Originally published in CBN.
Nobody expects to die in the middle of their son’s wedding weekend.
You don’t expect to stagger through a rehearsal dinner with a 104° fever. You don’t think a backyard baseball game with your boys is going to rip your insides apart. And you definitely don’t expect a freezing operating room to be the place where a five-year-old’s prayer gets answered.
But that’s exactly what happened to Mike McKinsey.
He spent three miserable days just trying to hold it together so he wouldn’t miss his son’s wedding — smiling in pictures, pretending he was okay, even though he clearly wasn’t. Everyone figured it was just the flu. It wasn’t until the wedding was over that he finally said: “Alright, I need to get checked out,” and went to the ER.
A nurse tapped his foot, and pain exploded in his stomach. The surgeon counted backward three days since his appendix likely ruptured. They needed to act fast. Mike kissed his wife and was rushed into surgery. The table was freezing and so narrow that he crossed his hands over his chest. Mike felt awful. This was the first time he was concerned that he may not ever see his wife and kids again.
He simply turned his head to the right.
And Jesus walked into the room.
Not a floating spirit. Not a vision above the body. A physical man like a surgeon entering his own operating room, dark brown hair to His shoulders, short beard, white robe, Middle Eastern features. Not the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus that Mike had seen growing up.
Their eyes met, and he knew instantly who it was.
Jesus held out His hand and said: “I want to answer your prayer.”
A prayer that never let go
The first time Mike asked to see Heaven, he was five years old at his grandfather’s funeral. Sitting in a big church, mesmerised by smoke rising from a priest’s censer.
The priest kept describing heaven: no pain, no tears, no sadness. To a five-year-old, it sounded beautiful and strangely real. That night, Mike added a new line to his bedtime prayers.
“Show me Heaven. I want to see it.”
Night after night, for years, he repeated it.
“You didn’t show me yet.”
He didn’t know a prayer can wait decades for its answer.
The hill, the city, and the glory of the Lord
Back in Ventura, when Jesus said, “I want to answer your prayer,” Mike assumed He meant the surgery would go well. He wasn’t thinking about that five-year-old boy in a pew.
Then he took Jesus’ hand.
In an instant, the operating room disappeared.
Mike was standing barefoot on a hill, feeling cool green grass beneath him with impossible clarity, like he could count every blade touching his skin. Everything around him was blinding white, like dense fog pressed close.
Out of the white appeared a glowing, pearl-like sphere the size of a basketball. From it, beams of light began shooting outward smooth, tube-like rays moving through the mist. One flew straight at him and hit him in the forehead before he could react. It passed through him with a gentle buzzing sound and filled his body with warmth.
Then, like a curtain pulling to the side, the white parted.
Below him was a massive city, domes, rooftops, and tall white structures rising through a low blanket of fog. Golden domes reflected light. Some buildings resembled church steeples, but one detail stunned him:
There were no crosses anywhere.
Behind the city rose a mountain covered in perfectly shaped trees with delicate, lace-like branches. Above it stretched a sky exploding with colors he had never seen — like the most vivid sunset imagined, except without a visible sun.
The beams of light kept firing from the sphere, traveling across the valley and striking the treetops. Each time they hit, they burst into countless tiny rays, like silent fireworks against that radiant sky.
Overwhelmed, Mike looked toward the source.
Jesus said: “It’s the glory of the Lord.”
The words hit him so deeply that his knees gave out. The moment they touched the ground, the scene vanished.
He was back in the operating room.
A doctor hovered over him, asking: “Do you know your name?” Nurses pushed the crash cart away. Later, the surgeon would tell him” “Yours is the worst case I’ve ever seen where the patient lived… God’s not done with you yet.”
Flat on his back, learning to listen
The NDE wasn’t the end. In fact, it was the beginning for Mike.
Twenty-four hours later, at 2am in ICU, Mike woke up unable to breathe. His lungs felt heavy. The nurse checked him and said: “Oh honey, you’re developing pneumonia.” His fever was still dangerously high. His body was full of E. coli. They packed him in ice, put oxygen under his nose, and handed him a spirometer. He couldn’t move the marble inside it.
He thought: “This is why Jesus showed me Heaven. I’m going to die.” Then he felt the same Presence enter the room.
Jesus sat at the end of his bed.
Mike couldn’t see Him this time, but he heard Him clearly: “I had to get you flat on your back, away from all the distractions, so you could hear Me.”
The nurse sitting beside him heard nothing. For the next three hours — from 2 to 5am — Jesus spoke to him. Mike moved his lips, asked questions out loud, and kept glancing at the nurse to see if she reacted. She didn’t.
Jesus told him he would survive, make a full recovery, and that He wanted more of him.
From Sunday Christian to living awake
Before all this, Mike would’ve described himself as a “Sunday Christian”. He believed in God but lived like faith was something that fit in a one-hour window.
After the hospital, everything shifted.
He began reading his Bible and recognising the same voice he heard in ICU speaking through it. He started noticing God in small, specific ways – like prompting him to slip $220 to a pastor’s family, only to learn they needed exactly $220 for tires that same day. And then watching God repay it tenfold.
When he first tried sharing his story, even friends looked at him like he’d crossed into crazy. He held it quietly for years – until he sensed Jesus say: “Tell the whole story. Hold nothing back.”
So he wrote his book, I Held the Hand of Jesus in Heaven, not to elevate himself, but to point people back to the One who met him in both glory and weakness.
Ask Mike what he wants people to take away, and he keeps it simple:
Ask God. Slow down. Pay attention to the beauty around you. He’s closer than you think.
This isn’t just Mike’s story.
It’s for anyone who has ever drifted, doubted, or wondered if God still speaks – and is finally ready to stop wandering and walk toward the One who has been there the whole time.
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