need you to get up and walk, today's the day. He helped Mike out of bed. Mike had four different tubes on the IV stand, tubes coming out of him that he didn't know they could put tubes in. It was crazy. He took his little IV stand and started walking down the hall with the nurse helping him.

He walked by a couple of pictures. This was a beach town, so there were pictures of the ocean, pictures of sunsets. Mike looked at those pictures and thought, what have I been missing? He was just so stressed out. It changed everything, changed the way he looked at life.

Before and After

Mike describes his life before the NDE like this: He'd go to work early in the morning, very stressful job. He was a superintendent for a real estate development company. He had between 30 and 35 houses at different stages of construction. He'd come home, throw the baseball equipment or whatever in the back of the truck, race off to a baseball game or practice. Somewhere along the line he'd try to figure out where they were going to get dinner because they'd get done at 6:00 or 6:30, kids had homework he had to help them with. It was just lather, rinse, repeat, every day, same old thing, stress.

One of the biggest changes after the NDE was that Mike put into practice what he noticed in the hallways, walking back and forth and looking at those pictures. He thought, I'm just going to slow down, I'm going to stop and I'm going to enjoy every moment of my life.

Now, he'll be walking through a park or something, he'll see a flower, he'll bend down and smell the flower. He doesn't care who sees him or if they think it's weird. His phone is full of sunset pictures, full of pictures of flowers. He thinks he's more like seeing the world through the eyes of a kid.

Jesus didn't give him an assignment, but Mike thinks that's what Jesus wants him to do: tell everybody, slow down, man, just appreciate the beauty of his creation. Mike thinks that's why we're created, to spread God's love.

He's quick to say he's nothing special, he's not loved more by God than anybody. He always tells people now, ask God to reveal himself to you and he will, but be patient, because this one took 40 years. This prayer took 40 years to answer. But what's 40 years to God?

Mike is definitely not afraid of death. He always thinks now that when he does die for the final time and doesn't come back, Jesus is going to meet him on that hill and he's going to say, let's go see what you didn't get to see that day, let's spend some time in the city, I'll show you around. But he always says, but not today, not yet, because there's a lot of life to live. He has now 13 grandkids. If he would have died back then, he wouldn't have met any of them. He thinks that's probably why Jesus let him live.

What This Experience Reveals

Mike's account is one of the most visually detailed descriptions of a heavenly realm I've encountered in all my years of studying near-death experiences. The specificity matters. He didn't see a vague light or feel a general sense of peace. He saw bluish-green grass with individual blades he could count. He saw pastel flowers moving without wind. He saw a city with gold domes and white spires, mountains covered in perfectly shaped pine trees, a sunset with distinct bands of color from red to bright blue. He saw glowing light tubes that burst like diamonds when they hit the trees. This wasn't symbolic. It was real to him in a way that felt more real than the surgical room he'd just left.

The detail about the light tubes is particularly striking. They emanated from a bright light source, flew through the air, and when one hit Mike in the forehead, it made a buzzing sound and warmed him all the way to his feet. When Jesus identified the source of the light as the glory of the Lord, Mike's knees buckled. That physical reaction, that overwhelming sense of being in the presence of something so vast and holy that you can't remain standing, appears again and again in accounts of profound spiritual encounters. It's not performed reverence. It's involuntary awe.

The fact that Mike saw Jesus as a physical person with dark skin, wavy brown hair, and dark greenish-blue eyes challenges the sanitized Sunday school imagery many of us grew up with. Mike didn't see a glowing figure or a disembodied presence. He saw a man. A man whose eyes looked into his soul. A man radiating love so intensely that Mike knew, without question, who he was. This matches a pattern we see in many NDE accounts: beings of light are often recognized not by their appearance but by the love they emanate. The recognition is immediate and certain.

Mike's transformation after the NDE is as significant as the experience itself. He went from a stressed-out superintendent managing 35 construction sites and racing from one baseball practice to another to a man who bends down to smell flowers in public and fills his phone with sunset pictures. That's not a small shift. That's a complete reorientation of values. The world didn't change. Mike's capacity to see it did. He describes it as seeing the world through the eyes of a kid, and that's exactly what it is: recovering the sense of wonder we're born with and lose somewhere along the way to adulthood.

The banana story is almost comical in its simplicity, but it reveals something profound about what happens when someone returns from an NDE with heightened awareness of creation. Mike wasn't just eating a banana. He was suddenly, viscerally aware of the entire chain of existence that brought that banana to his hospital bed: the soil, the tree, the thousands of miles it traveled, the fact that it would nourish his body and help him heal. The weight of that interconnectedness, that intricate web of creation, hit him so hard he started crying. Most of us eat bananas without a second thought. Mike couldn't. He'd seen too much.

The fact that it took Mike three days to tell his wife the story without breaking down tells us something about the emotional weight of these experiences. This wasn't just an interesting thing that happened to him. It was a direct encounter with the divine that shattered his previous understanding of reality. He went into that operating room as a Sunday Christian who went through the motions. He came out knowing, with absolute certainty, that Jesus is real, that heaven is real, that love is the fundamental force of the universe. That kind of knowing doesn't come from belief or faith. It comes from direct experience. And once you've had that experience, you can't unknow it.

Mike's message is simple: slow down, appreciate creation, spread love. But the simplicity is deceptive. In a culture that glorifies busyness and productivity and accumulation, choosing to stop and smell flowers is a radical act. It's a rejection of the values that drive most of us through our days. Mike isn't advocating for laziness or irresponsibility. He's advocating for presence. For awareness. For gratitude. For seeing the world as it actually is: a staggering gift we're invited to participate in.

The fact that Jesus answered a prayer Mike prayed as a child, forty years later, is worth sitting with. Mike had forgotten about that prayer. He'd moved on with his life, raised a family, built a career. But the prayer was still there, still heard, still being answered. What's forty years to God? Mike asks. It's a good question. We measure time in days and years and decades. We get impatient when prayers aren't answered on our timeline. But Mike's experience suggests that the timeline isn't ours to control. The answer comes when it's meant to come. And when it does, it's worth the wait.

Mike says he's nothing special, not loved more by God than anybody else. But that's exactly the point. If this can happen to a tile salesman and Little League coach from California, it can happen to anyone. The door is open. The invitation stands. Ask God to reveal himself, Mike says, and he will. But be patient. The revelation might take forty years. Or it might come tomorrow. Either way, it's coming. And when it does, everything changes.