Man Died After Car Crash. Here’s What He Saw.
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 16 minutes
Words per Minute
161.25616
Summary
Ed Joza's life changed forever when he was in a head-on collision with a tractor-trailer on May 30th, 2017. In this episode, Ed shares the story of God's intervention in his life and how it changed his life forever.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
If you told me that I had to live another 100 years at the peak of that pain, or I could take
00:00:06.480
one second without God, I would choose the 100 years of pain, and I wouldn't even think twice
00:00:15.780
about it, because one second without God is an unimaginable torture.
00:00:22.140
You know, my friends, today we need examples of God's intervention in life, because for
00:00:41.300
It seems like God is up there, and is He really hearing me?
00:00:47.280
And so sometimes He gives to certain people a very powerful experience of His presence
00:00:53.840
and lets them know what the real score is so they can share that.
00:01:01.060
In Amos 3, verse 7, He says, God doesn't act unless He lets His prophets know.
00:01:09.420
And there are men and women who are called to give their testimonies of their experience
00:01:15.760
with God, and sometimes those experiences come at a great price.
00:01:24.080
Our next guest is someone who is already living as a Catholic, and then he got into an accident
00:01:32.180
that should, by all rights, have cost him his life.
00:01:35.920
And boy, did he get a glimpse of the heavenly realities.
00:01:41.600
Stay tuned to this episode of The John Henry Weston Show with Ed Joza.
00:01:45.760
Dear LifeSite family, Lent is a time of reflection and renewal, a time to examine one's own
00:01:52.720
conscience and ask the question, are we each doing enough in how we stand for life and
00:01:59.140
Every day, LifeSite News stands for the truth and shares it with millions of people worldwide.
00:02:04.940
When others closed their eyes, we kept ours open.
00:02:07.820
When others deceived themselves, we prayerfully sought the truth.
00:02:13.040
When others were intimidated into silence, we spoke out boldly.
00:02:21.940
We are in the middle of our spring fundraising campaign, and I humbly ask that you please
00:02:27.940
consider including LifeSite News in your Lenten financial almsgiving.
00:02:32.080
It is your support which makes the continuation of LifeSite News' mission possible.
00:02:47.300
Let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross.
00:02:50.600
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
00:02:55.900
So, Ed, your book, The Mystic Next Door, recounts your story, and anybody, by the way, can go
00:03:07.200
get the book for free, if you're in the United States, at mysticnextdoor.org.
00:03:14.380
This is so fascinating, I think people will be enthralled.
00:03:20.000
You know, the day of that accident, if you would have asked me, are you going to heaven?
00:03:32.380
I go to church most of the time, unless something really important is happening.
00:03:37.240
And I shudder now, knowing what I know, to say things like that.
00:03:43.040
I judged my life based on the world's standards.
00:03:46.340
And by the world's standards, I was a pretty good guy.
00:03:49.800
And I just assumed that that's what it took to get there.
00:03:58.760
I was literally the guy building bigger barns to store my goods.
00:04:02.680
And I had no idea that the Lord was going to call me and ask for my life that night.
00:04:08.680
And I found that I had no treasures built or stored for heaven.
00:04:13.120
And that it takes more than just being a lukewarm Christian, if we expect to spend eternity with our Lord.
00:04:32.660
Been married to my wife at the time for 20-some years.
00:04:35.620
Three kids, two boys and a girl, like 16, 17, 15, and 12.
00:04:44.480
Two of my kids were in the car with me and I was taking them to soccer, or I'm sorry, to track practice.
00:04:51.260
And we were in a head-on collision, May 30th of 2017.
00:04:56.500
And, you know, from that moment on, everything about really all of our lives changed physically, spiritually, emotionally.
00:05:09.760
And through all the pain, through all the suffering, through all the trials, I will tell you that it was the best day of my life.
00:05:18.140
And I can assure you, while I may not necessarily wish to go through it again, I wouldn't change a thing about it.
00:05:37.660
We live in Indiana in a little country area, heavy farming community.
00:05:44.300
And, man, the tractors out here are big, you know, the farm equipment.
00:05:49.700
They take up both lanes and more of the little two-lane roads.
00:05:57.360
He has a small line of cars gone, you know, behind him patiently waiting.
00:06:01.500
And, you know, they only go 10 or 15 miles an hour.
00:06:11.080
I could see ahead of me a mile and a half and behind me a mile and a half.
00:06:17.020
And as I passed those cars, as I was passing the last car in line, they were, you know, as I was going opposite direction, my car, there was a flash of black and it exploded.
00:06:30.340
It was the most violent experience I've ever, you know, that I've ever seen, felt.
00:06:36.300
You know, the car was bucking and bronking and it was spinning.
00:06:47.380
Found myself as the car came to a stop, the airbag deflated in front of me and I could see again.
00:06:53.620
And oddly enough, I was just a few hundred meters, a few hundred yards from my house.
00:07:02.900
And I knew that I was spun around and I was facing it.
00:07:07.180
I knew that I wouldn't be gone back to that place for a while.
00:07:09.680
But the impact that had occurred because of a woman that was under the influence of marijuana hit the last car in line with her foot on the gas, 55 miles an hour, and drove that last car over the yellow line right into us head on.
00:07:34.940
It was the impact of the car collapsed around me.
00:07:39.500
And thankfully, in all of this, so it's a three car accident, nine people involved.
00:07:44.380
And I was really the only one that had life-threatening injuries.
00:07:50.940
One of the kids that were in my car, one of the kids I was carpooling, had a concussion.
00:07:57.040
My son had a broken collarbone so that this other boy from the seatbelts, my daughter had a damage to her inner ear.
00:08:03.620
But everybody, including the other two cars, they walked away.
00:08:08.360
And I ended up, I didn't walk again for months, but thankfully, all of that impact, all of that mass chaos was focused on in my body.
00:08:21.320
And, yeah, it ended up, the car collapsed around me.
00:08:25.900
The impact was so hard, it pushed me sideways, pinned me in the pillar behind, you know, that separates the front door to the back door.
00:08:35.600
If people get the book, they can see on the cover that there is, the door is bowed in half.
00:08:46.280
And I ended up being trapped in that car for two and a half hours.
00:08:50.100
And, you know, the first thing that came to my mind was the pain.
00:09:00.480
And the first thing I thought was I was dreaming.
00:09:04.440
And I thought at any moment, I'm going to wake up because, man, the pain is bad, right?
00:09:09.000
And you get to a point in your dreams where you say, wow, the pain is really bad.
00:09:19.340
I mean, panic set in at this point because I was suffocating.
00:09:28.480
And I really thought, yeah, I'm going to, I'm like drowning.
00:09:36.460
And then I realized that it wasn't a dream, that it was real.
00:09:39.620
I could see the mangled cars on the other side of the road.
00:09:42.620
The impact actually knocked us off the road into the field.
00:09:45.360
It knocked the other cars into the other field across the road.
00:09:50.340
I realized, you know, slowly piecing it together that we were in a head-on car collision.
00:09:55.780
And, man, we, you know, the little country town, our paramedics came to get me out and realized I was trapped.
00:10:05.900
It took another 20 minutes for the jaws of life to get there before they could even start working on me.
00:10:11.880
And, you know, the funny thing is about that, when you look at the cars,
00:10:14.900
when you look at the damage, most people would expect that I was dead.
00:10:20.740
And they would think that at the hospital as well.
00:10:26.260
I mean, this is a story of absolute miracles, miracle after miracle.
00:10:29.980
And these were miracles that didn't start that day.
00:10:32.440
A lot of these miracles, man, they came into my life decades before the Lord placed these miracles.
00:10:38.880
Decades before my life, because I was going to need them on that day.
00:10:42.340
You know, I didn't put that together at the time, but now I look at it and I see how I was a man that thought that God was out there somewhere, right?
00:10:49.940
And that he didn't really interfere or work in our lives.
00:10:52.820
And now I can tell you that he works in our lives every moment of every day, never stops, always intervening, always working, always guiding.
00:11:03.080
But one thing I did know was I knew I wasn't going to die.
00:11:07.780
See, when I was in that wreck, when I was trapped there, I was almost looking at myself like I was somewhere else and I was stuck, that I was stuck somewhere else and I was half here and half there.
00:11:21.060
But I knew, I knew, and it wasn't, it wasn't like, it wasn't shock and it wasn't denial.
00:11:33.500
And the only thing I can attribute to is like a God knowing.
00:11:37.900
I was the only person, I can assure you, on site and in the hospital that knew I was going to be okay because the doctors were pretty sure scratching their heads when we finally, you know, they life-flighted me to, again, another miracle.
00:11:53.720
I lived in Pennsylvania most of my life and I came here for my first airline job.
00:11:58.860
And the Indy 500, you know, it's like one of the biggest races in the world and they've seen wrecks like mine.
00:12:07.540
They have a team that's dedicated for that here.
00:12:10.420
And maybe nowhere else in the world would I have had that care, that team, that literally they were all working on me at the same time.
00:12:19.680
You very rarely have an operation where more than one doctor is working on you, but they had all the doctors working on me on all different parts of my body, inside, outside.
00:12:29.120
And, and it was, again, I look at it and say, man, with a likelihood, right.
00:12:35.760
That's just not a coincidence because there are no coincidences.
00:12:39.900
The coincidence is just something that a non-believer says when God's working in your life.
00:12:46.400
So when I got to the hospital, uh, after they freed me, you know, they cut that car apart as much as they could and they still couldn't get me out.
00:12:53.560
And they ended up playing tug of war with me, uh, sedated me, played tug of war, put me in the helicopter and flew me down to Indy.
00:13:03.840
They, uh, they sent me through the machines, right.
00:13:06.560
You know, the CAT scans, the MRIs to really see what was wrong.
00:13:10.060
And I had self-diagnosed that I knew that I had a, a broken hip and I knew that I had a broken arm just because I, I could see that.
00:13:17.800
And, uh, but we, we weren't sure what was wrong.
00:13:21.220
And so when they sent me through, they realized that my spleen was ruptured.
00:13:25.300
Um, it took about five hours, five and a half hours from the moment of impact to my first surgery.
00:13:32.300
And when they went in and they worked on that spleen, um, we would later come to find out that it was, uh, it was the highest level damage you can have.
00:13:41.040
It was basically disintegrated, uh, in an injury like that has a lifespan of about 20 minutes, uh, before you, before you bleed out and you die.
00:13:52.260
It was five and a half hours and doctors, they, they still have, there is no scientific medical understanding of how I could have lived with my spleen in the way that it was.
00:14:07.520
Um, they found that I had, uh, two collapsed lungs, which is the reason why I was suffocating.
00:14:17.340
I had, uh, the, the ulna was driven into my right hand.
00:14:24.640
Eight ribs were broken, 10 vertebrae, uh, six herniated discs.
00:14:29.180
I had the muscles between my ribs were herniated out.
00:14:31.900
Again, that's an injury that doesn't have a name.
00:14:36.880
There hasn't been a person recorded that has lived through it.
00:14:40.480
It took a month to figure out how to try to fix it because doctors, surgeons have just never seen the injury, the, the blunt force trauma that causes the muscles to herniate out from between your ribs has been life ending in everybody else today.
00:14:58.640
Uh, I, my, my, my hemoglobin was down in the fours, which low is 14.
00:15:09.740
Um, again, another reason they just, with all the other injuries, they had no concept of how I was alive.
00:15:18.220
Um, you know, the impact was so hard that the lenses of my eyes folded over.
00:15:24.220
I guarantee you that I, I've probably missed a dozen of them.
00:15:27.820
Uh, but to date I've, uh, I, I had, um, last year was my 23rd surgery, uh, for repairs.
00:15:37.660
And I think I'm pretty much at the point now that, uh, they're the, the rest of the injuries will remain, uh, they'll, they'll remain unfixable, uh, for the rest of my life.
00:15:55.060
I was living, I, I didn't know that, uh, pain existed on that level.
00:16:00.820
You know, we, we all think we understand pain, right?
00:16:03.820
And one of the reasons I list those, that long, you know, laundry list of injuries is because your pain really is a relative.
00:16:13.400
You know, what hurts me might not hurt you and vice versa.
00:16:16.520
We, we, it is hard to understand each other's pain.
00:16:21.620
We understand that a femur being driven through a hip socket or broken ribs and broken vertebrae and, you know, ruptured organs.
00:16:28.720
And, you know, we can understand like, okay, that hurts.
00:16:33.460
So I was in a level of pain that I did not know existed.
00:16:36.100
And it started with the suffocation was, um, the pain and the suffocation.
00:16:44.560
It was so awful that I, I kind of lived from that moment for the first week and a half, two weeks, second by second and telling myself, I can make it one more second.
00:17:05.760
Uh, uh, like I said, for weeks, I lived second by second in that agony that just, it didn't go away.
00:17:12.060
And I was saturated to say I was saturated in pain.
00:17:16.800
And what that means is, uh, external stimulus, uh, caused pain.
00:17:22.880
So for example, if a nurse or a doctor walked in the room, it was everything that I could do to not start screaming.
00:17:30.020
The additional stimulus of seeing them come in the room was agonizing.
00:17:35.840
The fact of like when a family member would come and visit me, uh, and wanted to hug me, I would start screaming.
00:17:43.660
Well, the first three days I had a, I had a breathing tube in, so I, I couldn't, I couldn't say anything.
00:17:52.760
But once the breathing tube was out, I would scream for people not to touch me because that additional stimulus of their touch on my skin was more than I could take.
00:18:05.220
I mean, I lived as a man that I wanted to just run away.
00:18:09.000
I just remember thinking I just wanted to run away, but there was no escape and the pain didn't end.
00:18:16.700
It felt as if the medication they were giving me for it did nothing.
00:18:28.700
One, um, your wife and your kids, their reaction, what were they going through at the time?
00:18:34.640
Also, um, what are the injuries that you still sustain to this day?
00:18:43.260
So, you know, at the time my, my kids, the, the, the, at the moment of the wreck, you know, the paramedics,
00:18:49.100
they wanted to take my kids to the local doctor, to the local hospital.
00:18:53.560
Um, but we knew that the, you knew, we knew that I was being flight, life flighted down
00:18:57.300
to Indianapolis to the city, which is about an hour drive from us.
00:19:01.020
So, uh, my wife had to actually sign papers to not take the kids that the, that the EMTs
00:19:07.820
would not take the kids and that she would take them to the hospital that I was going
00:19:13.680
Uh, and we ended up having, uh, friends come, neighbors and drove Amy down once they life
00:19:20.540
Um, and so the kids went and got checked out, uh, their injuries, uh, were, like I said,
00:19:26.680
were relatively minor, a couple broken bones and, and some damage to my daughter's ear.
00:19:32.800
Their injuries are probably more psychological than anything, you know, just, uh, they don't
00:19:37.160
like to drive on that country road that we were on.
00:19:41.520
So, uh, the kids went down and the neighbors brought, brought them back home that evening,
00:19:50.900
Um, you know, really out of all of this, my wife was an absolute rock and she, uh, and
00:19:58.340
she attributes, you know, the interesting thing about that is, um, she had been praying.
00:20:17.760
And had she not had faith, she would have been lost.
00:20:22.920
And so her faith did indeed, I mean, it, it strengthened all of my kids, my kids, everybody
00:20:30.080
came out of this, uh, a stronger believer because they witnessed the miracles, the impossibilities.
00:20:39.680
And they saw that, that it, the, the, the blessings that I have received since.
00:20:46.560
And that, so it's changed everybody in that way.
00:20:49.340
Um, the injuries that I still have now, um, the damage to the back was not fixable.
00:20:56.160
So those herniated discs, they, they herniated up into the bone above it and below it.
00:21:03.380
Um, and so, um, that's not surgically repairable at least it is in small numbers, but because
00:21:10.320
I have six in a row, um, they can't do the fusion that they would do.
00:21:14.940
It would leave, it would leave my back immobile and the, the hip, the hip was shattered into,
00:21:23.080
Is it like, I don't know how they put it back together, but there's a lot of worry that if
00:21:27.360
they did any fusion at all, that extra pressure on my, my damaged hip would actually cause that
00:21:34.380
So, so the back is, is a lot, the, the rib injury, uh, they were never really able to fix.
00:21:41.560
And so what they did was they, my, my rib muscles would fall into my internal body, right?
00:21:49.740
You could actually stick your hand in my side and make it disappear.
00:21:53.740
And then my lung would come out and my lung would come out if I was laying on the other
00:21:57.720
So what they did is they, they, um, they put a mesh in and tried to sew the muscles to
00:22:03.940
that mesh, but they had to leave it flexible because I have to be able to move.
00:22:06.720
So, so my, my left side of my body has no stability because you get, you gain a lot of
00:22:16.220
And then that causes a lot of pain in my back because of those, because of not having the
00:22:21.960
And then there was a lot of damage to the vertebrae up in my neck.
00:22:25.300
And so I have a pretty tremendous amount of pain, but the residual pain is, is mostly
00:22:31.340
nerve damage, which is what ended up grounding me from the FAA.
00:22:36.720
So, um, I have nerve damage all up and down the spine.
00:22:40.820
And then that damage causes issues, uh, in all my limbs, uh, in my neck.
00:22:48.600
So, uh, that's just something that will be a kind of a forever thing.
00:22:54.080
And in the story, you know, we talk about, I always talk about it.
00:23:02.800
I was not a, it was not, I didn't have a deep spiritual understanding of our faith and I
00:23:08.620
had no concept, no clue of redemptive suffering.
00:23:12.760
Uh, but the Lord would teach me about that in my, and hopefully we get to talk about that
00:23:18.260
But, uh, I have been given a blessing that, that, uh, every day is a, is an opportunity
00:23:26.140
And every day is an opportunity for me to be like Simon of Cyrene, to pick up my cross
00:23:34.360
And no, and, and, and, and I talked to the Lord and I, I asked him if, if he can fill
00:23:40.560
my offering, it's an offering of love that I carry, I carry for the souls in purgatory.
00:23:46.680
I carry it for whatever needs that he and the blessed mother determined are needed that
00:23:55.020
Um, and it's an opportunity that we all have, we all have suffering.
00:23:59.540
And if you don't think you're suffering, you're just not being honest with yourself.
00:24:02.960
I mean, most people are suffering in one way or another, and there always is an opportunity
00:24:07.400
to be like Simon, to pick up that cross, to carry it.
00:24:10.680
I mean, the Lord tells us that's what, what we need to do if we want to enter into, and
00:24:16.180
And, and so, um, I look at it as a great, great blessing.
00:24:21.600
Padre Pio would say, you know, suffering is a great gift for those who choose to use it
00:24:29.040
So, most people, when they end up, you know, doing a good deed, taking the kids to an event
00:24:37.180
that they're supposed to go to, and they get blindsided, and their whole life has changed.
00:24:44.520
You, you lose your career, you're, you're, you've got, you know, you're a pilot, that's
00:24:54.420
The, the, rather, especially those who are not given to the faith in, in, in the robust
00:24:59.560
way you are now, how did God intervene in this to, to use it to his glory, rather than
00:25:07.060
to a rebellious attitude versus rejecting God for the horror that he's allowed?
00:25:12.940
Yeah, you know, that's, that's really an interesting question.
00:25:15.860
Um, the doctors all told me that I would, uh, get addicted to the drugs and not to worry
00:25:21.780
They had some, they had other drugs to get me off.
00:25:23.960
They told me that I would suffer depression and not to worry about it.
00:25:26.940
They would send me to doctors to deal with that.
00:25:29.820
And they told me all these things that were going to be horrible, that would happen.
00:25:40.920
And, uh, and in the ICU, they, they, they watch you, they care for you every moment, right?
00:25:47.600
You can't, you can't blink an eye without a doctor or a nurse knowing what's going on
00:25:53.540
And then when I made it out of the ICU, seven days, seven operations out of the ICU into
00:25:59.000
a step-down unit, it was almost as if I was abandoned.
00:26:02.040
It was like the doctors and nurses all went away.
00:26:04.700
And my family, you know, they were so exhausted.
00:26:07.480
The family and friends that were coming every day.
00:26:10.080
Remember, it's an hour drive for them each way.
00:26:13.120
And, and then they, we all know we, anybody that spent time as a caregiver in a hospital
00:26:20.400
And so my wife, she had been doing it for seven days and taking care of three young kids
00:26:29.780
And my brother was staying with me and another friend, my wife's brother, right?
00:26:34.620
And so I told everybody when I got into that step-down unit that it would be okay, that
00:26:50.340
And so I sent them all home and, and this is a little bit long explanation for it, but,
00:26:58.400
but after this experience, after what I'm going to tell you, I learned that there is
00:27:03.900
nothing, nothing on this earth as bad as what I experienced because I experienced the loss
00:27:11.140
of God and see, after coming back from that, nothing that I went through could, could even
00:27:22.640
See, nothing was as bad as they said it was because I went to the worst place that there
00:27:40.320
And so where I went was I was in the, I was in my hospital bed and this is a very small recovery,
00:27:50.020
And it was cinder block wall, just, just beyond my feet.
00:27:54.380
And on that wall was this, this bright, staggeringly bright white little square.
00:28:02.380
And I looked at it and I thought, what is that?
00:28:04.580
And as I looked at that, it was as if I was transported through it and became like, became
00:28:11.720
It was incredibly bright, white, blindingly bright, bright white all around me.
00:28:17.400
And at the end, it was like a long tunnel and I was, I was transporting through it at
00:28:22.780
And at the very end was a darkness, a little dark spot, you know, it's a backwards tunnel.
00:28:30.280
This is, I'm in the light and there's dark at the end.
00:28:33.220
I come out of that tunnel and I'm, I'm in a room now and I'm looking down upon a scene
00:28:52.080
And then next thing I know, it was no longer a memory, but I was living it.
00:28:58.460
I was living it firsthand as if for the first time.
00:29:04.760
And the first thing that I realized was that I had exited time.
00:29:19.200
It was so crystal clear that it, it almost hurt my eyes.
00:29:25.220
And I realized that the place that I was, was real.
00:29:30.800
And the world that I had lived my whole life in that world was like a fake world.
00:29:34.880
It was foggy and it was cloudy compared to this crystal clear vision that I had now in that, in this truth that I lived in this realness.
00:29:45.940
And then I, I knew that I had knowledge and I'm going to call it the knowledge of the world.
00:29:52.260
And when I, what I mean by that is, is if it was ever recorded, written down, stored in a library, fought by a man, I knew it.
00:30:07.920
But I, it just, all knowledge of the world was an instant access.
00:30:35.540
And so, when I say that, I was a 46-year-old man and I never realized that God held my soul.
00:30:43.240
And see, in this knowledge that I had, I was, it was also inferred to me that what I knew and what I understand and what I'm going to tell you about these other worldly experiences,
00:30:59.380
And so, when I tell you that God held my soul in his hand, he holds all of our soul.
00:31:04.440
From before our conception until after our death, he places our soul in our body and he never lets go.
00:31:12.520
He holds it as if we, like we would hold a softball, right?
00:31:16.680
And he holds our soul so that from the back and from the side, his hand protects it.
00:31:22.440
See, evil can't enter our soul from where we can't see.
00:31:26.960
If evil is going to enter into our soul, it enters through the front.
00:31:38.420
But he held my soul for my whole life and I had no idea.
00:31:44.040
But then once he let go, all I could feel was his absence.
00:31:49.120
And now I'm going to say words that there are just not words.
00:31:52.340
There are not words in our language, in any language.
00:31:56.120
That can convey what I'm going to try to tell you.
00:32:04.380
And horrifying is infinitely underrating what I'm telling you.
00:32:11.140
And it was, there was just such misery and fear.
00:32:17.380
Being timeless is like living in the moment of a startle.
00:32:22.120
I just had someone explain it as, we've all leaned back on our chair too far.
00:32:31.600
And there's that point of no return when suddenly the chair starts to go over.
00:32:42.400
That startle of knowing that it's too late and the chair is going over.
00:32:55.280
Now, there was an entity, a being that was behind me.
00:32:59.920
And I say behind me because, so I didn't have a body.
00:33:03.000
And I could look 360 degrees around in any direction.
00:33:09.160
If, you know, if I wanted to look behind me, I could roll my vision back around.
00:33:25.040
And again, this is just knowledge that was infused to me.
00:33:37.600
And I knew that I needed to ask some questions.
00:33:41.900
And so, you know, I had always had heard that hell was the absence of God.
00:33:48.260
And see, before I used to think about that, and I would actually think, you know, that's not that bad because God's not with me right now, right?
00:34:00.000
He's out there somewhere, but he's not with me right now.
00:34:06.140
See, but I had no clue that God holds us every moment, never lets go.
00:34:30.820
Now, I was a pretty poorly catechized Catholic, but the next step in the hierarchy would be purgatory.
00:34:46.900
And he said, I don't, I don't want to be in forever.
00:35:02.720
And I was able to look around the room for, really, and study it.
00:35:06.720
It was a small room, very small cylindrical room.
00:35:09.000
If I had arms, I could reach out and touch each wall.
00:35:13.160
And it was highest gloss red that, I mean, I can't, it's like a, so bright, not like anything on this earth.
00:35:21.260
And the walls were made up of doors of all different sizes, flat handles.
00:35:26.580
Not that I had hands that I could open them, but I knew that those, those handles, those doorknobs, they were useless to me.
00:35:36.560
And the ceiling was, was like a white translucent.
00:35:41.440
And on the other side of it was this red viscous liquid, which I believe looked like blood.
00:35:47.740
And once I looked at it, I could never look away.
00:35:55.560
And it caused a white hot burning in my soul that went a million miles deep.
00:36:01.040
Like my soul was so much bigger than I, than I ever understood.
00:36:06.560
And this white hot burning bore down to the core.
00:36:22.700
I could feel the weight, the cumulative weight of a lifetime of my sin crushing down on me.
00:36:34.700
You know, and when I came back, I thought about it.
00:36:42.160
And it makes me think about when God spoke to Moses.
00:36:47.820
And Moses asked him his name and he says, I am.
00:37:00.540
And see, I was in a state where I just was, I just was misery.
00:37:05.140
I always would be from now until eternity, misery.
00:37:15.580
The only thing I had was this vast knowledge, all the knowledge in the world.
00:37:19.900
You have to remember, I was the airline pilot, very type A, right?
00:37:24.460
And not only that, I was, I was always a fighter, right?
00:37:30.220
My solution to most things was to take a sledgehammer to it.
00:37:32.980
And with enough muscle, anything could be fixed with a sledgehammer, right?
00:37:49.320
We've all seen the movies where the math problems are on the chalkboard and they go like around the entire room, right?
00:37:56.840
I could do those in my head as simple as I'm adding one plus one now, right?
00:38:01.380
I could do these, these chalkboard problems one after another, after another until I exhaust all math, all math.
00:38:17.220
If you asked me to recite a poem now, I wouldn't have one to give you.
00:38:24.540
And then I started the great works from Shakespeare.
00:38:32.940
And I did have a logic class in college, right?
00:38:36.460
And I took a logic class and Venn diagrams and things that I, I took one class and I passed it.
00:38:43.620
And that's about my limit of knowledge on, on logic, right?
00:38:46.300
But I was doing complex, multi-level logic problems.
00:38:53.980
I used all the knowledge of the world until I exhausted it all, all of it.
00:39:04.520
All the while living in a stark, stark terror, a stark fear, a stark agony of losing God's touch.
00:39:13.500
All the while never ceasing, never ending, trying everything I could to get out and not being able to free myself.
00:39:21.500
When I exhausted all of that knowledge, I took an evaluation of myself.
00:39:37.380
I knew I deserved to be there for all of eternity.
00:39:40.280
Because of my actions and the way that I lived my life up until that point, this was a just reward.
00:39:51.400
And I knew that there was nothing I could do to get out.
00:39:54.840
And I say to myself, there is nothing you can do.
00:40:00.020
And at that moment, that white ceiling got just a little lighter.
00:40:11.380
And the blood changed to a little bit different color.
00:40:14.380
And I even said to myself, oh, my goodness, you're doing it.
00:40:25.320
And at that moment, it was as if I passed through that red viscous, that blood-like liquid.
00:40:32.940
I passed through it, and I found myself on this gentle knoll, this lush green grass, a green like I've never seen, a green, an unearthly green, but most beautiful.
00:40:48.080
And I was staring up into a blue sky that was a blue like nothing I've ever seen.
00:41:19.020
Everything went black for a moment, and I found myself back in my bed in the hospital.
00:41:27.340
And I tell you that if a second went by, it would shock me.
00:41:33.660
Everything that I experienced, years, maybe decades that I was in that place, it happened in this sweep of a second hand.
00:41:44.540
And I think to myself, I don't think I'm going to heaven.
00:41:55.760
To come to a realization that, you know, you realize that at the moment of impact, right, I had this experience.
00:42:01.920
And I was the man that was sure I was going to heaven.
00:42:27.960
And I realized that the people, the souls in purgatory, well, they cannot pray for themselves.
00:42:38.240
And if you've picked up on one thing that I did not do when I was in that place, I did not pray.
00:42:44.660
See, because I didn't pray because I did not know prayer existed.
00:42:49.560
See, I've also learned since, and I'm going to prove it as we go on, is a prayer wells up in us from God.
00:43:01.060
And so I tell people, if you can pray, then hallelujah.
00:43:03.540
I know this is during Lent, and we're not supposed to say that, but hallelujah, because if you can pray, the Lord is with you.
00:43:12.500
Man, see, I was in a place that I wasn't with the Lord.
00:43:17.280
And see, not only could I not pray, I didn't know prayer existed.
00:43:24.940
I knew that I loved God, and I knew that I wished that I could be with Him.
00:43:30.940
But because of my choices that I made, that couldn't be.
00:43:34.980
See, but I didn't know prayer existed because God was not with me.
00:43:38.520
So that happened maybe at 10 o'clock at night, my first night in the step-down.
00:43:52.180
The next morning, I don't know, around 10 o'clock, my wife comes in, and I tell her, I said,
00:43:58.140
hey, I was supposed to get pain medicine at 8 this morning, and I didn't.
00:44:03.660
And we called, and the nurses said they would bring pain medicine, and they weren't in, man.
00:44:14.680
You know, I told you earlier that I didn't think the pain medicine was doing anything.
00:44:19.120
But I was a couple hours late, and I was noticing that what I thought was, you know, an 11 on the scale of 1 to 10.
00:44:28.540
And that's where I was living for over a week, man, I was moving up higher and higher.
00:44:33.500
That pain was ratcheting up by the minute, so much so that my wife's presence in the room was more than I could bear.
00:44:43.200
Now, I didn't tell her that because she was so worried, right?
00:44:50.360
I told her it would be a good day to go spend time with our kids.
00:44:54.460
But in reality, I just needed her out of the room because I was in agony.
00:45:00.020
And I asked her if she would stop by the nursing station and have them bring medicine, and she said she would, but nobody ever came.
00:45:12.280
Hours and hours go by, and I am nearly out of my mind.
00:45:15.940
Where I was living second by second before I couldn't even do that.
00:45:20.340
It came to me evening, and a new nurse came in, and he said, he's writing on the whiteboard information, you know.
00:45:36.880
And he turned around, and he said, has no one told you?
00:45:44.000
He said, there was a mistake made this morning.
00:45:46.400
You were given too much of a certain medicine, and you can't have anything until 8 o'clock in the morning tomorrow.
00:45:58.900
And I thought, oh, my gosh, how am I going to do this?
00:46:13.600
He sat down next to me, and he just started to talk to me.
00:46:18.360
We didn't talk about doctors and hospitals and medicine.
00:46:23.120
And I'll be honest with you, I don't remember everything that we talked about.
00:46:26.400
But he told me that he was a traveling nurse and that he goes from hospital to hospital.
00:46:35.500
He's in a different hospital every night, and that he wouldn't be back to this hospital until I was home.
00:46:42.040
Now, I didn't think of it at the time, but the doctor's prognosis was that I would spend several months in that hospital.
00:46:51.100
And then I would spend an additional several months in a step-down unit hospital or a rehab hospital.
00:46:58.680
So how he knew I was going to be home in 18 days because I was home in 18 days, which is another miracle.
00:47:07.600
But how he thought that he wouldn't be there until I was there.
00:47:10.760
And he spent so much time talking to me that the guy that literally is wrapped in casts from head to toe tells him,
00:47:23.240
And he tells me, I have nothing else to do right now.
00:47:28.140
Now, I can tell you, anybody that's spent time in a hospital knows that there's not a nurse in a hospital that has 45 minutes to sit down with a patient,
00:47:35.460
especially in a step-down unit just off of the ICU, right?
00:47:40.480
And the interesting thing is, you know, I go around the country and I share my story.
00:47:49.120
And hands down, the nurses in Indiana tell me that there is no such position.
00:47:55.180
There is no position where a nurse travels from hospital to hospital every day.
00:48:02.340
And, you know, it's funny because I always thought that he was an angel.
00:48:15.600
And it's something that we have the opportunity to do with each other.
00:48:33.300
And now I'm in really a tremendous amount of pain now.
00:48:37.500
And I think to myself, I don't think I'm going to be able to go to sleep.
00:48:42.920
But if I could close my eyes for a little bit, maybe I would just drift off.
00:48:52.360
And I drift out as if I'm leaning over an edge.
00:48:58.980
And I'm looking over this ledge, this great cliff.
00:49:01.840
And it goes on from horizon to horizon, as far as I can see.
00:49:06.160
And in front of me is just this dark abyss of nothingness.
00:49:21.940
And their mouths, they have multiple mouths and multiple eyes on their face.
00:49:32.220
It's just like bone-crushing fear coming out of there.
00:49:49.840
And I'm right there, leaning over this edge, looking down into the pit of hell.
00:49:58.500
Now, losing God was a horror of a different magnitude.
00:50:06.360
It was equal, because God wasn't there, but it was different.
00:50:18.000
And I open my eyes, and I determine that I'm not going to close them again.
00:50:23.820
I asked Jesus to send the Holy Spirit to take these visions away.
00:50:30.160
But see, I did not close my eyes again, see, because I did not believe that Jesus would send the Holy Spirit.
00:50:42.140
And again, this is where I proved to you that prayer comes from God.
00:50:52.820
And the first thing that I say is, I ask Jesus to take this pain.
00:50:56.620
And I immediately say, no, it is unfair for me to ask.
00:51:11.920
I will carry it for the salvation of the world.
00:51:14.380
Now, see, I tell you that that prayer was a foreign thought to me.
00:51:20.100
I didn't know, I had never heard of redemptive suffering.
00:51:28.040
And yet I made a prayer that was foreign to me, offered to carry my pain.
00:51:32.880
And I started talking to Jesus about his passion.
00:51:44.060
See, it occurred to me, it felt as if I was being led.
00:52:03.120
I said, my own bones have pierced my hands and feet.
00:52:07.560
I said, you hung on a cross and suffocated for hours.
00:52:11.620
I was trapped in a car and suffocated for hours.
00:52:40.900
I had no idea, no idea what he suffered for us.
00:53:04.840
And I closed my eyes and right in front of me, right in front of me, then again, I'm going to use words.
00:53:15.280
And at this point, I fear that they're blasphemous because there are no words to describe what I saw.
00:53:24.040
What I saw is infinitely greater than what I'm going to describe.
00:53:30.520
But in front of me was this beautiful ball of light.
00:53:43.560
And see, I would later understand that this is where the spiritual battle, this is the first time in my life that I can identify the spiritual battle.
00:53:54.520
And a voice says, just, just out of my thought, brain damage.
00:54:00.560
So, you know, here's the thing about that is with this horrendous wreck that I was in, all this damage to all the parts of my body, my organs, my, my spine, my neck, everything.
00:54:13.400
The amazing thing about it is, is I did not have brain damage.
00:54:47.780
I need to let them know that I have brain damage.
00:54:50.000
I'm going to tell them about the, the vision that I had yesterday that I was afraid to tell, right?
00:54:53.900
And I'm reaching down to push this button, the call button in an audible voice.
00:55:00.560
In this very small room, in the chair sitting right next to me, speaks.
00:55:16.500
And so now I know 100% that I have brain damage.
00:55:25.000
And so my finger is moving and my thumb is ready to push that button to call the nurse.
00:55:30.880
And that voice moves into my mind, into the back of my head.
00:55:44.440
I heard that voice my first time when I was nine years old.
00:55:51.120
The next time I would hear that voice, I was 15 and it helped me save a little girl's life.
00:56:00.560
And it spoke to me and it helped me save my own child's life.
00:56:27.160
But you have to remember, I was so poorly catechized.
00:56:35.000
And if that voice would have spoken and said, look at him,
00:56:40.280
And so the voice spoke to me so that I could understand.
00:56:47.040
So from now on, I will use the proper terminology, but that's where I was at the time.
00:56:58.500
And in front of me again was this beautiful ball of light, the Holy Spirit.
00:57:10.460
Now I will say, I don't know if there were stars or planets.
00:57:15.200
And I was moving at a really high rate of speed again, moving out to him.
00:57:21.160
And as I got closer, the Holy Spirit was growing in size, becoming enormous, right?
00:57:33.620
And as I get close to him, it's so bright, so unbelievably bright.
00:57:42.120
And just as I think that I can barely look at him, this gossamer veil covers him.
00:57:50.320
And the only thing I can liken it to, now again, I'm a science guy, a physics guy.
00:57:58.160
Plasma has like this sheer look to it, but it's electric.
00:58:09.920
And it blocks just enough of the light so that I can look at him.
00:58:13.920
And this gossamer fog was pooled at the poles, north and south, east and west.
00:58:27.520
And I come up to the Holy Spirit, and I look at him.
00:58:33.040
You know, the first thing I thought when I saw him being a science guy is that he resembled a star.
00:58:40.860
Like when we look at the science channel and we see our sun, and it looks like the surface is moving and alive.
00:58:51.700
The beauty is so much more beautiful, but it resembled it.
00:59:08.700
And it's funny because it reminded me of when I was a child.
00:59:15.060
And my parents would put the Christmas presents under the tree.
00:59:19.300
And you'd want to, like, sneak when they weren't looking and look and see if there was anything with your name on it, right?
00:59:25.260
And you're kind of looking over your shoulder while you're peeking, right?
00:59:29.760
See, I was allowed to look at him, but I don't know why.
00:59:33.340
And I looked at him, and eventually I came head on to him.
00:59:49.360
And see, I'm going to say it traveled through me, but it didn't travel.
01:00:09.840
And that's when I gained such disdain for the enemy to the point to have since that day, I've never called him by his name because I looked at it.
01:00:20.700
I was just a regular man, right, with limited intellect.
01:00:26.140
And the enemy, you know, he was an elevated being.
01:00:32.840
I knew this power was so vast and so strong that nothing could ever defeat it.
01:00:38.520
What would make you think you could fight it and win?
01:00:41.600
Like, I lost all respect, and I thought your pride.
01:00:44.280
What pride must you have had to think you could win?
01:01:10.460
Only where in that other world my vision was so clear it hurt.
01:01:15.420
So here I was thankful that my vision was so clear so I could see it.
01:01:22.080
In that other world, I had the knowledge of the world.
01:01:25.340
But see, here I had the knowledge of what I'll call the universe.
01:01:33.300
He elevated my intellect to the point to where things like our mysteries, I could look at it and understand them.
01:01:44.320
I remember thinking that about the Holy Trinity.
01:01:46.960
Like, the Holy Trinity was like the simplest thing.
01:01:58.900
And I can tell you this, that any man that says he understands the Trinity, you don't believe him because he can't.
01:02:07.080
But I'm letting you know that when I was in that place, when I was with our Lord, I understood those things.
01:02:25.120
I felt love like it was a physical thing touching me.
01:02:30.040
It was reminiscent of what the rays of sun feel like when they touch our skin, right?
01:02:46.560
And I realized that, oddly enough, the catechism describes the Holy Spirit as power, the Father as love, and the Son as mercy.
01:02:58.160
See, coming through the Holy Spirit, I felt all of them through the Holy Spirit.
01:03:03.800
And I felt these things that we think are just abstract as physical, concrete experiences.
01:03:18.040
Then scriptures started flooding my mind, right?
01:03:21.860
And so the first scripture, and the way it happened is the scripture would flood my mind, and I would exclaim an answer.
01:03:28.140
So scripture floods my mind, and I say, oh my gosh, how easy it would be for God to pass a camel through the eye of the needle.
01:03:43.160
And then I thought, oh my goodness, if we had just a faith the size of a mustard seed, the tiniest little faith multiplied against this infinite power, we indeed could make mountains move.
01:03:57.840
And then I saw, I understood the Christmas star.
01:04:08.160
See, as a kid, I used to always think, how did the wise men find a place where Jesus was?
01:04:12.760
I would look outside up at the stars, and I'd see a million stars above my house.
01:04:22.680
What I looked at, it indeed, the beautiful paintings that we see at Christmastime with that beautiful Christmas star, that's what I was looking at.
01:04:32.620
It would be, just over the next hill, over the next mountain, the wise men would follow it until it came, and it rested over a place.
01:04:42.060
See, and it explained, why didn't Herod just follow the same star?
01:04:48.640
See, because like Jesus in his ministry, he only showed who he was to the people that needed to see.
01:04:56.740
I understood why Jesus could walk up to a fisherman mending his net and say, follow me.
01:05:01.980
And he would get up and follow him, because for a moment, Jesus would show them something.
01:05:08.440
And then I saw Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
01:05:32.160
See, no man could stand in the presence of that power.
01:05:39.400
See, he did that for our benefit and for theirs.
01:05:43.680
See, he wanted them to know, and he wanted us to know, that they could not take him.
01:06:06.840
There was no, I just wanted to be there forever.
01:06:12.040
You know, and I, I looked down, I could look down, like, to my right and like where my feet would be.
01:06:30.880
I knew, I knew that God was holding their souls, right?
01:06:38.720
It would be okay if I stayed there forever, because that's where I wanted to be.
01:06:42.380
See, I didn't realize my whole life, I was homesick for this place.
01:06:48.760
And at that moment, one of those beautiful gossamer spires reached out and touched me in my soul.
01:06:55.960
And it's really hard to explain, but I felt myself pouring into the Lord, and I felt the Lord pouring into me.
01:07:08.220
And it was, it was, again, these words, they're just so pale.
01:07:14.920
It was, it was joy and bliss and love and peace and ecstasy and happiness and every good thing pouring into me.
01:07:24.620
And it was, I was pouring out into the Lord all at the same moment, impossibly.
01:07:41.900
I increased pouring into him until, until I lost consciousness.
01:07:46.320
And again, this happened at maybe 10 or 11 o'clock at night, the night before.
01:07:56.640
It was probably seven or eight o'clock in the morning.
01:08:02.760
I don't even know if doctors or nurses came in to check on me in all of that time.
01:08:06.420
As a matter of fact, I remained pain-free until I took my first pain medicine the next day, and then the pain came back.
01:08:18.260
And so, you asked me a long time ago, I tend to talk a lot when I tell this story, about the bad things.
01:08:28.340
See, I didn't, I didn't become addicted to the drugs, because I realized what benefit there is to having this redemptive suffering.
01:08:38.800
So I didn't use the pain medicine after I got home.
01:08:48.060
See, but they didn't understand that I went to the worst place that we can't even imagine.
01:08:54.480
And I can tell you this, if you told me that I had to live another hundred years at the peak of that pain, or I could take one second without God,
01:09:07.500
I would choose the hundred years of pain, and I wouldn't even think twice about it,
01:09:14.740
because one second without God is an unimaginable torture.
01:09:24.480
And so, I used to think that God is out there somewhere, right?
01:09:31.660
And we prayed to Him, and sometimes He answered, and sometimes He didn't.
01:09:36.200
But, you know, I look at it now, see, one of the benefits of that red room,
01:09:41.160
one of the benefits of that misery of losing God's touch is that when I came back, I could feel Him holding my soul.
01:09:48.020
I feel it right now when I talk to you, and I assure you, remember, I was shown that I am not different than anybody else.
01:09:56.960
God is holding your soul right now, just like He holds mine.
01:10:04.840
And so, there was nothing on this earth that made it too bad.
01:10:09.640
I used to think about that footprint prone, right?
01:10:14.000
And I used to think, yeah, that's kind of cute, but it's not real.
01:10:18.160
I look at the impossibilities of what I've been through, the rehab, the years and years, the 23 operations, the loss of career, all those things you mentioned, right?
01:10:30.720
They were unmanageable, and I look now, and there's only one way that I could have made it through, and it was because He truly was carrying me.
01:10:45.800
And so, the footprint prone is absolutely spot on.
01:10:50.560
And the Lord has continued to bless me, letting me have visions, and maybe for another time, I have another book coming out that explains the red room, and why there was that misery, and what it means to be washed in the blood of Christ's soul.
01:11:10.620
What does your faith-like look like now, after the fact, before you were still going to Mass?
01:11:18.100
But, you know, unless it was something that got in the way, I presume that was Sundays mostly.
01:11:24.540
Don't know if you prayed much, the Holy Rosary, or anything like that.
01:11:34.420
So, I wake up every morning, and I do the daily readings, and I write a commentary, and I put it out.
01:11:43.500
Um, and I, I put a commentary based on what I saw, what I lived, and what it means, what that, what it means, right?
01:11:55.000
And, and sometimes I say the hard things that we don't always hear in the pew.
01:12:03.680
I still am a father, and I am running this apostolate now, so it keeps me busy.
01:12:17.240
There, there's nothing in the world like adoration.
01:12:20.300
I used to go to confession once a year because it was required to be Catholic to go once a year.
01:12:25.520
Now I have a spiritual director who is, understands my story that I can go to confession to,
01:12:39.580
See, I saw the effects of my sin, and now one of the blessings that I have is I can see sin coming.
01:12:46.680
I can see sin coming, and yet I still sin, right?
01:12:49.520
So, after everything I've seen, I'm still a sinner.
01:12:53.840
And so, my sins have a heavier weight than the average man's because of my knowledge,
01:13:00.740
what I've seen, and the fact that I've been blessed to be able to see them coming.
01:13:05.540
And so, I go to my, my, my own spiritual director because he understands that weight.
01:13:16.040
I mean, I used to think that we went to Mass because, well, we had to, right?
01:13:22.120
And, and now I realized that, see, that's the place where we get to share in the Lord's sacrifice.
01:13:29.420
And that's the place where he feeds us both physically and spiritually.
01:13:43.660
I was so, uh, I had no, I had no idea how spoiled I was, and I overlooked it.
01:13:50.900
And so, yeah, now I pray all the time, but, you know, it, it's a lot easier to pray when, um, you can feel God touching you.
01:14:02.420
Uh, so, yeah, my, my life, my prayer life is better.
01:14:09.200
My, I look back now, I'm embarrassed at the man that I was.
01:14:13.140
I'm embarrassed of, of the man that, that literally was building treasures here and had nothing stored for the kingdom.
01:14:23.120
I'm embarrassed that I focused my life, so much of my life on the wrong things and not at all on the right things.
01:14:32.640
You know, I, I thought God was out there somewhere, but see, he's not out there somewhere.
01:14:37.780
He's here, he dwells within us, he holds us, he is a real tangible being that reaches through time and space to touch and hold our souls from before our conception until after our death.
01:14:55.760
I mean, that's, we are so spoiled, all of us, whether we know it or not.
01:15:01.540
And, uh, so my mission now is to awaken people to that, to awaken people to the benefits of suffering.
01:15:11.120
We live in a world that the enemy tells us that this is it.
01:15:14.740
This is where we need to have our joy, our happiness, all of those things, right?
01:15:22.780
And I'm here to tell you that this place is fake.
01:15:26.640
But at one point in our life, we were going to go someplace that is real in what we do and how we behave and how we honor our Lord here and now.
01:15:38.420
It makes a difference of the, what kind of eternity I spent an eternity that all I wished would be that it would end.
01:15:47.120
And I spent another eternity that I never wanted to end.
01:15:51.900
And all of us are going to have a choice at some point of which one we spend that eternity in.
01:16:01.660
Ed Joza, thank you so much for sharing your story with us.
01:16:05.380
Anyone wants to, again, get more in touch with what Ed is doing, you can get to his website at themysticnextdoor.org.
01:16:14.120
So it's also available, especially for those outside the United States, on Amazon.