Struck by Lightning: "When You Look in the Mirror, What Do You See?"

Medical Details

In 2005, while sitting on her back stairs talking on a cordless phone during a rainstorm, she was struck on the right arm by lightning, which she says passed through her body and hit the transformer in front of her house. She woke beside the scorched stairs. She says she has medical documentation of a right bundle branch block in her heart and a seizure condition from the lightning strike.

The Experience

In 2005, a woman sitting on her back stairs during a rainstorm saw a lightning bolt come out of the sky and strike her right arm. After a moment of searing pain, she says she peeled up out of her body and walked into her house. Everything had a burnt-gold look, and the curtains and furniture were not her own. Just as she began to panic, a huge, loving presence filled her with compassion, and her fear vanished.

Together they moved sideways through pink and gold clouds to a magnificent garden. Two glowing young men stepped forward. She realized they were her two brothers who had died as babies, when she was a baby herself. She knew them instantly, and they shared hugs and tears; she kept telling them how much they looked like their dad. The grass was soft under her feet, the air sweet, and there were colors she had no names for. Many glowing people from different time periods gathered around her, and no one appeared older than their late twenties or early thirties.

With the loving presence behind her, whom she knew as God, she watched her life play like an old movie reel. She felt no judgment, only complete love and acceptance. A voice told her, "What you put out into the universe will come back to you," and she was shown this like a boomerang: love and kindness return, and so does harm. She says this changed how carefully she speaks and acts.

She describes a distant golden-walled city with carved white buildings; a place where children who have died laugh and play in the care of relatives; healing pools for those who died traumatic deaths; and a vast library she calls the Hall of Knowledge. Jesus came from a grove of trees, smiled and said, "I love you. I'm with you. Don't be afraid."

Beside a stream, she sat on a log with a man she knew to be God. He asked, "What would you do if it was just me and you?" Showing her the vastness of the universe, he laughed with sparkling eyes when she said he would tire of her chatter. Looking at an ancient oak, she saw how everything is connected and that God is in everything, even people who had hurt her. Then he asked what she sees when she looks in the mirror. She answered, "You made me, you are in me, so when I look in the mirror I see you," and he was overjoyed. She understood that she was not the fat, ugly or stupid person she had been told she was.

Two angels then showed her, in a lake like glass, scenes she understood as future world events, and told her they need not happen if humankind changes. Then she was sent back, waking in terrible pain beside charred stairs.

How It Changed Their Life

She says she became very careful about what she says and does, because she never wants to hurt anyone, and she came away knowing she is not the things the world told her she was.