A Nurse’s Near-Death Experience: Lessons in Energy and Love

For Penny Wittbrodt, life on the hospital floor was routine until the day she became the patient. After a severe allergic reaction shut down her airway, the nurse who had comforted countless others slipped out of her body and discovered that death was not the end. Instead, it was a classroom of energy, love, and unspoken truth.

Crossing Over

The reaction escalated quickly. By the time Penny reached the ER, her chest rattled with stridor and her vision faded. As doctors fought for her life, she slipped into darkness.

It was not ordinary dark but a suffocating void. She could breathe, but slowly and heavily, yet there was nothing around her. No floor, no horizon. She felt alone in a prison of her own making, waiting.

Far away, a glimmer broke the black. Penny discovered she could move toward it by shifting her whole being forward. The light grew into a window and a view of her hospital room. She saw her daughter, flannel shirt brushing against the ventilator tubing, silently praying. When Penny reached to embrace her, an invisible barrier stopped her. In an instant she was yanked back into the dark.

The darkness cracked again, this time filled with realization. Her loneliness, her guardedness after years of pain, had shaped this prison. And now it was breaking.

Encounters and Messages

Out of the light emerged her grandmother — radiant, towering, crowned with copper hair and piercing green eyes. She pulled Penny close without touching. “Calm yourself, dear one.” With that command, waves of peace replaced panic.

Her grandmother’s presence reminded her of something she had once memorized in nursing school. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It only changes form. Life, Penny saw, followed the same law.

Then came a greater light, vast and undeniable. A voice filled her: I am.

In a life review, Penny was shown not the major achievements she had once thought mattered, but tiny choices. The time she covered a stranger’s grocery bill and set off a chain of generosity. The silent criticism she held against a colleague, which carried weight she never realized.

The message was unmistakable: thoughts are energy. They shape reality just as much as spoken words. Look for good and magnify it. Release judgment — it binds others from becoming who they were meant to be.

One vision struck her deeply. She asked why her children had to endure pain after their father left. She was shown a future moment: her son at a soccer game, promising to be the father he never had. Generational wounds would heal through him. And years later, she lived to see it unfold exactly as shown.

One vision struck her deeply. She asked why her children had to endure pain after their father left. The question carried all the weight of a mother’s heartbreak. In response, she was shown a moment years in the future. Her son stood on the sidelines of a soccer field, watching his own child sprint down the grass. With tears in his eyes, he whispered, “I am going to be the dad to him that I deserved.”

The scene shimmered with hope. It wasn’t just her son’s healing, but it was the breaking of a chain, the mending of something carried through generations. The message was clear: suffering can transform, and love has the power to rewrite entire family lines. When that exact moment later came to pass in waking life, Penny recognized it instantly as confirmation that what she had seen in the light was real.

From there, the vision carried her deeper still. The field of grass dissolved, giving way to spiraling strands of DNA unfolding before her. Each turn pulsed with light, alive and intelligent. As she looked closer, a voice asked gently, “Do you see me?” In what scientists once dismissed as “junk DNA,” Penny recognized the unmistakable presence of the divine. God was not some distant overseer but intimately woven into the very architecture of her being. The message settled into her: You are made on purpose, for a purpose. You are loved not for what you accomplish, but because you were imagined, designed, and brought into existence with intention.

Return

Penny chose to come back. She woke in the hospital, told the nurse she had just been with God, and watched polite smiles form. When the room dimmed, the presence appeared again and, with humor and tenderness, asked why His sudden arrival startled her. I am never gone. He asked Penny to share a simple message. He is the Creator. We are made on purpose for a purpose. Say yes to the moment in front of you.

Reflections

The aftermath brought changes. Penny said yes to speaking publicly despite lifelong social anxiety. She leaned into connection rather than protective isolation. Above all, she began treating thoughts as actions with real energetic effects. The most meaningful work, she learned, happens in the ordinary moment where someone needs what you can give.

Penny Whitbroat

“You are made on purpose, for a purpose.
Purpose lives not in grand gestures but in the next small moment.”

Key Takeaways

• NDEs often reveal that thoughts and intentions carry energy, not just actions.
• Healing can ripple through generations when love replaces pain.
• Life’s meaning often unfolds in small, ordinary moments.

Curious about my writing process? Learn how I made this post.

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