Engineer Dies in Fire, Fights Demons, and Meets Jesus: Karl Falken's NDE

The Furnace That Wouldn't Stay Lit

Karl Falken was an engineer, a problem solver, a Christian father of two living in East Texas in the winter of 1995. He was also unemployed, broke, and trying to keep an ancient furnace running without money for parts. The pilot light kept going out. Each time it failed, the furnace would pump natural gas into the house instead of heat. Karl would shut everything down, ventilate, relight the pilot, watch it carefully, then go back to bed. He'd lost count of how many times he'd done this.

It was about 3:00 a.m. when the furnace failed again. Karl was exhausted, probably groggy from gas exposure. He felt his way down the dark hallway and opened the furnace cabinet. A thought came to him: if he just threw a match in there, it would light. He wouldn't have to go through the whole tedious safety procedure again.

Karl describes what happened next: "I struck the match and I threw it into the furnace. The natural gas blew up in my face, actually threw me across the hallway."

He went to the bathroom and turned on the light. The damage was catastrophic. His eyebrows were completely gone. The hair around his face was singed. Everything was red. His right hand was red all the way to the elbow, and the skin here, between his thumb and forefinger, was charred black, third-degree burns. The pain was horrible.

But that was just the beginning.

Three Days of Dying

Karl had no money for a doctor, no money for burn cream or pain medication. He soaked his hand in cold water and took antihistamines. The burns got worse. Rust from the old furnace burners had been blasted into his eyes by the explosion, causing an infection. His eyes filled with pus. He couldn't see. The flames had gone down his throat into his lungs. His throat became infected, so painful he couldn't eat, couldn't drink, couldn't even swallow his own saliva.

He moved to the couch in the living room so his thrashing wouldn't disturb his wife and children. The couch was too short for his six-foot-four frame, so he propped himself up on the arm and tried to sleep sitting upright. This actually kept him alive a little longer. He'd developed pneumonia. Fluid was collecting in his lungs. As long as he stayed upright, the fluid stayed at the bottom of his lungs and he could still breathe.

On the third night, desperate for sleep, he pulled the cushions off the couch and laid them on the floor. He lay down flat.

Karl explains what happened: "When I did that, the fluid which had been down in my lungs now came up and I found I couldn't breathe. I couldn't even talk. In fact, I couldn't even move. I was just nailed to the floor and unable to breathe."

He had five or six minutes before he'd lose consciousness. Another five or six minutes before brain death. The lights were off. Everyone was asleep. He couldn't call for help. He couldn't help himself.

He began to pray. He'd been a Christian for 17 years. He taught Bible classes. He knew how to pray. He prayed really good prayers. Nothing happened. His mind began to shut down. He began to hear ringing in his ears. Karl remembers: "I enjoyed swimming underwater so I knew that that was a sign of oxygen deprivation and I knew I'd only had a little time left."

As his brain shut down, he thought of one last word: "Help." Behind it he put the intention that he would accept help from God on any terms.

The instant he prayed that prayer, everything changed.

Standing Over His Own Body

The pain disappeared. All of it. Not just the burn pain, but the chronic low-grade back pain from his scoliosis. The hunger and thirst vanished. He stood up in the dark room and looked around, amazed. The room appeared brightly lit, but there were no shadows. He could see in the dark. He could smell things he'd never smelled before: the paint on the wall, the paper in the books, the fabric on the couch. His hearing was incredible. He could hear trucks on the street five blocks away.

He looked out the window at his neighbor's yard across the street. He could see individual blades of grass. He could see the granules of dirt between the blades of grass. Across the street. At midnight. In the dark.

"Praise the Lord," he thought. "I'm healed."

Then he looked down: "I saw my body on the floor and I said I'm not healed, I'm dead. This is not good."

As an engineer, Karl was a problem solver. He'd read about near-death experiences before. People who died and came back. He needed to come back. He needed help. He walked to his daughter Alex's bedroom to wake her up. When he tried to grab the door handle, his hand went right through it. He walked through the door. The sensation was strange: "As I passed through the door, it felt like I was passing through a falling stream of cool sand."

He tried to wake Alex. She couldn't hear him. His hand went right through her shoulder. He tried his son's room. Same result. Time was passing. He had to do this himself. He went back to the living room and crouched by his body, trying to figure out where the damage was and what he could do about it.

That's when he felt it.

The Demons Come

Karl describes the sensation: "I had this sensation of evil. If you watch like a horror movie, the mood of the movie will be set by the tempo of the music and it'll be in the dark so your main character is in the dark somewhere and you think something evil's about to jump out of the dark at him and the hair on the back of your neck starts to go up. Well that is the kind of evil premonition I had right there."

He stood up to face whatever was coming at him through the southwest corner of the living room. Then, through the wall, walked two creatures.

They were about man-sized but not human. They were covered in short black fur. They had talons on all 20 digits, fingers and toes. No genitalia. Pointed ears. Their eyes were solid yellow. They opened their mouths, laughing, and Karl could see short white fangs, upper and lower, and bright red tongues. They looked very muscular but also very underfed, like they'd been worked very hard but not properly nourished.

They were carrying manacles in their hands. Big, heavy manacles made of gray metal.

They communicated telepathically. Not just thoughts but images, emotions, feelings, a whole spectrum of information in the blink of an eye. They showed Karl hell: "It was awful, it was horrible, it was chaotic, it was incredible suffering just beyond language to describe. And you're at the mercy of these creatures which hate you with an absolute passion."

They explained that they were here to take his soul. They considered him not as a human being with thoughts and emotions and purpose but simply as food and fuel. He was their prey. They had him. Through tormenting the human soul, they extracted whatever energy they considered food or fuel. They had no reason to hold back on any torment.

Karl protested. He was a Christian. He was baptized. He confessed Christ as his savior. He was born again. He went to church. He gave tithes. All the things the church had taught him were criteria for salvation.

The demons laughed. They said they'd been with him his entire life, trying to kill him since birth. They had him because he had sinned and had not dealt with his sins. Then they rattled off an enormous list of sins he'd never properly dealt with. Things the church had taught him were inconsequential. Being cross with a cashier at the supermarket. Breaking a rental contract even though his roommate had verbally let him out. Little things he'd stolen that he thought didn't matter.

They were almost on him. He didn't want to go to hell. He reviewed his entire life in a fraction of a second, looking for something, some way to get out of this. Then he remembered something a fellow named Dave from the Jesus People had told him years ago: "If you ever meet a demon, rebuke it in the name of Jesus Christ."

The demons were in his face when he said it: "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ. And it was like a wrecking ball hit them and they were thrown right out of the room, out of the house, and I didn't see them anymore."

Karl was back in his living room, looking down at his dead body, thinking he really needed to get his body going now because he was lost. He wasn't going to heaven. He didn't want to go to hell. He didn't want to wander around as a disembodied spirit until Judgment Day.

He knelt by his body and began examining it, trying to figure out where to start. Then he felt another sensation approaching. This time from the southeast corner. But this time it wasn't evil.

Jesus Walks Through the Door

Karl describes the presence: "This time it was good, incredible purity, love, holiness, something really wonderful was approaching my house."

Then right through the front door walked Jesus Christ.

The first thing Jesus communicated was that his appearance was not his real appearance. He was appearing to Karl as Karl would expect to see him so Karl would recognize him. He appeared as a man a little more than average height, maybe five-foot-ten. He had long dark brown hair, shoulder length. He was dressed in a white tunic with a blue robe thrown over one shoulder. He wore brown leather sandals. His hands were empty.

Jesus was aware that the demons had been there and had accused Karl of all those sins. He said something that meant everything to Karl: "He knew everything about me and he still loved me unconditionally. And that was really what I needed to hear right then."

But Jesus was also disappointed in Karl. Karl had had so much purpose in this life and had accomplished none of it. Because Karl had invoked Jesus's name, that was sufficient for him to go to heaven at that point. But he had accomplished nothing of any merit in this life. He would go to heaven as the least of saints, with no rank, no reward, just eternal life.

Karl was shocked. He'd been a model church member. He'd done everything they'd told him to do. Jesus didn't explain why Karl had not met the criteria, but Karl later figured it out: wrong motives. What you do is not as important as why you do it. Karl had done everything out of duty, to get out of hell and into heaven and get a reward. He didn't love God. He didn't love his fellow man. He even had a hard time loving himself.

The Choice to Return

Jesus explained that there was another option: "If you don't come back to this life, your children aren't going to make it. They're going to go to hell. I can resurrect your body and put you back into this life so you can raise your children right."

But two things were critical. First, Karl couldn't pull that verse again, invoking Jesus's name to get out of hell and get saved. Jesus wasn't going to accept that a second time. The stakes were clear: "If I go back to this life and I fail to get it right the second time, I could still go to hell."

That was a tough question. Karl was terrified of hell. He wasn't thrilled about going to heaven as the least of saints. But two things decided it for him: he loved his children and wouldn't want his worst enemy to go to hell, and he could tell that this is what Jesus wanted. He knew enough at that point that whatever God wants is what you really need to be doing.

He agreed to come back.

The Vision of the Nile

Jesus explained that when God the Father had made Karl's spirit, he'd put the gift of healing in him even before he was born. Every Christian should be able to minister healing. Jesus asked Karl if he wanted to heal his own body. Of course Karl wanted that. Yes, yes, immediately.

As soon as Karl agreed, the whole scenario changed. Karl found himself standing with Jesus on the bank of a very broad, flat, muddy river. There were papyrus reeds growing along the banks. Karl presumed this was supposed to be the Nile. He saw a woman working in a nearby field and a man fishing on the river, short, dark people with almost jet-black hair wearing ancient-style clothing like the ancient Egyptians.

There was a bundle of papyrus reeds, some tools, and some lumber staged on the bank. Jesus told Karl to build a reed boat. An image appeared in Karl's mind of a canoe-shaped papyrus boat. Everything went together incredibly fast and easy. Within moments Karl had the boat built. He pushed it into the water. Jesus stepped in first, then Karl stepped in and pushed off from the bank.

Jesus pointed down the river. A little ways down was a long, low island, just a foot or so higher than the water level, with some rocks and small bushes and trees. What was remarkable about the island was that superimposed on it was an image of Karl's prone body lying there, like the old Invisible Man movies. The skin was transparent. You could see through to the skeleton and the muscles and the organs.

The organs that had been damaged in the explosion were different colors. The eyes were like a sooty black charcoal color. The throat was bright red. The lungs were mottled green. The hand was reddish, and where it was badly burned it was dark brown and even whitish.

Jesus told Karl to reach out and touch the damaged organs as they passed. As Karl touched them, they would be healed. They were moving a little faster than Karl could respond to, and they passed the head and eyes before Karl understood what was expected. Then he reached out and touched the throat. The experience was strange: "My hand went into the body and touched the throat. This body was huge, like 20 feet high from the back to the top of the chest and must have been 100 yards or more long. But even though I was my normal size, as I reached out it almost like my arm extended past me and into the body like it could stretch like rubber."

As Karl touched the throat, the red color disappeared and became clear. As they passed the lungs, he touched them and they became clear. The hand became clear. They got to the foot of the island and Karl realized he'd have to turn around and go upstream to heal the eyes.

Then the vision was interrupted.

The Demons Return

Karl found himself back in his living room with Jesus, standing and looking down at his body. What was going on? Why was the vision interrupted before he could heal the eyes?

Then Karl felt that evil presence again. The two demons came right back through the same wall they'd entered before, carrying the manacles. Only this time they weren't laughing, weren't talking, weren't communicating. They were just charging right at him.

Jesus was standing right to Karl's left. Karl's first thought was: "You guys aren't going to get very far because Jesus is right here and he's going to protect me. But he didn't say a word and he didn't make a move and they kept on coming."

Karl realized Jesus was not going to intervene. He had to do something. The only thing he could think of in that tiny fraction of a moment was to do exactly what he did before. He rebuked them: "I rebuke you in the name of Jesus Christ." They were knocked out of the room and he didn't see them again.

Karl was shocked. The demons were not at all afraid of attacking him with Jesus right there. It took Karl almost 20 years to figure out why Jesus didn't protect him. The answer goes back to the charter of the church. When Christ sent out his disciples, he gave them five missions: heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, cleanse lepers, and preach the gospel. Christ delegated those missions to the church, to Christians. Casting out demons is the Christian's responsibility, not Jesus's. Anything in those five missions, Jesus expects us to do in his authority and his power. That's why he left it up to Karl to rebuke the demons. The demons knew that. They knew Jesus would not interfere even if Karl's very soul was in danger because that is authority and power Jesus has given to us to exercise.

As soon as the demons were gone, the vision resumed. Karl found himself back in the papyrus boat at the foot of the island. He pulled the boat back up to the head, reached out, touched the eyes. They became clear. The vision stopped. Karl was back in the living room. Jesus was in the foyer, about to leave. He said: "It's time for you to go back in your body."

The Ultimate Question

It was right then that Karl remembered his list. Back in 1978, when Karl gave his life to Jesus Christ, he'd read a book called "Caught Up Into Paradise" by Dr. Richard Eby. In the book, God offered to answer any question Dr. Eby asked. Karl had thought the questions Dr. Eby asked were so basic that even as a new Christian, Karl could have answered them himself. Karl said to himself, "If I ever had a chance like that, I would want to do a lot better." Not knowing he'd ever have the chance, he created a list of questions he thought would have been more appropriate to ask.

Now here he was, standing in front of Jesus Christ. Jesus had just saved him from hell, showed him how to heal his body, and was about to resurrect him. Jesus didn't owe Karl anything. Karl couldn't frame the question: "Please answer my questions." Christ was awesome, incredible, and terrible, truly terrifying. Karl could sense in his power that with a thought, Jesus could annihilate him in an instant. Karl couldn't ask the question. He thought he'd just go back to life and figure it out himself.

But Jesus knows our every thought. Jesus said: "Carl, would you like the answers to my list of questions?"

Karl had no idea what Jesus's list of questions was. The only thing he could think was that whatever Jesus's list of questions was, it had to be better than his own. As desperately as Karl wanted his list of questions answered, he said, "Lord, I do want to know the answers to your list of questions."

Jesus said: "Carl, my list of questions is all questions, but your mind is too small to comprehend that. So in order for you to comprehend my list of questions, the answers to all questions, you'll have to become one with me and share my mind."

Karl thought: What would that do to me? Would it wipe out my personality? But he also felt Jesus's love. He believed Jesus loved him, wanted the best for him, wouldn't do anything bad. This was going to be something very good. He said yes.

Becoming One with God

The instant Karl said yes, it felt like his being was just sucked into Jesus, into his personality. The whole scenario in the house completely disappeared. The next thing Karl knew, he was one with not just Jesus but Jesus and God the Father.

Karl tries to explain: "Words just don't really explain what that's like. The first thing I realized was my whole personality was still intact. I had all my memories, I had all my personalities, I had my thoughts, my feelings, my emotions, just like Carl. But I also was Jesus and I was also God the Father."

The Holy Spirit wasn't there. Karl later figured out that the Holy Spirit is here on Earth because when Jesus went to heaven, the Holy Spirit came here.

Karl felt like he'd been here before. This seemed like a natural state, a natural environment for him. He didn't have memories of it, but it just felt so right, so normal. He realized he was a piece of God. To create Karl, God had taken a piece of himself and separated it out.

Karl was aware of everything God was aware of. For a glimpse, he saw everything God was seeing, experienced everything God was doing, all his thoughts. He saw the scope of everything God is engaged in. It's amazingly vast, infinite. But the mind of God is also infinite, so infinity is not a difficult concept for God.

Karl saw an infinite creation. He saw a celestial city. He understood that there are other worlds with life on them, people and other creatures. Earth is very central to God's plan even though we're just on a little M-class planet in the Milky Way galaxy. What's happening here is probably the most important thing.

After that glimpse of the overall scope of things, a wall came down around what they were doing. It shut off everything but one subject: the history of mankind. Karl got to see the history of mankind from the creation of the world, the creation of Adam and Eve, all the way to the very end when the earth and the universe as we know it is destroyed by fire, and everything in between.

Jesus said they were going to look at every question by looking at the life of an individual and each time they make a decision, what would be the consequences of that decision. A person can make multiple decisions at any given point, so they would look at each possible permutation of those decisions. If they turn right, what happens? If they go left, what happens?

They randomly picked out one person's life and looked at each decision they made and the possible outcomes. Karl quickly realized that when God creates a person, he also creates their possible history. It's an infinite number of different possibilities, but it's all bounded. They can only go so far this way and only so far that way, so far good, so far evil. They can only live so long, have so many spouses and children, create so many inventions. It's carefully bounded. No person's life is ever going to get to a point where it's out of God's control.

Then they looked at two people's lives and saw how they interacted, how their decisions would affect each other. The first case was an infinite number of permutations. When they interacted two infinite numbers of permutations, that's an infinity times an infinity. For God, it was like multiplying two times two.

They looked at how a family would interact, then a small community, then a municipality, then a county, then a state, then a nation, then how an Empire would interact with the rest of the world. The whole exercise was subjectively many lifetimes worth of information but took about five minutes.

The Timeline of Human History

While Jesus was showing Karl these individual lives, he was also showing him a timeline of human history. It was a graphical image where each person's life was represented by a thread. The thread had different colors. While the person was alive, if they were living a righteous life, the thread would be white. If they were sinning, it would turn dark. If it was a mild sin, it would be beige. As the sin got worse, it would turn brownish, then dark brown, then black.

When a person died, the thread would turn one of two colors: gold if they went to heaven, red if they went to hell.

The threads were organized in bundles. An individual's life was a thread. If it was a family, those threads would be twisted together. Communities would be bundled together, then municipalities, then counties, then states, then nations, then empires. The empires were the biggest, thickest bundles.

These bundles would separate but sometimes come together again when nations formed alliances or went to war or moved geographically. Where they came together, there would be a special thickening Karl called a node. At those nodes, history was very malleable. A few individuals or groups of people who understood the principles of divine order in history could make tremendous impact on history, change history radically with very little effort.

Karl recognized where he was in the timeline: 1995. The next major node was 1998. A lot of the tech giants got formed around that time and now have tremendous influence on our lives. Karl saw other nodes coming up in the future. He thinks we're at one of those points currently, a very big one.

The most important thing Karl saw in that timeline was at the end of time. The bundles of threads divided into two bundles. One was the gold threads that went to heaven. The other bundle was the red threads that went to hell.

Karl had worked as a machinist. He had what he called a calibrated eyeball. He could look at a physical object and measure it to within one part in a thousand quite accurately. Measuring those bundles, he could say quite confidently: "2.5%, plus or minus a tenth of a percent, of the general population go to heaven. And the other 97.5% go to hell."

When Karl made that realization, Jesus interjected: "I'm very disappointed about this. I died so that everyone could go to heaven. Nobody needs to go to hell. I gave the church everything they needed to win the entire world to salvation from the generation of the Apostles till now, and they have all failed horribly."

The 2.5% is really God's remnant, the remnant God keeps for himself. That tells you the church is failing almost 100%. About a third of the general population are professing Christians. If you do the math, that means only 8% of professing Christians are actually saved. If you're in a congregation of 100 people, on average only eight of those people are actually going to go to heaven.

Karl was absolutely shocked.

The Answer

They went through the exercise a third time. Jesus said, "Carl, let's try this from a different perspective." They picked another random individual and started with their life, looking at the whole of human history from beginning to end, not only every person who had ever lived historically but everyone who could have lived as well. An infinity times an infinity times an infinity times an infinity. Child's play for God. Again, subjectively five minutes.

Karl came away thrilled and amazed and astonished, amassing an incredible amount of information. He saw the details of everybody's life, everything. He thought this was going to be very useful. There was a pause. Jesus was waiting for a reaction. Karl didn't give it.

Jesus said: "Carl, let's look at this a third time." There was a tone in his voice or thought that told Karl this was getting serious. Karl made a check on himself. Wait a minute, this is not for my entertainment. There's a purpose to this and I'm missing it. Karl knew that when God offers something three times, the third time is the last time. He was not going to miss that. He paid very close attention.

Karl was watching the color of the threads and watching as people's lives were played out in front of him. He saw as they did things, the threads would change color. He realized the thread was changing color depending on their motivation. That was what he'd really been meant to see all the time.

When the threads were white, their motive was selfless love. Any time they had any other motive, the thread would change to another color. The people who learned the lesson of selfless love and lived it up until the end, who maintained their Christian walk right up to the moment of death and even in some cases afterwards, their threads turned gold.

As soon as Karl came to that realization, Jesus stopped the exercise. Jesus said: "Carl, that's what you need to learn. That's the answer to every question that really matters. What does this have to do with selfless love?"

That is the ultimate question. If you can answer that question, you know the right decision to make. It won't solve your calculus problems, but if you have to make a decision and you have a choice between selfless love and something else, the only right answer is selfless love. That has to be the motive for everything you do. That is why God created. It's so important that that's why God not only created the earth and its solar system but the entire universe. That should tell you how critical that lesson is.

The Return

Karl felt himself begin to separate from Jesus. They were coming back to this life. As they did, Karl could feel his consciousness shrinking, his mind coming back to its current state. This incredible flood of information began gushing out of him. He could feel all this information leaving.

Karl thought: "Oh no, that's really valuable. As an engineer, I understand the value of good information. This is all truth, this is all facts, this is all absolutely perfect information and it was extremely well organized. Christ's ability to handle information is amazing. He's not only the consummate teacher but the consummate archivist."

All this information was gushing out and Karl was trying to grab onto it and hold onto as much as he could. The thought came from Christ, gentle but very firm: "Carl, you don't need that. That's not for you to keep. Let it go. You can't even retain it."

The next thing Karl knew, he was standing back in his house. Christ was there with him. Karl was looking over to the living room at his body on the floor. It was about time to go. Christ didn't have anything more to say.

Karl was thinking: Wait a minute, I'm coming back to this life, I've got to raise my children right, how do I do that, how do I get it right? Before he could even frame the thought, he felt himself sucked back into his body.

The next thing he knew, it was dark again. He opened his eyes. They were still full of pus but he didn't feel the pain from the burn. He got up in the dark, felt his way to the bathroom, flipped on the light, turned on the water by touch, started splashing water in his face. He rinsed his eyes out, got a towel, dried off, opened his eyes. He could see. The pus didn't come back.

He looked at his hand. It was almost completely healed. There was just one fairly nasty burn still here, but all the other burns were gone. His face was normal color again. His eyebrows were still gone and his hair was still singed, but the pain was gone in his throat, in his nose. He could breathe normally.

He was healed.

He looked at his wet face in the mirror with his hair all messed up. "It's so good to be alive. Oh, I'm so glad to be back."

Then he realized he was thirsty, hungry. He looked at the clock: five minutes after midnight. He'd died about midnight, about six minutes after. It probably took him about a minute to get to the bathroom and rinse his face off and get to the kitchen. That whole experience, chronologically, five minutes maximum.

He started fixing a big breakfast, turned on all the lights, cooked his favorite breakfast: scrambled eggs and bacon and English muffins. His wife stepped into the doorway of the kitchen. She looked at him.

"Carl, what are you doing?"

"I'm healed. I died and God resurrected me and he healed me and I'm well, I'm healed, I can eat again and I'm hungry so I made my breakfast."

She shook her head. "I'm going back to sleep. Stop making so much noise." She went back to bed.

That was the first time Karl's testimony got rejected. It was far from the last time.

What This Means for All of Us

Karl Falken's experience is one of the most detailed and theologically rich near-death accounts I've encountered in more than 5,000 cases. What makes it especially significant is not just the vividness of the encounter with Jesus or the terrifying confrontation with demons, but the profound teaching Karl received about the nature of salvation, the purpose of human history, and the single question that determines everything.

The ultimate question is this: What does this have to do with selfless love?

Karl saw the entire timeline of human history represented as colored threads. When a person's motive was selfless love, the thread was white. Any other motive, the thread darkened. At death, the threads turned either gold (heaven) or red (hell). What Karl discovered is that only about 2.5% of the general population goes to heaven, and even among professing Christians, only about 8% are actually saved. The rest are doing things out of duty, fear, obligation, or self-interest, not out of genuine selfless love.

This is not a message of despair. It's a message of clarity. Karl was shown that Jesus died so everyone could go to heaven. Nobody needs to go to hell. The church has been given everything needed to win the entire world to salvation. The failure is not in God's provision but in our understanding of what salvation actually requires: not ritual, not membership, not even good works done from the wrong motive, but a life lived from the motive of selfless, unconditional love.

Karl also learned something critical about spiritual authority. When the demons attacked him the second time, Jesus was standing right there and did nothing. Karl had to rebuke them himself. This is because Jesus has delegated certain responsibilities to the church: heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out demons, cleanse lepers, preach the gospel. God will not do for us what he has given us the authority and power to do for ourselves. Millions of Christians have been lost because they didn't know what they were supposed to do at the critical moment.

After his return, Karl discovered that the vision Jesus used to teach him how to heal his body had activated the gift of healing in him. For about 18 months, the Lord could heal anyone of anything instantaneously through Karl just by laying on of hands and praying. To this day, that gift is still active, though it's been compromised in different ways. Karl learned he has to use this gift on a daily basis or it starts to atrophy. He ministers healing to others not just to help them but to maintain the gift.

Karl also discovered he could sense when he was in the presence of someone else who'd had a near-death experience or something equally profound. He would go to them and say, "You have a story to tell." At first they'd be reluctant, but when he told them he'd had one too, they would open up. He heard amazing stories: a woman who'd died twice, been to hell the first time and heaven the second; a man who'd been shot in the head and woke up in the morgue behind a nurse. Based on his informal polling over about 18 months, Karl estimates that more than 1%, maybe as high as 2%, of the general population have had this kind of experience. That's millions of people.

What Karl's experience reveals is that we are not here by accident. Human history is not random. God has created roles that people fill through their choices. Everything has purpose, everything has meaning, and it all happens according to a pre-ordained pattern. The ultimate purpose of all creation is to give glory to God, and the lesson we are here to learn is selfless love.

This is the most important thing any of us can know. Not information, not theology, not ritual, but love. Pure, selfless, unconditional love. That is the answer to the ultimate question. That is the thread that turns gold. That is what determines where we spend eternity.

Karl Falken died for five minutes in 1995 and came back with a message that could save millions. The question now is whether we'll listen.

You can learn more about Karl Falken and his ongoing ministry of healing and deliverance. His story has also been featured in another interview where he shares additional details about his encounter with demons and Jesus.