Hardcore Atheist to Zealot - Howard Storm's NDE

0:00 From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes. They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped. And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my physical body because I was somewhere else. The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt. I was greeted by people I'd known in the past. I'm back home again. Incredibly safe and felt at home. Welcome, welcome everybody to Round Trip Death and a special welcome to our, oh, I'm going to call him famous, whatever, our very special guest Howard Storm.

0:49 How are you Howard? Okay. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. I was born in 1946. I like to think I was one of the first things I did when my father came back from the Pacific during World War II. I grew up in a very dysfunctional family. My father was extremely abusive every day, physically, emotionally. My mother was very loving kind and extremely passive. At the age 15, I had a long talk with my pastor because I was seriously thinking of going into the ministry when he explained what Christianity really was about, which was, with his Harvard University understanding Christianity was about myths and superstitions and fairy tales.

1:44 I walked out of that meaning knowing that I was not going to have anything to do with church, religion, God, Jesus ever again. I quickly became an existentialist under the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and Martin Heidegger, et cetera. I stayed that way up until my near-death experience on June 1, 1985. I had become an art professor in 1972, had a wife, two kids, a nice home, two cars, and was living the American dream in totally self-centered, aid type personality, obsessed with my career, my success, and hopefully ultimately my fame as an artist.

2:46 Well the American dream, all right. Well Howard, thanks for telling us about you. I'm going to interject some more because I know you're too humble to talk about it, but you are very well known in the near-death experience community. You've been in films, documentaries, you've written how many books now? I've just published my fifth book and I'm working on five more with my publisher in England. And what's your newest book called? My new book is called Following Jesus, The Way, The Truth, and the Life. Sounds beautiful. I just for fun went on YouTube and looked at a couple of your videos and by total random, I'm going to read you some comments that are on there, okay?

3:35 Because again, I know you're a little too humble to do this. Here you go. Here's from someone named Anthony. Love you, Howard Storm. I will never forget you. Listen to your stories over and over. I'm following the Lord much more closely and it's because of you. Well, that's very gratifying. Here's another one. Just ordered your new book, Mr. Storm. You've made a huge impact on my life. Thank you and I love you. Your words made me just melt. Okay, I know you're getting embarrassed, but you're going to get a couple more. Well, I'll just end with this one because this is the best.

4:16 This is all capital letters. It says, I love, love, love you, Howard Storm. You've made a big impact on a lot of people. I appreciate you being on with me today. If you don't mind, let's go back to 1985, that day that you were talking about. Now you had decided not to become clergy. Were you, would you consider yourself more of an atheist or agnostic or where did you fit in that whole thing? Well, I was a very hardcore atheist. And all, I was a professor at the university and all of my friends were hardcore atheists, too. And one of our favorite topics at one and two o'clock in the morning after consuming several pictures of beer was to talk about how stupid and delusional religious people were.

5:11 And let me narrow that down. We didn't ridicule Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims. We never talked about them. Our target of our ridicule was Christians. Seems to happen a lot, doesn't it? Okay, what happened on that day in 1985? What led up to your NDE? I'm going to give you a really short version. At 11 o'clock in the morning, I had a perforation of the duodham in simple English, a hole through my small stomach, which took me to the ground in the worst pain I had ever experienced in my life.

5:52 My wife called, we were at the hotel. My wife called the desk. They got an emergency doctor who came very quickly and knew exactly what was wrong. Said he was going to call an ambulance because I needed to have surgery within an hour or I would die. The ambulance came, took me to the big city hospital in Paris, the hospital general, the assistant public, de Paris, and examined by two very nice doctors. An emergency told me the exact same thing. That doctor that had been in the hotel said rushed me over to the surgical hospital where I was parked because unbeknownst to me and unbeknownst to the doctor's emergency.

6:37 Because it was a Saturday, which there's a French technical term for that, it's le weekend. Do you want me to translate that into English for you? Le weekend? No, I think we got it. Oh, good. But I assume what that meant was a lot of medical staff weren't there. Yeah, if you had the money and could get out of Paris for the weekend and had a nice little country place, that's where you went. Anyways, I was parked on a bed. I was not technically admitted to that hospital. I was under no doctor care and I was left there for 10 hours. I never saw a doctor once an hour.

7:20 Our nurse would come in and come to the room and ask me how I was doing. I would tell her in my poor French that I was dying and she would shrug her shoulders and leave. An hour later she'd come back and same question, same response. The pain that I experienced at the hotel got worse and worse and worse. Breathing became almost impossible. The American doctor I've talked to ever since that experience told me that my life expectancy was about two hours. The American doctors always use this weird word that had not been part of my vocabulary was it's a miracle you're alive because that night nurse came into the room and said they were unable to find a doctor and they were trying to get one the next day, which would have been Sunday and left the room.

8:22 I made my goodbyes to my wife and told her that I was going to die now. I closed my eyes and went unconscious. I had a very extensive near death experience which began with a group of people taking me to L and tearing me apart. In desperation my mind went back to my childhood, Sunday school, singing Jesus Loves Me. I called out to Jesus to save me. He came, he took me out of there. I had a life review and then when that was over he invited me to ask questions.

9:06 We spent the next several years together where he taught me a lot of stuff. When I say several years, that's not accurate because there's no time outside of this world. The time that we have in this world is linear time. It's what we know in God's world. Time is without measure and one can move through time at will past, present, and future. Anyways, that's a whole long another story. At the end of my graduate degree with my best friend in the whole world who goes by the name of Jesus, also known in Hebrew, Yeshua, I said that I want to go to heaven and he said no you don't have the character to fit in heaven, you've got to go back into this world and try and live the way that God created you to live.

10:05 We had a big argument. He won the argument and sent me back when I came back. The nurse who had been in the room earlier said there was no doctor that night, said a doctor has arrived and I had that surgery 10 o'clock that night. I just want to conclude this with when I woke from the surgery that morning, I knew that the most important thing in my life had happened to me. I knew that it was more real, far more real than what we call reality.

10:47 Life changing and all I could think about that morning was where do I begin? What do I do? And so that's what I've been working on for almost 40 years. What do I do? How do I live a way that's more pleasing to God? To put it quite simply, my goal is to live a life pleasing to God. The good news is I'm not alone in this. I have my buddy Jesus with me all the time and the way that he's with me all the time, it's called the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ. So we are in touch all the time, every day, and I rely upon connecting with the Spirit of Christ to both guide me and also to correct me when I screw up, which I do.

11:42 Don't we all? If you don't mind, Howard, I want to go back and ask you some questions to fill in a lot of details back here along the way. So first of all, and I don't want to spend a bunch of time on this, but give us a little more description of what this hellish experience was and who was tearing you apart. Okay. They were people. I never met a demon. People always want to ask me about the demons. I never saw any demons. Let me just do a quick aside here. I had an experience of hell. Hell is vast and there is unlimited variety of hellish experiences.

12:27 I've talked to many, many people who have had hellish experiences. None of us who've had hellish experiences want to talk about them. They're traumatic. I had a good friend who is a psychiatrist and he told me one time that I was suffering from PTSD from my hellish experience and that he wanted to do therapy with me to help me overcome that PTSD and we did it and it was very, very helpful by the way. I don't want anybody, anybody to ever experience what I did. They took me on a long journey to this group of people that seduced me out of my hospital room and took me into an ever increasing darkness which ultimately became complete total darkness and I was terrified of them because I was becoming very aware that they were very cruel people.

13:28 I said, I'm not going with you any further and with that we got into a big fight and I tried to resist them but there were a lot of them, many, many of them and obviously they had their way with me and it degenerated from kicking and punching to ripping, gouging, tearing, biting, clawing which degenerated into invasive things and that's where I stopped because I have never told and I will never tell ever what they did to me. The point was they did everything they could to demean me and left me on the ground of that place unable to move which is when eventually I called upon Jesus out of desperation.

14:26 Well, thank you for sharing. I know that was hard. I'm trying to understand how an atheist calls on Jesus. Is it because of that point of desperation? Do you think? How would you describe that now? Well let me preface this with a little Bible quote. The Bible says in four different places, anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved and if you look up that scripture there's no if ands, buts, maybes. It's just laid in there that simple and plain.

15:08 I think that it's really important. It means sincerely when calling upon Jesus is like, hey Jesus if you're not too busy if you're just hanging out, hey drop by sometime. Not like that. It's desperation. It's got to be right from the heart and I really believe that if anyone does that, really does it from their heart. He's going to respond. My call was Jesus saved me. Pretty simple prayer, right? He did. He not just saved me. He gave me a whole new life. That was like I said almost 40 years ago.

15:50 I started going to church. I became a pastor. I served churches for 30 years. All right books about it. I do YouTube. I do interviews like this one. I always try to respond to every email I get with people's questions. I have a website. There's a connect on there and I welcome anyone that would like to write me or ask me something or share something with me. I make myself available and that's my life. Okay. My next question is back to the life review. I hear different stories on what those were like. Tell me what yours was like.

16:32 Well, I've talked to a lot of people who've had near death experiences and people that have had extensive near death experiences have had a life review. Now they may differ a little bit. The life review is truth. It's not our memory of our life. Our life was recorded and I'm not talking about a book. I'm talking about the full audio visual plus. One thing you'll hear from a lot of people that had a life review is that the impact that they've had on the people that they've interacted with, they also get to know.

17:23 Let me just give you one simple example. My mother, I was her only son and I was the apple of her eye and they showed me how much I hurt my mother by being such a rebellious child. The last thing in the world I ever wanted to do was to hurt my mom but I'm running away from home at the age of 15 showing up three months later. That kind of stuff really hurt her. I never really appreciated how much pain I caused my dear mom. Jesus did a lot in my life review showing me why my father was the very screwed up, extremely narcissistic, cruel man that he was.

18:12 It was because of his upbringing. Jesus wanted me to understand why my father was the way I was and it was Jesus's hope that somehow I could be reconciled with my father when I came back into this world, which to a certain degree I was. The life review is not punishment. It's not like a courtroom trial. You're simply confronted with the truth of the good and the bad and the indifferent that you did with your life. You've had a lot of years to think about this now. I'm going to ask you to speculate on some things.

18:54 Give me your opinion on some things. One is why a life review? If it's not like a court, it's not like you're guilty or you're not guilty. What is the purpose of it? Question. God's love is not punitive. God loves us. God's love is rehabilitative. Now I have to add this. People will naturally go to the question if God's love is to bring us to heaven and rehabilitate us, which let me put this in a little more religious terms.

19:37 God's love is for our ultimate total sanctification so that we can be in heaven forever. Why does God have that alternate place to heaven known as hell? And the reason is very simple. People get what is in their heart. If your heart has chosen a rejection of God, you get to reject God. You get to go to a place where God doesn't rule. Matter of fact, none of the goodness of God is there at all. People rule. Unfortunately, those people degenerate into the worst of human behavior.

20:25 They live to torment one another. There's no light down there. There's no birds. There's no food. There's no joy. And most importantly, there's no hope. What happens to those people in hell? It would be wonderful if they all hit that point of desperation, total rejection of their mental construct of being angry and hating the God that they say doesn't exist. They would call upon Jesus. I would like to think that if they did that, Jesus would come and take them out of there.

21:10 The people that I met in hell were not interested in calling upon Jesus or God and made it very clear to me that they knew there was no God in the most vulgar ways. So people get what they choose. If you choose God, God is going to help you find the way. If you choose Jesus, Jesus is going to help you find the way. And that's what I wrote this. Well, all my books are about that more or less, but the recent one is very directly about what it means to choose Jesus and follow his way.

21:50 I hope that the stuff that I'm putting out there, whether it's a YouTube or an interview or a book or whatever, my ministry of 30 years, I hope that I have been helpful in people making that choice because I know that rejecting God is a choice and seeking God is a choice. I know this sounds simple, but that's it, baby. You've got one or two choices. It's a simple binary choice that you have to make, one or the other.

22:34 Jesus talking about shame and guilt. What did he have to say about that? Jesus and I talked a lot about guilt and shame, and he really despises those things because those are just us wallowing in things that we can be free from. When Jesus died on the cross, he said, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do. And he was speaking to a crowd that was mocking him, a crowd that was not only tormenting him with their jeers, but also the people that had whipped him almost to death with the 40 lashes.

23:17 He was talking to the people who nailed him to the cross, the people that were really enjoying watching him suffer this long, horrible death on the cross. You think you've done something bad? You're nothing compared to the people that killed Jesus. That was bad. You want bad? How about the people that killed Jesus because they didn't like the love that he offered the world? You take your stuff to Jesus. You be honest with him. You fess up. You turn your life around.

23:59 You make a change, and you ask him to forgive you. And that stuff is finished. It's gone, and you will not see it in your life review. Get smart people. Get your life review. Clean it up. You don't have to look at the bad stuff if you don't want to. One other question about the life review. I'm a very private person, so I'm uncomfortable with the thought of my whole life being recorded. Why do you think it's recorded? I don't really understand. It's recorded because our memory of our life is highly inaccurate.

24:43 It is highly colored by our emotions. Once let me give you an example since I used my father. In my mind, my father was a monster, and I was the victim of a monster. And one of the things that Jesus showed me was how I had contributed, which I never would have admitted and certainly didn't recognize, into the deterioration of our relationship. The crueler he was to me, the more I hated him, and the more he knew, because it was quite obvious that I disliked him intensely.

25:24 So therefore he tried to impose himself more and more on me to the point where we had no relationship at all. All right, we're going to get to the part that I've been looking forward to the very, very, very most. I don't know if you can guess what that is or not, but you talked about having a question and answer session. I've got to know what some of those questions and answers were. Okay. Well, let me, can I start off with the biggie? I'll start off with the one that I considered the best one. When Jesus told me that I had to come back to this world and try and live it in a way that would be more consistent, which is why God created me and everyone in the first place, to be children of God, I said, what do you want me to do if I were to go back?

26:14 This is when I was still pleading to go to heaven. He said, quote, love the person you're with. I said quickly and glibly, okay, got it. What else do you want me to do? And before he could answer, I started to tell him that I was going to look for a big piece of land out in the country and build a big, amazing shrine to him so that people would come from all over the world to see the shrine that I had built in Jesus. And he said, quote, please don't do that. And I said, I was shocked because I thought it was a really good idea.

26:57 And I said, why? And he said, I don't need it. God doesn't need it. And I interrupted him and said, yeah, well, what about all the cathedrals and the shrines all over the world? You know, what about all those? And he said, those are for people. God doesn't need that stuff, you know? I don't need that stuff. That's for people. He said, I want you to love the person that you're with. I said to him, yeah, that's nice. What good will that do? He said, if you love the person that you're with, they may carry that love to their next interaction with another person, be kind and loving towards them.

27:46 And that person might carry that out. And he didn't say this, but in my own words, you know, it's the ripple effect, you know, throw the stone in the water and the ripples go out, right? That's what he was trying to teach me. So of course, me thinking that I'm so smart and have to teach Jesus, I said, oh, that's not going to work. I said, the world's full of cruelty, lots of nasty people, you know, you do something loving and the next person gets slammed for it, they get discouraged and that's the end of it. And he said, we have millions of people who are trying to do this.

28:28 I explained, yeah, well, your millions are a minority in the world and it's not going to work. He said, we have billions of angels. And I said, yeah, well, with your millions of people and your billions of angels, it's not going to work. That love thing's not going to work. Now Jesus now dropped the nuclear bomb on me. You ready for it? Eric, you ready? Ready. I'm so ready. He said, it's God's will. Well, as arrogant and ignorant as I was, I did not know how to respond to the nuclear bomb.

29:10 It's God's will. Oops. That's what we call a mic drop. Jesus says it's God's will, drops the mic, walks away, end of discussion. Amen. Yeah, I was dumbstruck, didn't know what to say. It sounds like the university professor side of you was coming back out in that discussion. You were trying to reason. You were trying to, yeah, do all that kind of stuff. I'd love to hear a couple of other questions you asked him. Oh, let's see. You know, I really did ask him hundreds and thousands of questions.

29:53 Here's a kind of fun one. He had told me that there was some intelligent life on other planets in our universe. And I'm not just talking about the multiverse. I'm talking about our physical universe, which of course is just one of many universes. And he told me, oh, there's many, many. And I said, what do they look like? So he called forth a parade of alien beings beginning with ones that were human like, and maybe, you know, that have strange ears or noses or different colors and things like that.

30:35 And then they started getting weirder and weirder. And then they started getting really strange. Have you ever seen photographs of very deep sea creatures? Yeah. They look like they're from another planet. Yeah. Well, these looked like people from other planets, and they were all waving and smiling at me as they went parading by. And it was kind of freaking me out. So I said to Jesus, OK, OK, OK, I got it. I got it. That's enough. I don't want to see any more. That's like, you're weird. Now, I'll give you, that was sort of a fun one. Another question that I asked him when we talked about what is known as the heavenly choir, which I like to refer to as the heavenly symphony, because it's way more than just vocal.

31:23 What's the point? I mean, obviously, they're worshiping God and they're in close proximity to God and everybody's getting their major love going back and forth. So that, that, of course, is one of the purposes known in the world as worship. But the ultimate point is, is that the universe, and this is not, I'm going into, this is what Jesus, Jesus told me, taught me, the universe is made up of vibrational states. If you look into theoretical physics, you'll find out that this is what all theoretical physicists teach.

32:05 This is what Jesus taught me. Choir and energy are simply forms of vibrational states. Guess what the source of those vibrational states are, Eric? I'm not giving you time to answer. The source of those vibrational states are God and the heavenly choir. And Jesus told me that if the heavenly choir and God were to cease, the whole universe would vanish. They would not be at all because they created, and not only are they creating it by sustaining what is, but also creating a new.

32:50 And that's one of the reasons why there's some multi-universes. This physical universe that we know is not the only universe in existence. And God is constantly, please don't take this as blasphemy. God is just like this wild, crazy artist, just the most creative being, and he just loves to create. And one of the things that he loves to create besides beautiful things and extraordinary things like galaxies and planets and suns and habitable worlds with all kinds of interesting life forms, he likes to create beings who actually have the capacity with the gifts that he gives to interact with God and to become holy people and come to heaven and to participate with God in the creative activity of the universe.

33:53 I never use the term co-creator because that might imply some equality with God. Our creative activity is under the design, control, and empowerment of God. We participate with God and the creation. We are not in this no equality at all between us and God. Quite a destiny that we will ultimately, in our process of sanctification, be in close proximity to God participating in the creation of the universe.

34:39 How about that? You just said God is a wild, crazy artist. Sorry, when you say wild and crazy, I think of Steve Martin. I'm getting away from that. You're a wild and crazy artist, does that mean the place where you saw some really cool creative things and if so describe some? I'm going to give you a definitive description of heaven. Everything good, everything beautiful, everything that ever was good and beautiful, everything that is good and beautiful, everything that ever will be good and beautiful is in heaven.

35:20 When you talk to people that have been to heaven, and I did get a tour of heaven, by the way, how about grass and flowers and trees that sing? How do you like that puppy? Everything in heaven is alive. The rocks are alive in heaven. People project what they think heaven is by their experience in this world. People argue about what kind of mansion they're going to get in heaven and what kind of food they're going to eat in heaven. It's way beyond, way better than that. So aren't we? I got to tell you this.

36:01 This is a story. I had a guy that sent me a bunch of emails because he wanted to know what kind of shoes we were going to wear in heaven. I tried to explain to him where you don't need shoes. Yeah, you want to walk in that singing grass. By the way, you won't hurt it. It'll tickle your feet. I want to go everywhere barefoot. That sounds better to me. So I'm glad to hear that answer. Are there any other things that you can describe that you saw? I love hearing about everything being alive and singing. My tour of heaven, I saw incredibly beautiful mountains, wonderful oceans, lakes, forests, vast plains of grass, animals.

36:47 I'm a dog lover. I've had multiple dogs all my life. I believe, I don't know this, but I believe that somehow either the dogs that I've had or maybe some kind of single dog that embodies all the dogs that I've had, I will be greeted with them in heaven. Because for me, I need a doggy in heaven. Dogs are my best friends. I don't mean that globally. I mean, I'm quite serious. I'm just crazy. Dogs give unconditional love.

37:30 And so I believe that dogs are a gift from God to teach us unconditional love. Now, there's horse people and cat people and bird people and lots of different. But I'm a dog guy. I'm going to skip ahead just a little bit and come back here. But I'm curious after this experience, you had to have been completely changed. You had to have changed your title from atheist to something else. What was it like speaking with your wife, your colleagues back at the university, when you were so different now? This is not good.

38:11 My wife ultimately, we got divorced. I mean, she left me. I fought that divorce, but she didn't want to be married to me after 40 years of marriage. Anyways, she hated what I had become. But in fact, because all I wanted to do was talk about Jesus and God, and I started reading the Bible. And one of the things I did was I started memorizing scripture and reciting it to people all the time. I mean, I was a total fanatic, complete seller. I mean, I was super obnoxious trying to get people to want to know Jesus. I don't do that anymore.

38:53 I've really changed my style of evangelism. Anyways, I turned her off, turned my kids off, turned my mother off. And everyone that came into my room, I was in the hospital in the United States for a couple months. I would try the same thing and I turned them all off. The word got out at the university. I had some visitors or friends. I would try and tell them what happened to me. They would never, my best friends. They would never speak to me again. When they saw me coming, they would go way out of their way to avoid me. And I lost every friend I had in the world and lost my whole family.

39:36 My wife, my two kids, I was all alone. The good news was I had started going to church and I started making new friends. I just want to say my Christian friends are far better friends than I ever had. And I may as well tell you the unvarnished truth. So I came home from a mission trip on the Amazon River. And when I came home, the house, my ex-wife, my first wife of 40 years, she was an attorney. When I came home from that mission trip, the house was empty and there were divorce papers on the kitchen table with a note, sign this.

40:17 So we got divorced because that's what she wanted and she was not interested in trying to resuscitate the marriage. Now here's the really dumb part. Eric, you're dealing with a major dumb head here. Three weeks after the divorce, I got married to another woman. Everybody that I talked to about my plan to marry her told me, don't do that. It's a big mistake. She's not right for you. But I told myself, I'm in love. They don't understand. I'm in love. She's the one for me. It's going to be great. 16 years later, she walked out on me.

40:58 We got divorced. So I decided that I would never date. I would never marry again. That lasted for over a year. One morning I woke up and said, I love women. What am I talking about? I need a wife. I need a woman. It's a long story, which I don't have time to go into, but it's really incredible. God thing, story. A pastor friend of mine handed me a slip of paper and he said, here's a name and a telephone number called this woman. I think that this is the woman that God has planned for you. And I called her. I made a date with her to have coffee at 10 o'clock in the morning near her house.

41:43 We met for coffee at noon time. We were falling in love. And I said, are you hungry? She said, I'm famished. And I said, there's a really nice restaurant next door. And she said, oh, I love that place. We went next door three hours later. I said, maybe you need to go home. I know I got to go home and take care of my dog. Can I call you tomorrow? Can I see you tomorrow? And she said, yes. And three months later, we were talking about getting married and not too long after that. And she is such a super Christian, such a loving, kind person and takes incredibly good care of me because I've been through a lot of really big health crisis.

42:38 And she is just wonderful. And everybody I know, before I can say it, says, boy, she's a gift from God. And I said, I know that. I know that. I've got the most amazing wife. And we're very happy. And we've been married for well over a year now. And by the way, my dog's lover. Well that's important. Oh, yeah. And I'm not saying that sarcastically. That's very important. And vice versa. Okay. I want to hear about the process of you coming back. It sounds like you got in a bit of an argument with Jesus.

43:18 He said you had to go back. You didn't want to go. Give me a little more detail. What all happened there? Like one of the things that I knew would be incredibly powerful argument. Once I said, why would you send me back to this world? The world is full of horrible, evil, cruel people. Why would you want to put me in that world? And Jesus said, that's true. But the world is also full of loving, kind, and wonderful people. And then he added this. And I really hope that the people that are listening or seeing this podcast will pay attention to this.

44:05 Jesus told me that what is in your heart is what you will find. And then he explained, if you look for good and loving people, they will come to you in your life. If you look for cruel, rotten people, that's what you're going to find. And you know what? Jesus was telling the truth. I have evangelizing and doing mission work been all over the world. I spent a month in China. I've been in Africa. I've been in all the countries of Western Europe. I've been in South America, Central America.

44:48 I've been all over the world. And you know what I find, or that's just unbelievable? Loving, kind, good people. And you know what else I found in all of my weeks and months of traveling around the world? I have never, ever had one bad experience, not one. The good, loving, kind people are out there. What's in your heart is what you're going to find, look for them. So did you come back kind of kicking and screaming then? Well, I just had a three hour major abdominal surgery, so I wasn't very mobile.

45:31 But you know, all I could think about is, how am I going to change? What am I going to change? Eric, in my opinion, the hardest thing for a person to do in this world is to change themselves. And if you talk to people in 12-step programs like AA, NA, Al-Anon, etc., they'll tell you, you know, for people to make any kind of change in themselves, it's really, really hard work, but important work. So there I thought, what do I do? What do I do? What do I do? And like I said, it's been almost 40 years and I'm still trying to discover what I could do better and what I've done wrong and what I've done right.

46:16 And that is a daily self-examination. It's not like, you know, once a month or once a week, you know, every day. Let me just give you a simple example. I've told you what an absolutely wonderful wife I have. I didn't tell you. I also have a temper. I don't mean to shock you, Eric. Please don't turn off the video. I thought you were perfect. Now, Father Eric, I'm giving you a true confession here. There have been occasions when I have lost my temper with my wife because obviously she did something to make me angry and not intentionally, but you know, we're all imperfect people.

47:06 And I've yelled at her. You know, the minute I do that, you know, I go, oh, damn, stupid idiot me. I'm talking about me. You know, she doesn't deserve that. She doesn't need that. And then I can feel that I've really hurt her. My wife, who came from a very dysfunctional background too, she does not like to be yelled at. It hurts her really badly. You know, obviously what I have to do is I wait a little bit, give it a little time, you know, and then tell her, I'm so sorry. Please forgive me. You know, I just flew off, you know, I didn't mean to do that.

47:50 And I will really, really try not to do that kind of thing again. I am working on not losing my temper. But Eric, you know that sometimes, you know, you don't think. You just react, bang, you know, fight or flight, right? And those times when I yell at my wife, fortunately, I would like to report I'm doing less and less of that all the time. So yay for me, I'm making progress. I'm trying to change that lifelong. I used to be a real bully. I used to be a very controlling person. Actually my anger was highly effective in getting my way because I, you know, I was a big strong guy and I could intimidate people.

48:38 Well, I don't try and intimidate anybody and I don't always try and get my own way. And you know, when you're living with a person who's very patient and kind and caring, you know, it's hard to really know when you're abusing their kindness, right? Well, thank you for sharing that. We're all dealing with stuff and we're certainly not perfect. Let's leave this off on a high note. Oh, oh, first, wait. So I was asking about your sort of argument conversation with Jesus prior to coming back. Was there a point where he actually gave you the choice, you know, he said, here's why you need to go back now to your choice or were you just told you have to go back?

49:28 He made it really clear that I didn't have any choice in the matter. And ultimately what he was waiting for was for me to agree with him. And it took a lot of arguing for him to ultimately persuade me. And what I finally said to him was, I don't want to, but I'll go back. And with that, I was back. So eventually it was your choice. Yeah. Or your acceptance, maybe we should say. Yeah. Okay. You've done a lot of good out there in the world. And this is a tough place to live right now for a lot of people.

50:08 Can you leave everybody with some kind of a message of hope here? God has a definite plan that this world is going to become a utopia. The book of Revelation is so misunderstood and misrepresented by people because they want to focus on all the gruesome images in there. The whole point of the book, by the way, I took a class at a Catholic seminary about the book of Revelation. The whole point of the book of Revelation is ultimately the ending where God destroys all the evil, all the evil in our world.

50:56 It's all cast and destroyed in the lake of fire. And we build heaven on earth. As we pray in the Lord's prayer, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We create a utopia in this world. And that's the future of the world. When that's going to happen, the Bible is very clear. No one knows. So obviously, I don't know. And all those people that say they do, when they do, that's a big, giant red flag that they're a false prophet, by the way. No one knows when that's exactly. I'm hoping that it happens this afternoon. If not, how about by Friday?

51:39 If not, I don't know when it's going to happen. Jesus suggested to me that it's not that far away. And with the science of the time and the world that we're living in, one can't help but suspect that it may not be so far away. And if you want to read a really good section of the Bible that spells all this out, and what I think is pretty powerful prophetic language, read the Gospel of Matthew chapter 24, which is 100% the words of Jesus talking about how the New World, the New Earth is coming about. And I think we are in the labor pains of that coming about.

52:23 So our job, every single person in this world, is to, to the best of our ability, create a relationship with God through the Christ, and to be an instrument, not just for our salvation, but for the salvation of everybody that we come in contact with. Going back to that thing that I said earlier about, love the person you're with. After you have a relationship with them, maybe, maybe, maybe you'll have an opportunity to talk a little bit about what God and Jesus have done for you.

53:06 I think the most powerful of evangelism, in my opinion, is personal testimony. Things like, you know, well, I went through some really bad depression, and this is how Jesus helped me find my way out of that, etc. I think that that kind of testimony is a whole lot more powerful than telling people what they should do. You know what, people get defensive when you tell them to do. You know, Eric, you know, the problem with you is those shirts that you wear, you know, nobody can take you seriously with those ugly shirts you're wearing. Why don't you get a nice shirt, you know, and button up the collar? You know what I mean? Doesn't that make you feel a little defensive?

53:48 Like, you know, who, who the heck is Howard? You have no idea, you have no idea how true that is, Howard. And I know, and I know since you lost your vision, you can't see my shirt, but. That's true. I'm just wearing a t-shirt here, but usually I'm wearing a flowery shirt, so I know people don't take me seriously. It's okay. Like Hawaiian flowery? Yes, Aloha shirts. Uh-oh. Yes. Yeah, by the way, I've been getting rid of my Hawaiian shirts. God, send me your address and I'll send you a box of Hawaiian shirts. Send them to me. I grew up wearing them. I still love them. And I really don't care that people don't take them seriously.

54:29 Yeah. But today it's a plain old t-shirt. Uh, yeah, I don't look half as good as you do. Oh, wow. Truth really hurts. You got me between the eyes there. See, I told you I had psychic. All right. You do. Very last question. I love asking people this on a scale of one to 10, how much fear of death does Howard Storm have? Thank you for asking that question because a psychologist who taught at the University of Connecticut studied that question. His name is Ken Ring. He wrote about it.

55:11 And so what he did was in psychology there's instruments, there are tests, you know, multi-page questions, the study of the fear of death called tontology. You know, fear of death is the number one fear that general, everyone in the world has. He used this instrument with two groups, people who have had near death experiences and people who had not had a near death experience. And in the group of people that had not had a near death experience, he found the fear of death to be quite high. In the group of near death experiences, they flunked the test as in had no fear of death.

55:58 So I have no fear of death. People that have had NDEs that I've known and I've gotten to talk to, they have no fear of death. None of us have a death wish because we all are very much convinced that we have work to do in this world, which I've tried to explain in that work is to pass on the love of God to follow Jesus. So I'm busy doing my J-O-B, which is trying to be as loving as I possibly can. But when I die, it's going to be the happiest, best day of my life because I'm going to leave this world of woe and to go up into a world of love, joy, and faith.

56:55 Amen. Thank you very much, Howard. You're welcome. It's been a pleasure talking with you. Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast. Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtripdeath.com. If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about the show, send an email to ericatroundtripdeath.com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.