What does it feel like to have people pray for you? What if you aren’t even conscious? What if you’re in a coma and on life support—do you know that prayers are being said? Eben Alexander has a fascinating answer.
Alexander is an M.D., a practicing neurosurgeon who lives in Virginia. He’d been raised in the church but after years of medical training, after years of studying scientific research, after years of operating on patients at life-and-death moments, he was pretty much a skeptic. A Christmas-and-Easter Christian at the very most.
When he overheard loved ones and family members volunteer to pray for patients, he considered their actions kind but misguided. What would prayer do?
Then in his 50s he contracted a very rare case of bacterial meningitis and plunged into a coma. Rushed to the hospital, he was administered antibiotics and placed on a ventilator. For six days he remained in a coma and hopes grew very dim. The chances of him resuming his former vigorous life seemed slim. All the while, though, loved ones prayed for him. His pastor, his wife, his sister, good friends, never leaving his bedside, keeping up a vigil night and day.
What they didn’t know, what Eben only recounted later, is that while they were praying he was on the journey of a lifetime, traveling to the gate of heaven, led by a beautiful angel/butterfly. For more on his extraordinary near-death experience, watch this video. One of the things I found most intriguing in his story, something I asked him about, was that when he was in that other realm he knew people were praying for him.
As he describes in his book Proof of Heaven, “Countless beings were surrounding me, kneeling in arcs that spread into the distance.” He recognized the faces of his pastor and his wife, among others, and their prayers gave him energy. They almost appeared to be candles spreading a healing light. “They were singing and praying to help me keep my spirits up.”
Eben woke up on the seventh day of his coma and made a miraculous and full recovery. He has returned to his medical practice. These days he does not take lightly any offers of prayer or look on any bedside vigil with bewilderment. How those prayers are answered is up to the divine, as he says. But that those prayers have an effect and reach a patient he doesn’t doubt. After all, he was there.
