Nobody expects to die in the middle of their son’s wedding weekend.
You don’t expect to stagger through a rehearsal dinner with a 104° fever. You don’t think a backyard baseball game with your boys is going to rip your insides apart. And you definitely don’t expect a freezing operating room to be the place where a five-year-old’s prayer gets answered.
But that’s exactly what happened to Mike McKinsey.
He spent three miserable days just trying to hold it together so he wouldn’t miss his son’s wedding—smiling in pictures, pretending he was okay, even though he clearly wasn’t. Everyone figured it was just the flu. It wasn’t until the wedding was over that he finally said, “Alright, I need to get checked out,” and went to the ER.
A nurse tapped his foot, and pain exploded in his stomach. The surgeon counted backward three days since his appendix likely ruptured. They needed to act fast. Mike kissed his wife and was rushed into surgery. The table was freezing and so narrow that he crossed his hands over his chest. Mike felt awful. This was the first time he was concerned that he may not ever see his wife and kids again.
He simply turned his head to the right.
And Jesus walked into the room.
Not a floating spirit. Not a vision above the body. A physical man like a surgeon entering his own operating room, dark brown hair to His shoulders, short beard, white robe, Middle Eastern features. Not the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus that Mike had seen growing up.
Their eyes met, and he knew instantly who it was.
Jesus held out His hand and said, “I want to answer your prayer.”
A Prayer That Never Let Go
The first time Mike asked to see heaven, he was five years old at his grandfather’s funeral. Sitting in a big church, mesmerized by smoke rising from a priest’s censer.
The priest kept describing heaven: no pain, no tears, no sadness. To a five-year-old, it sounded beautiful and strangely real. That night, Mike added a new line to his bedtime prayers.
“Show me heaven. I want to see it.”
Night after night, for years, he repeated it.
“You didn’t show me yet.”
He didn’t know a prayer can wait decades for its answer.
The Hill, the City, and the Glory of the Lord
Back in Ventura, when Jesus said, “I want to answer your prayer,” Mike assumed He meant the surgery would go well. He wasn’t thinking about that five-year-old boy in a pew.
Then he took Jesus’ hand.
In an instant, the operating room disappeared.
Mike was standing barefoot on a hill, feeling cool green grass beneath him with impossible clarity, like he could count every blade touching his skin. Everything around him was blinding white, like dense fog pressed close.
Out of the white appeared a glowing, pearl-like sphere the size of a basketball. From it, beams of light began shooting outward smooth, tube-like rays moving through the mist. One flew straight at him and hit him in the forehead before he could react. It passed through him with a gentle buzzing sound and filled his body with warmth.
Then, like a curtain pulling to the side, the white parted.
Below him was a massive city, domes, rooftops, and tall white structures rising through a low blanket of fog. Golden domes reflected light. Some buildings resembled church steeples, but one detail stunned him:
There were no crosses anywhere.
Behind the city rose a mountain covered in perfectly shaped trees with delicate, lace-like branches. Above it stretched a sky exploding with colors he had never seen—like the most vivid sunset imagined, except without a visible sun.
The beams of light kept firing from the sphere, traveling across the valley and striking the treetops. Each time they hit, they burst into countless tiny rays, like silent fireworks against that radiant sky.
Overwhelmed, Mike looked toward the source.
Jesus said, “It’s the glory of the Lord.”
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