Woman Comes Back to Life with a Message
“In the dream I was driving in my car and I came upon this accident scene that had to do with semi trucks,” Cheryl remembers. “And so when I started waking up out of the dream, I was like, I could feel—it was a dream from the Lord and I felt burdened. And so I began to pray right away.”
March of 2000, two months after Cheryl dramatic dream, her sister Valerie was in a freeway pileup near her home in Flagstaff Arizona. Valerie’s car was crushed under the weight of a semi truck, and it took first responders several hours to extract her from the vehicle. A mutual friend was on the scene and got word to Cheryl that Valerie was unconscious and not expected to survive.
Cheryl says, “And we hung up the phone and the minute we hung up, I started praying. I said, ‘God, how do you want me to pray for Valerie?’ and He said, ‘Pray that she will live and not die and declare the works of the Lord.’” Those words, from psalm 118 verse 17 gave Cheryl hope as she prayed for her sister’s life.
“It stirred my faith to believe that the impossible was possible,” she says. “Already, before I even saw her. So when I did see her, I was not moved by what I saw in the hospital, because I didn't even recognize her. But what moved me was the word of God.”
A prayer chain quickly started as word spread through their church community. But when Cheryl got to the hospital, doctors gave her a grim report. She says, “They pretty much told us she had, you know, we had no hope, that she was probably not going to make it. There was no brain activity. They kept her on life support to harvest her organs.”
Cheryl would not give up. She gathered friends and continued praying for Valerie to wake from her coma. Cheryl says, “I want those that I have already prayed with, who are one in spirit, that will believe God’s word and we’re going to go to war and we’re going to pray over Valerie. And so we took a time one day, I think it was on a Wednesday, we went into the chapel and we took over the chapel. And the chapel became like a war room. We went in there and we just began to speak life over her. We prayed over her.”
Their prayers continued for days, but there were no visible signs of improvement. Meanwhile, Valerie was experiencing a very different reality in Heaven. Valerie says, “When I stepped into heaven, I mean, I hit the light. And I was literally blinded by the light. I’m blinded still today of the light of his presence…I stood up, I turned around and there was Jesus. And I don't know if I ran to him or he came to me. I mean, all of a sudden we were there. He just smiled at me. And I felt all this emotion that he had for me. I finally felt like I was home. It was like I stepped into—finally I belong. This is where I belong. I was home.”
Valerie had been a Christian for most of her life, but says she never believed that God really loved her, “In my heart of hearts, I did not believe that I was worthy of his love because I always felt like I was never going to measure up to what I thought the Lord wanted from me and so when I felt his emotion, I felt how he felt about me and the things that I thought about myself, like my flaws or my issues, he never even noticed. He just wants me. It wasn’t anything that I did for him. It wasn’t my performance, nothing. It was –it was just me…I wasn’t just loved by him, but he was in love with me. And I was his. That was it. I was done for. And I thought ah! But then realizing this is how he feels about his creation. Those that he’s created, whether they know him yet or not, this is how he feels.”
Valerie says she felt like she was there for a thousand years and experienced life and love like she never had on Earth. Then Jesus told her she had to go back - with a message. “And he said, ‘you can stay if you want to.’ and I said ‘Well, if I can stay, I’m staying with you. I’m going to stay with you.’ And he said, ‘But your purpose isn’t done. I want you to tell them, tell the people who I am. Who I really am.’ Because I thought he was, you know, religious, I thought he was mean, I thought he was –I didn’t think he was, you know, human. And he’s human. He’ll always be human, but he’s God. I didn’t want to leave him. I hated leaving. But I had to come back and the next thing I knew, I was making like my descent back to the Earth.”
At the hospital days after the accident, the medical team began reacting to new signs of life. Cheryl remembers, “And the doctor is checking, he’s flashing the light in her eyes. And he looks at me and he said, ‘Get ready, I think your sister’s coming back. I see some brain activity.’ I just began to rejoice. Rejoice and I said, ‘Thank you Lord!’”
Valerie soon woke up and experienced a miraculous recovery. Two and a half months after the accident she walked out of the hospital, healed both physically and spiritually. She says, “I know who I really am. And so when I had to deal with, you know, coming back with the suffering, my time with the Lord is what carried me through my recovery.”
Cheryl says, “While Valerie was in Heaven getting a revelation of the love of Jesus, I was on Earth getting a revelation of the love of Jesus. There’s a love that I’ve been experiencing—Jesus’ love that I’d never experienced before as a Christian.”
Cheryl and Valerie look back on their experience amazed and thankful for the answered prayers and love they each received in their time of need. Valerie says, “I was worth the price that he paid. That blew me away. We are worth the price that he paid for us.”
“It was the power of prayer to see God bring forth a miracle,” says Cheryl. “Believe the word of the Lord. Stand on his word. Get a scripture and stand on that word. And continue to pray. No matter how bad it looks. Even when the doctors give you the bad report, believe in the report of the Lord, which is a good report. And stand in faith believing for your miracle, and I know God will give them a miracle.”
