Woman Who Felt Life Was Full of Suffering Collapses, Feels God Show Her the ‘Perfect Order’ of Things

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Amy Call was sensitive from a young age, and it was made all the more difficult by her hyperawareness of suffering, and proximity to it. Over the years, it snowballed in diagnosis after diagnosis and a long list of medications that fatigued her already anxious mind.

“When I was small and I started to pray, a prayer that I repeated all the time was ‘please let me be a tool in thy hands.’ I just wanted so badly to help with the suffering, because I really did feel one with it,” Call said at an International Association for Near-Death Studies conference. “And more than anything I wanted to believe there was a God that had answers and I wanted to be a tool in his hands.”

A near-death experience of several journeys would change Call deeply as a person.

Magnet for Suffering

Call remembers being 4 years old and overhearing her mother talking about cancer with a worried tone, and asking her mother about it.

“And I said, ‘Well there’s a God, and He can fix it,’” Call said. “And she said, ‘Well sometimes people aren’t fixed. Sometimes God lets people suffer, and die, and sometimes it doesn’t work out that we might want it to.’”

Call said the family she grew up in was a large one, and strong in their convictions, both religious and political. She was raised to believe and trust in God, and she could not understand why, if there was suffering in the world, could they not just pray to God so that God would fix it.

“I became ultra-aware, after that, of suffering, and I almost was like a magnet to it,” she said. “And I had already had this sensitive nature where I felt one with everything ... I had a difficult time separating myself from others.”

It began close to home. Call’s mother was diagnosed with fibromyalgia and her grandmother developed ankylosing spondylitis—both chronic and painful diseases. If Call saw on the news that children were suffering halfway around the world, she would be on the floor, sobbing as if it were her own children suffering this plight.

Call said she remembered telling her dad this was not the world she wanted to be in, but she was also terrified to die. If dying meant going where God was, a God who allowed all this suffering to amass, what kind of eternity would that be?

“I just was constantly praying, I was constantly asking God, ‘Please, please, please, once they prove that they’re good, can you just please bless them and let them be free of their suffering and pain?’”

Surrender

Over the next two decades, Call’s suffering would only compound, but she never stopped praying.

By the time Call was in her teens, her empathic and anxious disposition resulted in a bipolar diagnosis and “heavy, heavy medication” that did not benefit her. It only resulted in her being even more disconnected, Call said. Before, she had disconnected socially, but on medication, she could no longer feel passion, and disconnected from what had been the beautiful and good parts of her life as well.

“At age 17, I woke up one morning, and I felt that I couldn’t breathe, and my whole body felt pulverized. It was like I had been in an accident,” Call said. She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, and given a lot of pain medication.

The number of pills she needed to take racked up over the next year. She had already responded poorly to the medication given for her bipolar diagnosis, manifesting bad side effects, after which she was given more medication to manage those side effects. The list of drugs just kept getting longer and longer, she said. They hindered her cognition, but it was impossible to just suddenly stop taking such heavy medication that had so permeated her brain.

“At age 21, I did what I was supposed to do, what I was taught to do. I got married, I started having children, I was trying to follow the list of what you do if you have faith, if you do the right things instead of the wrong things,” she said. “I wanted so desperately for a change to happen, with all the pain I was in.”

She continued to pray the prayer she had since she was a child, wanting to be an instrument of God. She believed in miracles, and in doing the right things.

Her health continued to deteriorate, to the point where some days she could only crawl on the floor and anything else, even holding her babies, was too painful. She was no longer able to sleep for longer than 15 minutes at a time because she would feel a sensation as though her brain shutting down, and be frightened awake.

“So, here I am, I have four kids and a family, and I keep praying to God, ‘Something has to happen. I know you’re not going to let me actually lose my mind, with these four kids. I just want to do what’s right. I just want to do what I was taught to do, so please, please don’t let this happen,’” she said.

Call said she finally hit a point where she could not pray anymore. “It was too painful to pray,” she said. “It was just breaking me, and one day I just kind of hit the floor.”

She landed on her knees, and thought, “God, I surrender. I don’t know anything.”

Shortly after this, Call had another doctor’s appointment whereupon she was given yet another drug. It wasn’t meant for sleep or pain, but it seemed to help with both, she was told.

Call ended up having an allergic reaction to it that paralyzed her, and she could not breathe.

“And there was suddenly this suction from the top of my head,” she said. “And I was free.”

Several experiences happened seemingly simultaneously.

‘Factor of Humility’

Call said she went through some sort of portal, and was in another place that felt completely normal, though in retrospect it was “more real” than life itself. She had no reason to think she was dead or close to it, and felt no hesitation or unease about the fact that now she was somewhere else with a lot of other people, many of whom were communicating about how they died.

“I saw a man in this area and I seemed to have this understanding that he was a mentor, or a teacher. I went to him because I wanted to know what was going on,” she said. “I found out he died in a car accident, he drove trucks as a profession ... and what he was there for was the factor of humility.”

“He was able to teach, in a way, the people that were in this space the importance of humility,” she said. But the humility she felt from this man was not how she would have defined humility. “It wasn’t like a bowing, or being small. There was a confidence and assuredness and there was an honesty to it.”

“What he was acted like a tuning fork to that area, and it was like a gift to those who were there. And I could feel it—it was peaceful and it was a good thing. He explained to me that the people that were in this space had brought themselves to their own demise,” she said.

“He was explaining to me that despite what he could offer the people there, he couldn’t fully teach them, because true learning happens in the body,” she said. “And this is a big deal to me personally because so much of my life was about wanting to escape the body and wanting that for other people.”

Then Call finally asked him what all the people were doing there. “And he said they’re all deceased, they’re dead. And it just kind of hit me, and I said in my head, well if they’re dead, what am I?”

She understood that she wasn’t quite the same as these other people; she hadn’t really died. This man gave her a similar understanding as well, so she left.

Order in the Universe

Sometime during Call’s near-death experience, she had been on an entirely different journey, where “it was like I was just soul.”

“This part was the most beautiful and comforting experience,” she said.

Call said she had been with her guide, and given endless knowledge of the wisdom of the universe. In her life, she had not been drawn to or especially talented in mathematics and sciences, but here she understood these equations so intimately it was as if she was math and science, Call described, and she was proved all the answers to the questions she had wanted to ask.

“I was all of it, and I knew that while I was all these things, this math and the science and this order that was in the universe, I knew that there was nowhere that it wasn’t. Even if there was a tiny bug going across the room, that was within this math and science too, and this beautiful order,” she said.

“And this was beyond beautiful, because my life before the experience, I struggled with looking out in the world. This really just looks chaotic,” she said. She was taught that God had His order and would explain everything in the end, but until this moment had not been able to comprehend how any sensible being would direct such chaos in the world.

“And so in my experience to be within this order, and to see that there was so much order it was beyond anything I could imagine, or even put word to, it was incredibly beautiful and peaceful,” she said.

“I had this understanding that the way everything worked in the universe was almost as if there was like a big clockwork thing going on in the sky, where everything fit,” she said. “And it was perfect. And everything reflected everything.”

“That was healing for me.”

Life Review

When Call was young, her mother would tell her that she should be good, because in the afterlife there would be an account of everything she had ever done, and she'd be embarrassed if she did something bad.

This turned out to be half true, because Call did witness the life she lived, but there was no embarrassment.

“It was just powerfully loving,” she said. She felt like she was her soul, but also connected to this small part of her that she felt was her ego, and connected to all the people that had ever been around her.

She also felt connected to God.

Call said that she, as other near-death experiencers have shared, uses the word “God” less after their experiences because it feels too small, limiting, or human of a word to encompass what she had felt. Some avoid it altogether saying it feels prideful to name the Creator of all life, and others opt for a more abstract description like “the source” or “the light” when they share their stories.

“I say ‘Source’ a lot because it feels almost weird for me to use ‘God’ since my NDE (near-death experience) because it almost feels like I’m narrowing it, but I understand we need words here, so I say both,” Call said.

She said during the review she felt a boundless compassion for every person, the way a parent unconditionally loves their children and hopes for their happiness.

“In this experience, this life review, I had someone who I thought was my enemy, and this person came up ... and I saw her, and I had judgments in my mind, ‘She’s so bad’ or whatever, from what I had witnessed. I didn’t realize I held that in my mind. And in my life review, I connected with this person and that was probably the most powerful feeling of love in my whole NDE, was when I was able to connect with who she really was, beyond all of the things I thought I knew about her and the judgments that I made.”

Two Meetings

There was another part of the journey where Call remembers moving through space, seeing planet Earth, and receiving many messages, some relating to her health, to rest and eat pure food, and some messages she knew she would not be able to remember when she returned to her body.

She also had two interactions that made an impression on her.

In one, she saw another man who she recognized as a teacher or mentor. She had many questions she wanted to ask. As soon as she thought about it, she could experience this teacher’s thoughts and feelings as if she was him, watching her ask this question.

She thought, “Well, which one is the true Church?”

“The way I saw myself asking was like a little kid going up to someone with maybe some more wisdom or knowledge, and it was as if I were saying, ‘So tell me which kind of cheese is the moon made of, is it Jack, Swiss, or cheddar?”

“He smiled at me, and he just kind of lowered his head in a way that I understood he was going to let me wait a while until I was ready to figure out whatever it was I really needed to ask,” she said. “And ever since then, when I’ve come back, in prayer or meditation I’ve always kept that in my mind: Amy, you may not be asking the question you mean to ask, or you may not be there quite yet.”

In her other encounter, a young woman came up very close to her and tried to get her attention.

“I could feel from her that it was important, and she started saying things like, ‘Tell them this, tell them that,’” Call said. The woman shared personal information about her life, and Call couldn’t understand why, but didn’t feel intruded upon either. “She was saying things like, ‘Tell them I’m free. Tell them I’m not in any pain, that I’m happy, that I have joy now.’ She said, ‘Tell them before I went I had started to sing, that that brought me joy and I really loved singing.’”

At one point, her guide told her she “needed to go back,” and Call understood that meant back to her body. Even the idea of it, in this space of unconditional love, put her in agony. She was about to argue to stay, but her guide told her to look to her left.

“And so I looked to my left, and my 4-year-old daughter ... suddenly there’s my daughter and she’s saying, ‘But Mommy, who will take care of us?’ and she’s smiling. And before she could even finish asking me I was saying, ‘Of course, I will.”

Call explained that it wasn’t merely that as a mother she wanted to take care of her children. She knew in that space that even if she didn’t go back, her family would be alright. But she felt a calling, and God’s love, and it was that selflessness that enabled her to respond the way she did.

“In that place, it was the love that was coming through, the divine love, that said ‘Of course I will.’”

Back in Her Body

With the help of her guide, she was “zapped” back to Earth, to her bedroom—and with some difficulty, back into her body—where her husband was trying to wake her and help her breathe again.

After Call came back from her near-death experience, she was sobbing, but it was from relief. She still remembered what it felt like to be connected to God, and the immense love that connected God to her and each individual.

“I could almost feel my body physically was changing,” she said. “I was totally sure I was OK. I was more OK than ever.”

She told her husband about her experience, but resisted sharing it more widely for many years.

“After this experience, I went right away to church, and my husband was surprised because he was saying, ‘You know, you’d think after something like that you‘d be in bed for two weeks,’” Call said. It wasn’t that she needed to go to church, but she felt there was something important she needed to do there.

It was there that she saw a woman who had been crying.

“She said she just found out that her daughter had died,” Call said. Immediately, Call knew it was the young woman from her experience, but it wasn’t something she could bring up out of the blue. She invited the woman to come to Call’s home the next day so they could talk about it, and Call asked her to bring a photo.

“She said yes, and I was surprised she was open to that,” she said.

The photo confirmed it was the same young woman, and Call told the woman she wanted to share an experience that happened to her. “It was a relief, that that was able to connect,” Call said. “And that was comforting for her.”

Call said that that encounter had been a gift to herself, as well. The connection, and the details, which matched the family’s accounts and coroner’s report, confirmed for Call that she was not crazy.

It wasn’t just this piece of serendipity, Call said. There was a period after her near-death experience full of coincidences and miracles, but more importantly, she was looking at the world in a completely different way. Where she used to pray and pray and pray and reach out hoping God would reach back, now she understood God to be everywhere. Her faith prior to her experience compelled her to dot her i’s and cross her t’s, and be the letter of perfection—but after the experience, she sought to be the love that she felt from God.

“It’s like the divine was saying, ‘Lighten up.’”