‘There’s No Such Thing As Drowning’
In Marion, Ohio, young Pegi Robinson, the youngest of five children, had her first near death experience when she was only 5 years old.On a hot summer day, she was in her room playing with her dolls when her mother emerged and said that she could go swimming. She was ecstatic.
When Robinson and her brother reached the lake, he dove right into the far end. He started doing laps without paying her any attention. Robinson was being careful. She stayed in the shallow waters while waiting for her mother and sister to join her. She didn’t know how to swim.
She suddenly saw a board floating in the water and thought she could hold onto it and do laps like her brother. She doggy paddled further into the pond with the board’s aid.
“Hey, John! Look at me,” she yelled to her brother.
John quickly swam towards her and grabbed the board away. Robinson became stranded in the middle of the pond. She was drowning.
“I tried to tread water and I couldn’t. It wasn’t long at all and my head was under the water. I was choking underwater, which does no good. The water was muddy brown. I couldn’t see. I lost direction of what is up and down,” recalled Robinson.
While underwater, she thought about her mother and sister. Next thing she knew, she was in the kitchen, floating, looking down at her mother and sister. Robinson could feel their thoughts but she was struggling being unable to breathe.
The next moment, as if waking up from a dream, she was back in the water but it wasn’t muddy anymore.
“And I thought, ’my parents lied to me, there’s no such thing as drowning! I was scared for no reason,'” Robinson said.
Another scene opened up before her eyes. She was looking at the world through a fish bowl. She began to rise and couldn’t see her body anymore. She knew she was dead as she rose above the trees. As she wanted to fly higher, she heard a voice telling her to wait because someone might still find her.
That same voice told her, “God sends children here to be loved.”
But Robinson didn’t feel loved at all. When she came to consciousness, she was over her brother’s shoulder. When he realized Robinson had woken up, he asked their mother if he could put Robinson down. Her mother agreed and Robinson was left alone on the road.
Robinson thought, “Why would I go back to a family who does not love me?”
Complaining to God
Robinson became a foster parent at 23 years old. Throughout her life, she fostered 60 children in total.Robinson also had her own family. After having three sons, she became pregnant with twins. However, this was not a smooth pregnancy.
Robinson felt that she had an ectopic pregnancy (outside of the uterus) but her doctor said that the fertilized eggs had implanted in the uterus. She felt pain regularly until one day the pain worsened to the point where she couldn’t get up.
She prayed to God to let her live long enough to get to the hospital.
After arriving at the hospital, the doctors discovered that she did indeed have an ectopic pregnancy—one that had progressed further than any they had ever seen. She was two months along, and the surgery terminated the pregnancy.
That night while she was hospitalized, she suddenly felt like she was traveling very quickly through space.
Robinson was angry that she was going to die. She had three sons that needed her care.
“Suddenly I’m at a tunnel and it’s dim. And I’m whizzing real fast through space. And suddenly it stops and everything’s perfectly quiet and still. I’m in a very bright white light and I look down. I feel just like me, but I have no body whatsoever,” Robinson recalled.
She saw people standing before her and God was sitting at the center.
Robinson began to yell very disrespectfully that she wouldn’t stay because she had children to raise. She was shown a scene of a child throwing a fit at the store. Robinson believed that that was God’s way of telling her that she was acting like a spoiled child.
Then she told God of the abuse that she experienced as a child. And she said, “I know, for being Catholic, that you’re omniscient. You can see in the future. If you can see that my sons would be better off without me, for whatever reason, I agree to stay. But if not, I beg to return.”
She saw a scene of her sons talking about their mother’s death. Robinson believed that was God’s way of telling her that she could not go back.
She began to panic. What if her sons end up hating God because their mother was taken away so early?
She began to cry when she noticed that Jesus was there, next to God. She wondered who would teach her children about God once she was gone.
Then, she was suddenly back at the hospital in a wheelchair. She was alive and she felt no pain, but felt she must have been living on borrowed time.
She followed up on her promise to raise her children well. Every year, they won the Citizenship award at school.
Following Guidance, Saving Lives
After losing her twins, Robinson was given guidance to save others.During a family reunion, she suddenly heard a child crying. When she asked the people around her, no one else could hear it. She decided to pursue the sound and was led to a field. A voice told to her walk towards the tall grass.
Robinson found a toddler who was face down in the water and pulled the boy out.
Another incident occurred while Robinson was in a car with her husband. She suddenly felt that she needed to get to a house. A stranger’s house at that. When she knocked, she was surprised to find that she knew the person who answered the door. The girl was babysitting her nephew. Robinson demanded to see the nephew right away.
“So we went to the bedroom. I mean, I ran back there instinctively. And he was back there choking on Easter basket grass. And I started pulling the grass out and saved him from choking,” Robinson said.
Another encounter occurred when Robinson was putting her sons down for a nap in the afternoon. She heard a sound that no one else heard and decided to find the source. It turned out to be a car wreck. There were four passengers and the two in the back were thrown from the car, suffering from concussions. The two men in the front had broken necks. She called the paramedics and their lives were saved.
Despite Robinson’s airing her grievances to God, her near-death experiences allowed her to feel a deep reverence for God.
“It’s real—God, Jesus, heaven—it’s real,” said Robinson. She prayed, “God, you’ve got to send people back and let them tell people that this is real. Maybe life would be different if people knew that this was real. That we’re not just dead in a coffin, that we do live on.”
