Jim Woodford wasn’t a religious man. But after five years of suffering from agonizing pain due to Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare condition in which his body’s immune system attacked his nerves, Woodford quite literally saw the light.
This retired pilot from Canada had traveled all over the world and never thought much about spiritual matters. But the experience of the neurological disease left him in a state of desperation, leading to a dependence and then overdose on prescription pain medication.
After leaving his brain-dead body for 11 hours, experiencing the blissfulness of Heaven, and then returning a changed man, Woodford now speaks about his experience around the world.
Having lived a life of luxury, Woodford wasn’t prepared for the pain of Guillain-Barré syndrome. “This disease filled my life with relentless and indescribable pain and eventually shut down my earthly body,” he shared. “My fingers began to curl inward so much they had to be splinted to remain straight.” It was only through serious pain medication that he was able to regain control of his extremities and begin physical therapy.
But one evening, while he was parked in his truck, Woodford took too many of the painkillers in a desperate bid to control the pain he was experiencing. “Immediately, knowing that I had done something very wrong, I gasped a final cry, ‘God forgive me,’” he shared.
“I had this overwhelming sense in those last nanoseconds of my life, that I had wasted this beautiful life that the Creator had given me,” Woodford told Sid Roth.
It was then that Woodford recalled his spirit floating up to a strange place. “[He] stood at a transition point between the lush green paradise of Heaven to my right and the gaping jaws of Hell to my left,” as he wrote. Going on a journey like that of Dante in “Divine Comedy,” Woodford stood “at the edge of Hell’s pit, smelling the stench of death and hopelessness and hearing its ancient screeching gates opening to receive me into Hell’s eternal darkness,” as he described it.
After almost being pulled into Hell by a horrifying beast, Woodford said he shouted, “God save me!” at which point three angels came down at an incredible speed and took him to Heaven. They took him through paradise where he was able to see the beauties and peacefulness of paradise, before finally taking him to Jesus.
He recalls, “As I looked into the gracious, loving eyes of Jesus, I found healing for the emptiness I had experienced in my earthly life and a new purpose to declare God’s glory.” But Woodford believes that he wasn’t meant for Heaven yet and was sent back down to Earth to tell others about the experience he had had.
After having been officially “dead” for 11 hours, Woodford writes, “I came back with the chemical evidence of Guillain-Barré still in my body, but to the amazement of the doctors I have no symptoms—no pain or paralysis!” Beyond the fact that doctors and his family, including his wife, never thought he would come back, they were equally surprised by his spiritual transformation.
“Once you’ve seen Heaven and walked in the very presence of angels and of Jesus, you can never be satisfied on earth again,” Woodford notes. He has found new energy and new life and has transformed that into a mission of doing good and persuading others about the existence of Heaven and Hell.
