Each year, millions of people worldwide report what has commonly become known as Near-Death Experiences, or NDEs. Add Illinois Senator Mark Kirk to that growing list of people who claim to have had an otherworldly experience with what they can only describe as angels.
For Mark Kirk, there was no white light, no tunnel.
What Illinois’ junior U.S. senator experienced was three angels standing at the foot of his bed.
“You want to come with us?” Kirk was asked.
“No,” he told them. “I’ll hold off.”
The Highland Park Republican, who plans to return to the Senate when Congress convenes Thursday, recounted the story in his first in-depth interview since he suffered a massive stroke nearly a year ago.
Awakening from what he says might have been a dream, a side effect of medication or a near-death experience, Kirk found himself lying in a hospital bed in Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, hooked up to monitors and tubes.
He had no way of immediately knowing what had transpired in the days after he suffered an ischemic stroke on Jan. 21, 2012; that doctors had put him in a coma and performed several surgeries, temporarily removing a 4-by-8 inch portion of skull to allow his brain to swell and heal.
What Kirk did know was how close he had been to death.
“A thing goes off in your head that this is the end,” he remembered.
Kirk’s life and outlook would be dramatically changed, the stroke serving as a defining moment that he said deepened his faith and altered his sense of purpose.
Sitting at the dining room table of his suburban townhouse, his left arm slack, Kirk gestures emphatically with his right hand as he says the experience made him resolve “to never, ever give up.”
He is determined “to just keep going, even when things feel like we’re at the end here. Which is what the ICU was like for me.”
What do you think? Did Senator Kirk actually have a visitation by three angels as he lay semi-concious in his hospital bed? Or could this have been merely a hallucination created by his brain due to the drugs he was being administered? Or perhaps it was a combination of both? Maybe our brain isn’t a transmitter, but rather a receiver, and when certain factors affect our brain function, we are actually able to perceive things that normally we would not?
Have you ever had a Near Death Experience of your own? If so, please feel free to share your experience here.
READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE: Senator Kirk speaks for the first time about his stroke