"WOW!" Ralph Meets Jesus And Embraces Him During His NDE (Part 1)

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 to Round Trip Death, everybody, and welcome to our special guest.

0:43 We're really happy to have Ralph Jensen with us today. How are you, Ralph? Great. Glad to be here. Good. It's so good to have you here. For our listeners, I just want you to know, wow, is what you're going to be saying halfway through this and at the end, and you're going to want to share this with friends because the things that Ralph experienced during his NDE are really amazing and really can grow your faith. So with that, before we jump into it, Ralph, can you just tell us a little bit about you? Okay. I was born. Would you like to know where I was born? Congratulations.

1:26 I was born in a town called Logan, but I didn't live there, Logan, Utah. I lived in a farm outside in the valley. So I learned to melt cows when I was five, and we were working on the farm and milking cows since I'd been before preschool even. And then when I was 14, my dad and our family, we all moved to Seattle because we lived off our farm, but we didn't pay our other bills off our farm. My dad was a builder because all the farming and ranching that he did before was gone by the time I got there.

2:06 So we moved to Seattle for him to build. So I lived in Seattle from ninth grade, was 14, until after I got married in 1975. And then my wife and I moved to Salt Lake City as an answer to prayers. I'm the father of nine children. We had nine in 12 years. Wow. So by the time my oldest was 12, we had number nine, and my wife was 34, and I was 36. Double wow. And this isn't the wow part I was alluding to. And then we lived mostly in the valley around Salt Lake.

2:48 And for a year, we moved back to Washington, lived in St. Homish, and we came back when we had five children at the time. And then in January of 1999, my youngest was 10, my oldest is 22, she was married, and she was three months away from our first grandchild. My wife took my 13-year-old to the doctor and on the way home, a man ran a red light and struck her on her side, and she didn't survive the accident. So my daughter was beat up pretty good, but she lived. And so at the age of 46, I had eight children at home, five teenagers, 10-year-old, up to a 20, and that made life a little different.

3:35 And then later, after a grandchild came and other time, I married my son-in-law's mother, and she has three boys, one married to my daughter and two others. And so we have 12 children, eight boys, four girls, and 35 grandchildren. And they live from Florida to Oregon, West Virginia, Texas, and around in the valley here. So we don't get to see all of them all the time, but we see several. And since my heart problem is a hereditary problem, my brothers all have the problem, and three of my children do.

4:22 One of them at the age of 41 in April of 2019, he died from heart trouble. He had four children. He was in their force. This hereditary heart thing is not that great. So he's gone, so we still have 11 of them left. My wife and I just live here in Midvale. Yeah, that's awesome. That's amazing, and congratulations, all those grandchildren. The oldest one that was born in April of 1999, she is married, and she's almost 25. Her younger brother's married, so we have two married grandchildren. So you're going to have greats pretty soon.

5:04 Well, we're hoping so. I shouldn't say pretty soon. At some point, you're going to have greats. I don't want to put pressure on them. Yeah, I don't know their schedule. My wife and I plan to have 15 children, so we wouldn't limit the Lord, and we only got nine. Only. Okay. All right, speaking of heart problems, and you don't have to give us all the medical details, but that's what led up to your near-death experience back in February of 2004. Can you tell me what was happening that day? Were you feeling sick, or did this come right out of the blue? No, I was feeling just fine. We had gone out with our son that evening, and we got home around an old little after nine.

5:50 It happened to be on a Thursday. This was Thursday night. We went to bed around 11.30. Now at midnight, it turns into Friday the 13th, and so here on Friday the 13th, I woke up. My chest was hurting, and I woke up and looked at the clock, and it said 3.04. So it was 3.04 a.m. I don't feel so good, so I got up and I went into the bathroom. We were living in a small apartment. There's only 800 square foot, but it was a two-bedroom, two bath with a little kitchen and living room, and we had just lost a business in Zion, so we finally got us a little apartment to live.

6:32 We were homeless, and three and a half months after we moved into that apartment, after bouncing around for six months, I had this happen. At the time, I only had two of our children left, the two youngest, Lisa and Michael. I go in the bathroom, and I guess I made too much noise, and my wife wondered why I got up. She's a light sleeper. She came in, and she says, what's the matter with you? My chest hurts. She's as sore as mine as it ended up she had pneumonia. She had pneumonia while I had heart attack, but I wasn't sure if it was going to be a heart attack. I mean, I wasn't thinking about that.

7:13 I thought, well, maybe if I go lay down, I was having problems breathing. I stacked up a bunch of pillows against the headboard, and I was leaning there on the pillows, and things started to get a little rough, and she says, what do you want me to do? I said, I don't know. Call the hospital. See what they say. So she calls the hospital. They say, well, call 911. I don't want to bother anybody at three o'clock anymore. So finally, it was starting to get really painful, and our cell phone happened to be a little cell we finally got that it wasn't that great, and then the building we were in was concrete brick, so the signal wouldn't come through.

7:54 So you had to lean against the window to get the signal. So she's in the bathroom, and I can see her from where I'm laying in the bed through the door, and she's leaning against the window with the phone, and if she stands up even, she'll lose the call. So she has to stay leaning on the window to keep a call. So now she's about 15, 20 feet away from me, maybe 15 feet or so, and I'm laying there. When things got pretty rough and the pain was getting pretty great, I can handle pain quite well, have high pain tolerance, that's part of the reason why she was not knowing what to do. And I said, okay, get Michael up, get him to go across the street, get Brother Altson for a blessing, and call 911 and hurry.

8:41 So she calls 911. Meantime, Spencer Altson comes in, and he's kneeling next to me, and my son is standing there, and my daughter took our dog into the bedroom away from all of this to keep him away from the paramedics as well. So now I'm laying there, and I'm kind of screaming, help me, please help me. And she's on the call, and she's, she'd ask a question, they'd ask her, and then Spencer would haul her back the answer, and they're talking back and forth on what's going on, and you know, what color is he? Does he hurt? Is he perspiring? Is he choking?

9:22 And, and then the midst of all this is interesting that before I had actually died, I saw two people standing in the foot of my bed, and I thought it was my son Michael, and I thought, would you change your clothes for, because he was wearing something dark and these people were wearing white. And then I, my eyes rolled back in my head, my head rolled back, and I rolled off the pillows face down away from Spencer on the bed. And as that happened, all the pain went away. And I was in excruciating pain, I thought my chest was going to explode.

10:04 So I was holding it to keep it from exploding. I thought, not good, not to go from this heavy pain to nothing, not a good sign. And I said, I'm dying. And that's what I was thinking, and I was turned pray to ask God if I could stay. Well, in the meantime, I, I finally go, I can't shut my eyes. I can't speak. I can't move. Why can't I do any of these things? Because I didn't know I had already separated from my body. And then I noticed a few things different. I noticed that I could see through the walls. And now in the wintertime, it's dark outside at 3.30 in the morning, and I can see sunlight outside.

10:49 I thought, hmm, that's different. You're so casual about all this. Oh, that's different. You're just so calm and casual about the whole thing. Well, my wife was not too casual. Oh, that's different. I must be dying. That's different. Yeah. Sorry, keep going. That's fine. My wife was screaming on the phone and I just imagine anybody in this kind of a situation watching their spouse going through this, you know, you can't come to it. You can't come to the person. You have to stay on the phone against the window. You can't move or you lose it.

11:30 She starts screaming, don't leave me. Please don't leave me over and over. And then she screams, where are you guys? Why is it taking so long to get here? Where are you? And then she screams, don't leave me. It ended up taking like seven minutes for them to come from the first of the call. And that seven minutes seemed like seven days, you know. So I had these two gentlemen in my room. They'd ever turned their head. They stood with their arms to the side looking straight forward, which was away from me. But you don't need to turn around because when I was up against the wall, if I were mortal, I could not see my wife, even if I turned around to look at her.

12:17 And obviously I couldn't see my daughter through the wall, in case the bedroom was just in the next room next to the wall. But I could see her in there cuddling the dog. I could see my wife on the phone screaming. I could see these guys and I could see outside daytime. Okay? This is not normal. But I said, if I have to stay, I'll stay. But I'd like to go back. Would you let me go back? Because I didn't want to leave my family without a father. Their mother was already gone. I didn't want to leave without, you know, leaving them alone. And then I didn't want to leave my new wife with 12 children by herself.

13:01 She had been single for quite a while, but she had three children and they had grown because her youngest married my oldest. They're three years apart, my daughter's older. And so her kids were out of the house. It was just my kids that were in the house. But I didn't want her to be alone with all those kids and I didn't want to leave my family. So I said, hey, I want to go back. I did not have any desire to stay there. But just imagine, I'm someone who has gone through a lot of different trials in my life. I've been paralyzed a few times. I've had a lot of broken things. I've had a lot of sicknesses that weren't that good. I'd injured things.

13:42 So I was, I'm in, you know, a constant pain really and things don't feel so good. And to be there and have no pain was just amazing. Hey, this part was great, you know, but it didn't phase me. It didn't help me want to stay there. I didn't want to stay. I wanted to come back here. And the two people standing there, they said, yes, you can go back. Now the communication is not the same as we do here with our mouths and talking. And some people call it mental telepathy. That's the only thing we can think about as mortals to try to understand it.

14:25 But you're actually more talking with your heart than your mind. It's incredible kind of a communication that you just know what they think. You just know instantly the whole thought process. And so the communication between us happened very quickly, but to rehearse it back takes time. Sure. Can I interject a couple of questions before we get further down the road? I'm so curious about these two, I think you called them men or people or. They were men. At the foot of your bed. Do you have any idea who they were? Did they have names? Were they ancestors?

15:05 At the time, I did not know who they were at all. Now my mother, when she was younger, had had a heart attack. She died, had two men and her mother come to her. And the two men were like escorts with her mother. That with other experiences, I don't need to share them all. I had some knowledge of what happens to people when they die. And so to me, they were my escorts and I didn't know who they were. I couldn't see their faces. It was just they were there. My escorts, as far as I knew, since they were the ones there and they were the ones I asked. I can tell you more later about at least one of them who he was.

15:45 Okay. I know we're going to get to, you had your heart stop more than once this night, right? Yes. Okay. This first time, did you end up staying there around your body or did you take off down a tunnel and that kind of thing? Or was that the second time around? No tunnel. Just like, just like if you were to get out of bed and walk over to the wall. I mean, it was not kind of normal, except for I kind of floated there. But I mean, it's about the same. But when they told Spencer Olson what to say in a blessing, he grabbed me with one hand, he put his hand on my head and the other hand. And then with the power of the priesthood and the name of Jesus Christ, he commands me back to my body.

16:29 So I called back in myself, which was really kind of fun, getting back in until I could tell I was completely in. I just got warm. I get a feel of the warmth coming back in my body. And then as soon as that was complete, the pain hit me like a truck crashing into me. And I screamed. And I was screaming for joy, even though it was extremely painful. To go from that bliss to this pain, that was not so fun. But that didn't take a long time. By then, the paramedics had shown up. They hauled me to the hospital. And when I got into the hospital, they were working on me for a heart attack.

17:09 It happened to be a non-survivable, extremely serious heart attack. What is funny is on the way there, I joked with the paramedics. But we get there. And about an hour and a half later, by then I had my daughter-in-law had come and my wife had been calling people. So they were there in the room. And then I went in cardiac arrest. And my nurse was very large, about 6'4", maybe 280, 300 pounds. And he jumped on, pounded on my chest, and he busted my whole rib cage, busted my sternum, crushing my chest into my heart. And then they shock-paddled me quite a bit. While I was there, I didn't watch myself this time.

17:51 I go into this empty waiting room. It seemed like it had confinement, but it also seemed endless. And there was my wife and my parents standing there, looking like they're 25-ish. So this is your first wife you're talking about? My first wife, who had died. That was killed in the car accident. Okay. She came to meet me. Her name's Carol. My wife now is Charlotte. Carol came. She was standing there in a red sweater, and a red calf, down her calf aways skirt with flowers on it. My mother was standing there with a full dress, clear down her ankles with royal blue with big white and colored flowers on it.

18:35 My dad had a dark suit, white shirt, and tie, dark tie. And they looked like their wedding picture, kind of, when they were 25, and they got married. It's interesting that after you hadn't seen them for a while, hadn't seen my dad since February of 1992, hadn't seen my mother since March of 1998. My wife since January of 1999, and this is 2004, and you might think they would say, Oh, hi, good to see you. Sure. Now they didn't do that. They just said, You've already got permission to stay. So what are you doing here? We have more to get done for the second coming that we have time for. And all you're doing is getting there away.

19:15 So would you go back and do your assignment and let us get on to do ours? Holy cow. You're just all matter of fact business, just get back and you're not staying. So you're just in our way. Now, if you're staying, this isn't what they said. But you know, if you're staying, let's get to work. But you're not. So get out of here. Now, I've got 10 more questions. The first one is, how did that make you feel? Was it a little crushing? Well, it's interesting. It just took me off guard a little bit. I didn't feel terrible. It just was something I didn't expect, but I'm a stubborn Norwegian. See, my mother is and so am I. And I thought, if you're here and I'm here, I'm going to say hello.

19:58 Yeah. So I walked over to them. They were probably 20 feet away from me. I walked over to them and I gave them hugs and I talked to them. I find out kind of what their assignments were. And the whole time they went, go on and tap in there for me. You about done, you know, get out of here. We're busy. But then the man that gave me permission in my room was standing behind them. He was back a little ways. He's in white. And I thought, no, my escort's back. What's he here for? You know, my attention went to him. I left the attention off my family and they disappeared. I don't know. I never saw him again. I'm walking back to this guy.

20:39 Now a little bit of foreign knowledge to what's going to happen next. When I was young growing up and I learned about the spirit world, I learned about how life is an eternal life of man. I thought, well, if you're an atheist and you don't believe in anything and you die and now here you are, you're still alive when you think you're dead. Isn't it kind of obvious that you were wrong? And then I thought, and then if you meet Christ and you don't believe in him and there he is, obvious here he is. But there's a problem with that. If you haven't accepted him as your savior, he's not going to let you know that because there's agency and he isn't going to mess up your agency.

21:25 He's going to have, you have to seek for him first. And so you're not going to obviously know it's who it is. And so for 25 years, I've been praying, I had been praying, how do you have agency when you get there and you see all this stuff when you didn't believe in any of it? Well, it doesn't work that way. You don't get to see everything. You don't get to know it's Christ. You don't get to know about your pre-mortal existence. You don't get to know about God in heaven if you don't have any knowledge of him or any want to know about him as a mortal. And so he was answering this prayer in a very different way than I ever expected to have it answered.

22:06 And so I start walking back to this man who's standing back there and then the Holy Ghost, which is the only way you can know Jesus as the Lord, is through the Holy Ghost, not through meeting him or everybody that met him in mortal life would know who he was. They meet him. They don't know who he is, but he says, my sheep hear my voice. Well, who are my sheep? My sheep are the ones who have opened their heart to the Holy Ghost to bear witness to them to be able to know that Jesus is the Lord. The Holy Ghost stands there and he says, that's the Savior. You know, that's Christ. Okay, whole thing changes. It's not just an escort. He's the Savior.

22:47 And so I bowed to the ground as quickly as I could get there with two challenges. One, I couldn't get there fast enough. And two, I couldn't get deeper than the floor. He had called me and asked me to come to him. And so I was easy then. I could stand up, went over to him, gave him a hug. He's a little taller than I am. I'm used to be 5'10, but I'm about 5'8 now. He's more like a 6'2". He's size and I went to, I hugged him. We parted. We're quite close together, maybe two feet, max. And I'm looking in his eyes, which I cannot describe to you what that's like.

23:28 And he very lovingly asked me a question. He says, where is your heart? He's asking me where my values are. And at that instant, my whole life, and I could comprehend my entire life in an instant. It was strange. It's like seeing a movie of your life in almost a second and you understand it all. And I thought, wow, I am not perfect. How can I stand here? Looking into the eyes of Christ and say I'm with you. So I didn't answer, even though I thought that. My whole life was that way. But in that instant, every little thing you've done seems huge.

24:12 And he didn't demand an answer. He just smiled. And we went back through time, like Scrooge, seeing his Christmas past, going back to his, you know, and seeing three-dimensional people there. I could see from the pre-mortally existence him. So I got to see the Warren Council in heaven. And then he built the world. So I got to watch the world get made. And I got to watch Adam and Eve get put in a garden. And since Jehovah is Christ in the Old Testament, I got to see him interact with all the prophets through the Old Testament. And then I got to be at his birth. And that was one unique thing that happened because I thought, there's no way I can be worthy to stand here and watch this birth of the Savior.

25:01 And I wanted to leave. I was standing not at all, maybe 25 feet away from Mary and Joseph. And there was a midwife there. And I thought, I can't watch this. And so I was going to leave. And of course, he knows my thoughts. He just reached over and gently took a hold of my arm behind my elbow. You're staying. Okay. You're the boss. So I stayed. And that happened a few times during this experience. So I got to be there and the shepherds. And of course, the wise men didn't show up then. They came almost three years later. So he was walking and talking when they were in the house when they came.

25:45 Then I got to watch him grow up. Before we move on, and I want to hear all of this detail, can I just clarify a few things to make sure I understand? So Jesus was one of the two people in white at the foot of your bed. Yes. Okay. You mentioned that Spencer was told what to say in the blessing. Yes. Was that from Jesus? Yes. Okay. I also thought it very interesting that when you met your first wife and your mother and father that they were wearing colored clothes that sound kind of like regular earthly clothes.

26:28 Yes. Kind of like your best Sunday order meeting clothes. Yes. Because some people tell me about, yes, everybody was dressed in white or something like that. So it's just kind of unusual. What do you make of that? Well, agency is the master controlling law. Everything points to agency. Even the atonement. He used his agency to volunteer to be the Savior, and we use our agency to allow that to work in our lives. And so agency is the master control of all laws. Everything we do. And so that agency cannot be thwarted.

27:12 And so you will see people dressed the way that works for you. Now I know that the people in the spirit world don't have to be wearing robes like they did in the Bible. If Christ would have been born in our day, he would have been wearing a suit, you know, or maybe a sport jacket. Who knows, you know? He would be wearing our kind of clothes and roaming around teaching people. He wouldn't necessarily be in a suit the whole time, but could be. But he'd be wearing clothes like we wear now. And so he wore robes because that was the style of the day.

27:53 And that's how people want to see him or think that he needs to be dressed. When they see things, they'll see him so they can understand what they're seeing. Now I had foreknowledge, like I told you, that people in the spirit world don't all dress in robes. And so it was no big deal to me to have them wearing normal clothes. My mother had a gift to see spirits. I myself had a gift, but not as extensive as my mother's. And so to see people in the spirit world, sell them, do you see them wearing robes? At least in my experience, in my mother's experience.

28:35 And so people are going to wear what doesn't mess up the person's agency and helps them understand who they're seeing. Even there's one example with my mother. She had an uncle who was, well, I guess he was a nephew. It was his nephew. And he had been injured in a wagon accident. And so he had a bad leg and he had to drag it. It didn't work. So he clumped, dragged, clumped, dragged, you know, kind of like, anyway. And so he comes back to see her and he's clumping, dragging his leg. And she's asked him, she says, his name was Wilford.

29:17 And she says, Wilford, why are you walking like that? Because you don't have those problems in the spirit world. He goes, oh, I'm doing this so you'd know who I was. Now you recognize who I am because this is how you know me. And so that's part of it. And so to see people dressed in clothes that are normal and even priced was not wearing a robe. He was wearing a white suit. That didn't bother me at all. I didn't even think twice about it. Thank you for that explanation. A couple other quick things before we get back to where you were. You mentioned something about accepting the Savior.

30:00 Did you learn how we do that? Is there a simple answer to that? Well, you can read it all through the New Testament. And then in Corinthians it says that no man can say Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost. In other words, you have to accept Christ as your Savior. Open your heart to Him. Open your heart to hear a spiritual communication rather than the stuff we normally hear around here. And the Holy Ghost then will speak to your mind and your heart, mostly your heart. And tell you that this is who He is. It verifies truth. Because, you know, when Christ was leaving his apostles, he says that the Father would send the Holy Ghost in His name and He will teach you all things and He will bring to your remembrance whatsoever I've said unto you.

30:53 Which those two things are very important in the writing of the New Testament itself and in the writing of my book. So He teaches you truth. And He is the testifier. He testifies of the living God and the living Christ and that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God. And that's the only way you know it. Mortal communication is not strong enough. It is not complete enough. That's how you know who it is. And so when I had already known that before all this happened and everything I saw, I already knew was real, I already knew was true.

31:35 I think if I hadn't known it, I wouldn't have seen it. But because I already knew about a pre-mortal, I already knew about Him making the earth, I already knew Jehovah and Jesus were the same person, I already knew the Holy Ghost had to bear witness to you. I saw, I knew a lot of things already. And all this did is give me more detail and just verify stronger. Well, I'm really not stronger. It's more detail because my testimony didn't get stronger. I already knew Christ was Christ and I don't know Him anymore. I just got to know Him more personal. I got to know more details. So that's part of the reason why it came to me that way because I was not a novice in spiritual things.

32:17 And the other thing, I'm trying to in my own mind envision everything that you were experiencing there. I'm trying to make like a movie out of it, and you mentioned that you were able to look into Jesus' eyes. He was a little taller than you. He was around six, two, you thought. Is there anything else you can explain about what He looked like? Oh, I can tell you some things, but there are some things I'm not allowed to tell you. Perhaps in one idea of the last question asked me, he says, you should have a broken heart and a contrite spirit. In other words, you have to be humble and receptive to the Lord.

32:58 When you first see Him and know that's who it is, it was interesting that when I saw Him before I knew who it was, I thought, well, just a guy standing there, you know, and it didn't, I didn't get too excited about it except for, okay, my escort's here. Then when I was told who it was, it suddenly all changed. And then you see Him different. And then it's a little bit like maybe like Mary and the tomb, because He comes to her and He says, you know, what's your problem? Why are you crying? And she goes, well, they took Him away. Just tell me where He is. And she didn't recognize Him, though she was extremely familiar with Him.

33:41 But then He made one word statement and He said, Mary. But now here's the difference. When He said Mary, He said it in a way that she would recognize His demeanor, His voice, Him as a person. When He said the other things, He was saying it more of a maybe like the resurrected Lord. So she didn't recognize it. When I was looking at Him, He was just normal. But then when I was told who He is, now I see Him as the Lord in a way I recognize through the whisperings of the Holy Ghost. And so then it became a whole new world.

34:24 I was looking in His eyes and nothing else mattered. How tall He was or what He was wearing, what His face looked like, nothing mattered. All that mattered was His eyes. And they are just so expansive and eternal and loving and accepting. It's incredible to look into His eyes because I got to see Him through His entire life and as immortal for quite a long time, immortal, I should say, mortal and immortal. I got to know what He looked like in a different way than when you normally see Him for a short time.

35:04 If you see Him for a short time, nothing else seems to make any difference but His eyes and the spirit around Him and the love you feel from Him. But when I got to have a conversation with Him and have Him show me different things, I got to see things beyond just His life that you read in the scriptures. And when you get this kind of a time with Him, it's like being with your friend. You have time to have a conversation. You may not talk about what you had for breakfast, but you have a normal kind of a conversation dealing with the atmosphere that you're in. And so I got to know what He looks like and I'm not allowed to tell anyone specifically what He looks like.

35:48 Well, thank you for filling in those blanks. Before I got us off on a tangent, you were talking about you got to see His birth. You got to see Him as a youth growing up. Go ahead and pick it back up there. Sorry to interrupt, but this interview is long enough. We need to split it into two episodes. We're not even halfway through and it just gets better. Part two will be released later this week. And to be notified as soon as it's live, be sure to follow or subscribe to this podcast. In the meantime, please share it with a friend. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.