Posted on 09/03/2005 7:58:25 AM PDT by NYer
This is the account of a minister, Howard Storm, from Ohio, who "died" in 1985 from a perforation in his intestines and returned with an account of hell. While he's a minister now (at Zion United Church of Christ in Norwood), at the time he was an atheistic professor, chairman of the art department at North Kentucky University. Storm describes himself as a selfish man who not only didn't believe but detested those who did.
Then came the crisis on June 1, 1985, while he was leading students on a trip to museums in Paris.
"I needed surgery immediately but unfortunately when I got to the surgery hospital there wasn't a surgeon available," says Storm. "It was excruciating. I was in real agony for hours. I said to my wife that it was time to say good-bye. I couldn't hang on any longer. We said our good-byes and I closed my eyes, knowing full well that I was going to die and that when you die it's like an electric switch, the end of you. I knew that as certainly as anyone knows anything. I was waiting for the big zero, the big blackout, the one we never wake up from, the end of existence.
"I went unconscious and I don't know how long it lasted. I felt real strange, so I opened my eyes, and to my surprise I was standing up next to the bed looking down at my body in the bed. I tried to communicate with my wife but she was ignoring me. I tried to communicate with another man in the room, but he ignored me.
"Then I heard people outside the room calling my name in English. I went over to the doorway and I asked if they had come to take me for my surgery and they said, hurry up, we've been waiting for you a long time. I had bad feelings about them but I went with them. As I journeyed with this group of people beyond the room, down what would have been the hall, I began to be aware that the hall had no features and was just space, that I was traveling through a very hazy, ill-lit space and they were moving me along and we went for a very long journey -- there was no time, it could have been days or weeks -- and they became increasingly rude and abusive and hostile and I was becoming increasingly afraid.
"Now we were in darkness over this very long period of time. I said, 'I'm not going with you any further.' They said, 'We're almost there.' They started pushing and shoving me and I fought with them and there were many of them. A wild orgy of frenzied taunting, screaming, and hitting ensured. They had very sharp, hard fingernails. My impression was also that their teeth were longer than normal. I tried to defend myself but with this huge horde of people it was impossible. What they were doing was playing with me, initially scratching and biting, punching and slapping, pushing and taunting, very vulgar.
"Then it got much worse than that. That part's censored. They were playing with me as a cat plays with a mouse. Every new assault brought howls of cacophony. Then at some point, they began to tear off pieces of my flesh. To my horror I realized I was being taken apart and eaten alive, slowly, so that their entertainment would last as long as possible. I want to reiterate that what was happening was extremely real.
"After they had humiliated me to the best of their ability, I was lying on the floor of that place and I had been all kinds of ripped up and broken, outside and inside. I was devastated, having been stripped of any worth. I heard a voice that said, 'Pray to God.' I thought, I don't believe in God, it's a stupid idea. I heard it a second and third time and I was thinking, what did I say when I was a kid? I was 38 and had probably said my last prayer when I was 15 years old. And in my attempt to remember I muttered a few phrases [of old prayers] and with that the people who were around me became very angry and they were saying to me in obscene language which is unimaginable -- nobody has ever spoken like this in this world -- in essence, `There is no God. Nobody can hear you. And if you don't stop we're going to really hurt you.'
"But because the mention of God made them so angry, I tried to remember phrases about God -- anything from my childhood. As I did that I was aware it was driving them away from me, as if the mention of God repelled them. It was as if I was throwing boiling oil on them. And eventually I was all alone in that place. My sense was that they were way, way off in the darkness somewhere. I was left alone there for a time without measure and thought about my life. The bottom-line conclusion was that I had led a bad life. My god was my art career. That's what I worshipped.
"I thought of how cold-hearted and cruel and manipulative I was. I felt where I had ended up was where I belonged, and that the people who had come and picked me up and taken me to this place were people who had lived lives like mine. We were people who hadn't loved God and hadn't loved fellow human beings.
"Now in this place there was nothing left but to tear and gnaw on one another, which was essentially what we had done on earth. I was also aware that this was just the beginning, and that it was going to get worse. Much, much worse. I knew the only way to survive in this place was to be crueler than the people who were around you. There was no kindness, no compassion, no hope.
"I had no hope of seeing the world or getting back to life but I didn't want to be part of their world. I had gone down the sewer pipe of the universe to the cesspool and was still on the top of the cesspool. A memory from my childhood came very vividly of me as a small child sitting in a Sunday school classroom singing 'Jesus loves Me' and the memory was so simple and innocent and pure, believing in something good, and that Jesus cared about me and was good and powerful.
"I didn't believe in Him but I wanted to believe what I had believed as a child.
"So as an act of desperation I called out to the darkness, 'Jesus, please save me.'
"Off in the darkness I saw a pinpoint of light like the faintest star in the sky. I wondered why I hadn't seen it before. The star was getting brighter and brighter. At first I thought it might be some phenomenon like a meteor. Then it dawned on me that it was moving toward me at what apparently was an enormous rate of speed. As it closed in I realized that I was right in its path and I might be run over. But I couldn't take my eyes off it, because emanating from the light was more intensity and more beauty that I had ever seen before in my life. Almost immediately the light was very close. I realized then that while it was indescribably brilliant, it wasn't light at all. It was a living entity, a luminous being approximately eight feet in diameter and oval in shape. Its brilliance and intensity penetrated my body. In a very vivid and beautiful experience I slowly rose up with no effort into the light.
"As I was being picked up I saw all my gore blown away like dust and I was restored physically, and emotionally I was in ecstasy and I knew this person Who had come was Jesus and I knew instantly that He was very intelligent, very strong, and I knew that He was very good, and most importantly I knew that He had loved me more than any concept I had ever had of what love was. If I had taken all my experiences of love and compacted them into a moment, it would have exceeded that.
"And I knew that He knew absolutely everything about me. He knew my thoughts. He knew every moment of my life, even things I didn't remember. And He held me and I cried and cried and cried out of joy and He began to carry me directly straight up, like a helicopter. We started leaving that place.
"Fairly soon we were entering into a world full of light and off to the distance was a great center of brightness.
"The goodness and the love and the holiness were permeating through me, and I thought to myself, I'm a piece of garbage. They've made a terrible mistake, because I don't belong here. I was so ashamed.
With that we stopped our movement and He spoke to me for the first time and He said, `You do belong here, and we don't make mistakes."
"They made it very clear to me that God had given this country the greatest blessing of any people in the history of the world," said Dr. Storm, who is from the Cincinnati area. "We have more of God's blessing. Everything that we have comes from God. We didn't deserve it, we didn't earn it, but we happen to be the wealthiest, most powerful nation in the world. And God gave us all this so that we could be the instruments of God's light in this world, and we are not instruments of light. In other countries people see us as purveyors of exploitation, military might, and pornography. They see us as completely hedonistic and amoral -- we have no morality. People can do whatever they want wherever they want with whatever they want. Our amorality is a cancer on the rest of the world, and God created us to be just the opposite.
"People get mad at me for saying it, but God is very unhappy with what we're doing," adds Storm, now a Methodist minister. "When I came back from the experience I was almost out of my mind trying to convert people. God wanted a worldwide conversion thousands of years ago. God pulled out all the stops 2,000 years ago with Jesus. From God's view, that was the definitive moment in human history. And the impact of the prophets and teachers and the Messiah has been a big disappointment to God because people have by and large rejected it. I was told that God wants this conversion. And if we don't get with the program fairly soon, He is going to have to intervene in some ways that from a human point of view are going to seem cataclysmic. God is really tired of what we're doing to one another and the planet and to His Creation. We were put in this world to be stewards and live in harmony with His creation and one another and we don't realize the important spiritual consequences of what we do when we raise a child in a faithless society.
For those who may have missed the news report, here is a link:
New Orleans City Council President: "Maybe God's Going To Cleanse Us"
FYI ping
Opening round of the Chastisement?
THANKS MUCH.
GREAT DOC.
END TIMES PING LIST PING
Please let me know if you want on or off the list.
Thanks for the ping!
Let's carp about that, now, shall we? /sar
We could go around and around about that. And, certainly I think God prefers and created men to lead.
But HE ALSO SAID, IN CHRIST THERE IS NEITHER JEW NOR GREEK; NOR MALE NOR FEMALE etc. etc.
Tell the NT prophetesses and Queen ester that God doesn't use women in any kind of authority etc ever.
I think all our understandings of Scripture and all our sensibilities are due for adjustment when we See Jesus face to face.
THAT'S WHAT I'm beginning to see it as.
And am praying that God gives only what's necessary for our nation to mostly wake-up and then a long breather to make some progress with that being awakened.
I hope we don't go from worse to worse to worse every few weeks or so.
Also from the SD archive
http://www.spiritdaily.org/New-world-order/neworleans.htm
A waring to N. Orleans.
From the archives (2004):
Oh New Orleans, shed ye the darkness or face disaster
by Michael H. Brown
There are few cities with so many good as New Orleans and also few cities where there is such a stark coexistence with the bad. It is this city, the Big Easy, that is home to kind and generous and Christian people (nowhere is more Catholic) and yet also this city that has allowed evil to flourish in a way that has become truly dangerous.
I have to be blunt: New Orleans, you are in peril. You are a fine people but you have let fester an evil that is unmatched outside of Hollywood and Berkeley and Times Square. The devil is invoked in your city (there is even a swamp named for him just to the north in Baton Rouge) and there is nothing more hazardous. Voodoo priests are openly at work. There are occult temples. There are tours to "haunted" cemeteries. There is the proud tomb of voodoo queen Marie Leveau. "This mystical religion is as big a part of New Orleans as jazz, Cajun food and Mardi Gras," notes one writer. "Before you start thinking that voodoo is something of the past, the reader should be aware that the religion is as alive today as it was in the days of Marie Laveau. On a recent trip to New Orleans, I visited no less than 4 voodoo shops and a voodoo museum, plus visited with three different voodoo priestesses!"
It's that kind of stuff -- not God -- that brings disaster. When you invoke dark spirits, you get a storm. The very word hurricane comes from the Indian hurukan for evil spirit and when we look at the Bible we note that black magic -- the very definition of voodoo -- was quickest to bring the Lord's judgment.
Then there's the Mardi Gras. While this started as "Fat Tuesday" before the fasting of Lent, there is no longer fasting -- just the extravaganza with huge bizarre faces on floats surrounded by the pomp of barely-clad dancers. With their costume feathers and sexual flourish they would have been at home in the gardens of a Roman emperor or on a barge in the Nile or in a Venusian temple -- if not Babylon itself. This is serious business. Throughout the Bible God destroyed cities for exactly this kind of innuendo. And He has not changed. He is still in a time of mercy but it would do well for us to recall that in 1900 on the other side of the bay Galveston was destroyed by a category-four hurricane that came after a Mardi Gras which had as its costume theme "Beelzebub and the Devils."
God allows this to purge us when we don't purge ourselves. It doesn't have to happen but unless evil is expelled -- especially hardcore occultism like voodoo, which is the darkest form of evil -- it's inevitable. When I visited the National Hurricane Center, they told me there was no place that gave them the meteorological willies like your city. Miami is likelier to be hit by the mega-storm, but all it would take is a category-three or four to put the entire city under water.
There are parts of New Orleans that are 12 feet below sea level -- which means that a hurricane with a 17-foot surge, not all that much in a good storm -- would put parts of the city under twenty or even thirty feet of water. The area is like a bowl surrounded by levees that would trap water from the gulf and overflow from Lake Pontchartrain.
On Bourbon Street -- which has turned into a stretch of porn shops, strip joints, and hooter bars -- there would be water to the second story.
Officials told me that in the best of circumstances 100,000 would be stranded.
Hundreds of thousands coming from the lower parishes would likewise find themselves trapped.
And the cycles may be coming due. The return rate for a category-three is 31 years, a category-four 65 years, and a category-five 170 years. Recall please that in 1969 Hurricane Camille missed by thirty miles and you also squeaked by Andrew. If a category-five made landfall between your city and Baton Rouge, according to an emergency manager named Walter Maestri, it would be "the most catastrophic hurricane in the history of the United States."
This doesn't have to happen. God can intervene. I believe He will. He has in your past. He miraculously stopped a battle from destroying you in 1815 and fire from ravaging the entire city in 1812. You know this; you're Christians. You are among the finest, so easy to love; you outnumber the bad. But like Christians in every part of this country you have grown indifferent and devil-may-care and that's all it takes for the devil to triumph.
Sept 2004
billbears, 4CJ, this is a supurb account on what's in the "next room." Angels are "just" light-forms; with that light, even The Light :-), merely assuming forms and shaping to communicate with us--some day.
bump for later
Amazing! Most people consider Biblical stories to be - well - just that, stories. Wonder how many hearts have been turned by this latest 'Act of God'.
In light of Katrina (and 2 other chastisments I reckon as coming soon) we need to repent and return to Jesus. As a nation this must happen. The President should lead us in national repentance and mourning -- and thanksgiving to God for his gifts.
Declarations of how great we are and how we can rebuild on our own power are as odious to God as King David's census. It is time to get off of our proud horse and lie prostrate in the dust before the Lord and say, "Father, I have sinned."
The first thing the President could do that could diminish the impact of the chastisements is to issue an executive order protecting the "life rights" of the pre-born and putting an end to abortion in America.
As long as we Americans murder children in the womb, we march toward a giant chastisement that spells out the end of our existence as surely as the Flood of Noah spelt the end of the civilisations of his day.
Yes. That is right.
Think now how Katrina has caused the militant homosexuals to cancel their "Southern Decadence" celebration in New Orleans this year.
Katrina - name meaning pure and holy.
Hi all,
Glad to get this ping. I had heard about this guy ten or twelve years ago and thought his testimony was one of the most powerful I'd heard. But didn't remember his name, so glad to be reminded now.
Talk about being saved at the last moment.
JM
Lately I'm reminded of something I read a few months back...
AUGUST 3, 1973
"My daughter, my novice, do you love the Lord? If you love the Lord, listen to what I have to say to you. It is very important...You will convey it to your superior."
"Many men in this world afflict the Lord. I desire souls to console Him to soften the anger of the Heavenly Father. I wish, with my Son, for souls who will repair by their suffering and their poverty for the sinners and ingrates."
"In order that the world might know His anger, the Heavenly Father is preparing to inflict a great chastisement on all mankind. WIth my Son I have intervened so many times to appease the wrath of the Father. I have prevented the coming of calamities by offering Him the sufferings of the Son on the Cross, His Precious Blood, and beloved souls who console Him forming a cohort of victim souls. Prayer, penance and courageous sacrifices can soften the Father's anger. I desire this also from your community...that it love poverty, that it sanctify itself and pray in reparation for the ingratitude and outrages of so many men."
imho, GREAT POINTS.
willfully chosen suffering even for God is so foreign to the USA cultural gestalt . . . so far from our gestalt, I don't think SG1 could get close at all even by Stargate.
In any case, ENDTIMES or chastisement or combined . . . we are set, as a nation and as neighborhoods, families and individuals to reap what we have sown--particularly as a nation--as never before. The suffering will be much greater than that of the Civil War.
Except for spiritual revival and Christ's Mercy, we would cease to exist. Thankfully, I believe what the Angel told George Washington is true--we will survive as a nation. But it will be a much mangled nation, probably smaller in geography and totally submitted to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Thankfully, all nations that survive will be submitted to Him in due course.
I have frequent discussions with an atheist captain on our police dept. He asked me if this hurricane was an act of nature or an act of God. I told him it was an act of God.
He scoffed as usual. He reminds me of the minister in this story.
He wanted to know why God would send this hurricane if he was so loving. I told him it's a wake up call and told him Mother Teresa's words that 'no country that permits abortion will ever have peace.' And that we have murdered over 40 million unborn babies in this country and there is a price to pay for that.
Maybe some day he'll come around.
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