Ivan Comments

NDEs (Near Death Experiences) are now comparatively well known as a phenomenon but were not so when I began my interviewing/researching more than 50 years ago. I believe my book ‘Living Beyond’ provides the clearest and most accurate Christian explanation of the phenomenon, confirmed by NDErs themselves, and is packed full of accounts. However, I will only record two testimonies here on what has become a huge number of written and researched accounts.

Rhoda Fryer, a teacher who died during childbirth in St Joseph’s Hospital, Mowbray, Cape Town, South Africa.

I found myself looking down from a vantage point above my body on the operating table and saw the nuns busily working on my body. One was monitoring my heart, another the baby’s heart, and they were very concerned that they were not hearing heartbeats.

My consciousness floated down the corridor and somehow allowed me to see and hear the surgeon and the doctor in the scrub room.

I saw them scrubbing up and imagine my surprise when I heard them discussing fishing they had enjoyed together. I was outraged! Instinctively, I knew time was critical for me to be revived back to my body, yet they seemed to be quite unconcerned!

The next morning, I woke up to find both surgeon and doctor standing by my bed. I sat up and demanded to know why they had been discussing their fishing trip when I was in a critical state on the operating table?

They were dumbfounded.

“You couldn’t possibly have heard us. We were in another room down the passage! We were fully aware of the urgency and did not delay,” the surgeon said.

“I saw you,” I said. “You were laughing and joking: meanwhile I was dying!”

I described how one had removed his wristwatch and wedding ring and placed them on a glass shelf above where they were cleaning their hands. This tiny observation convinced them I had been watching them as well as listening.

            Rhoda’s testimony shows that:

1. God has made it that consciousness survives death.
2. God has designed it that death involves the release of a person’s spirit into the afterlife. Any pain ceases immediately. The spirit is fully conscious on leaving the body and often observes things happening on earth before departing.
3. God has designed it that revival from death involves the return of the spirit to the body. This overall process is nowadays called a near death experience or NDE.
4. God has set up a series of possible and varied stages that link this world with the next. The spirit leaving the body is simply the first of these possible stages. (Borrow “Living Beyond” by Ivan Rudolph from your local library if you want to know much more).

John, the Rudolphs’ Malawian Christian African gardener at St Andrews Secondary School in Blantyre.

John watched a video Ivan had prepared of NDE interviews in Malawi that was shown in a shop window in Blantyre as part of a Christian outreach. He told me (Ivan) in great and unusual excitement, about his own NDE some years previously when he died of a heart attack and was then revived. His use of the English language was limited and he used his hands a lot to illustrate what he said, which went something like this:

“Me I go to the garden of God. Much beautiful, not like this one,” he waved with his right arm in a sweep over our garden.

I found this comment funny. After all, our garden was his responsibility to keep it nice, but I hid my mirth.

“Water in God’s garden come up like this one; falling down like this one.” He used his hands to show water shooting upwards, and then his fingers to show it showering down. I supposed he was describing large fountains, which he may well never have seen on earth.

 “Grass green, much green. Much flowers. Much beautiful.”

John remained our happy gardener for the years we were in Malawi. And he never got the garden as beautiful as he had seen in Paradise, but did take good care of it nonetheless.

It is strange how all the Africans I have spoken to knew that at death your spirit leaves your body, and so do the Australian Aborigines – and my readings suggest tribal people everywhere appear to know this. How ignorant they must consider modern Europeans to be, most of whom do not know this fundamental fact about human existence and death.

            John’s testimony shows that:

1. God’s design is for the human spirit to separate from the corpse at death. That spirit then moves into the afterlife, leaving the physical body behind.
2. God has created a number of destinations for spirits entering the afterlife. A common venue is Paradise – basically a stunning rural idyll and beautiful garden.
3. God’s provision of NDE experiences are neither culturally nor religiously determined. There are NDE descriptions from all corners of the world, even in a small African nation such as Malawi.