Vietnam Vet Near Death Experience Affirms 14th Century Mystic Christian

Steve Gardipee’s fascinating and unique near-death experience after being shot down in Vietnam is well worth listening to. His testimony has the accuracy, objectivity and courageous honesty of a highly trained helicopter pilot. His interactions with God are strikingly similar to the experiences of Julian of Norwich, a Fourteenth Century Christian mystic, who also had a near-death experience and wrote about it in her famous book Revelations of Divine Love.

For instance, Gardipee says that he saw that God was not the mean and vengeful God that he had once believed in and resented.

Here is what Julian of Norwich says:

“Our life is grounded in love, without which we perish; yet God is never angry, but in our anger and sin he mercifully keeps us safe and ordains peace in us, rewarding our tribulations.

“Now this was a great marvel to the soul, continually shown in everything and considered with great attentiveness: that in regard to himself our Lord God cannot forgive, for he cannot be angry – it would be an impossibility.”

Gardipee on God’s love: “God is saddened over what we do to each other for that is an assault on his emotions. He created us to be wonderful.”

In regard to forgiveness, Gardipee says, “God doesn’t want us to cower in front of him. His one need is to love us. You have to ask for his forgiveness; he won’t take you into heaven kicking and screaming; you have to sincerely want him to forgive you.”

“Nothing in heaven is bad, all my past sins are forgiven. God told me I made you that way for a reason, which was not made known to me.”

Julian of Norwich: “And I saw that truly nothing happens by accident or luck, but everything by God’s wise providence. If it seems to be accident or luck from our point of view, our blindness and lack of foreknowledge is the cause…Therefore I was obliged to accept that everything which is done is well done, because our Lord God does everything;”

Once he was out of his body, Gardipee felt like a super God, powerful and all-knowing. Then God showed him how small he was in comparison to God.

Julian of Norwich: “In this vision he also showed a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, ‘What can this be?’ And the answer came to me, ‘It is all that is made.’ I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly have disappeared. And the answer in my mind was ‘It last and will last forever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way by the love of God.’

I have watched many near-death experience videos, and they are all interesting. I found Steve Gardipee’s especially interesting because of his clarity of observation and the similarity of what he saw to what Julian of Norwich saw in her visions from 600 years ago.