Ian McCormack, his wife Jane and eldest two children, Lisa and Michael. All pictures courtesy of Ian McCormack

26 February, 2004

Stung five times on the arm by a box jellyfish while night diving in Mauritius 20 years ago, Ian McCormack knew his life was ending. Inspired to pray, he asked Jesus Christ into his life in what amounted to a death-bed conversion. While his body was cooling in the morgue, the young traveller found himself standing before God who offered him a second chance at life.

DAVID ADAMS writes of how a surfie from New Zealand died to find God and now travels the world telling others of his experience...

The events of the night he died are still vividly etched in Ian McCormack’s brain. It was 1982 and he was in Mauritius off the east coast of Africa - his latest destination on what he describes as a three-year “summer surfing safari”. With no surf and a chance to find some food, the 26-year-old surfer had decided to go diving with some local Creole fisherman at night. That was when it happened. A feeling “like a branding iron” on his arm. McCormack had been stung on the arm five times by a deadly box jellyfish. His life could now be counted in minutes.

“They basically dragged me out of the water and into the fishing boat,” he recalls. His body becoming paralysed, they took him straight to the hospital.

“I was dying in the ambulance and I saw my life go before me,” says McCormack, who had been brought up as a nominal Anglican but was an atheist at the time. In particular, he saw an image of his mother praying for him and telling him to call out to God for forgiveness. “So in those dying moments by personal revelation of the Lord’s Prayer, I repented and forgave others and gave my life over to Jesus. It was a last minute, death-bed prayer really, inspired predominantly just by a vision of my mother praying for me. That was the pivotal point.”

Taken to Victoria Hospital in Quatre Bornes on the western side of the island, the doctors injected him with anti-toxins to try and save him. But it was to no avail.

McCormack recalls feeling himself leaving his body. “I remember shutting my eyes...because I was so tired. At that point I felt an incredible relief that my life was finished. And that’s when the machine's monitor flat-lined,” he says.

“It was like a bizarre sensation that I didn’t have to fight anymore but then the realisation was that I wasn’t in my body but very much alive. Which is very scary for a non-Christian. Although that deathbed prayer saved me, my understanding of the fact that I was born again or saved was very, very, well, non-existent, really.”

McCormack says he was plunged into total darkness with “heavy” voices yelling and screaming at him to shut up - a place he now believes was hell.

“It was very, very frightening. A complete absence of light and other people in the same predicament hearing my thoughts as speech, telling me that I deserved to be there, telling me to shut up, telling me that I’m a coward. As I asked where I was and what was happening, they just told me...It is very difficult to convey the intensity of that spiritual darkness or the sense of emptiness”.

Reaching up to touch his face, his hand passed through it. McCormack then recalls feeling like a speck of dust as he was brought up out of the darkness down a tunnel of brilliant light.

“As I moved into that light, waves of love, peace, joy came through me from this light,” he says. His body meanwhile, while still in human form, had become transparent and filled with light.

It was then that McCormack realised he was standing before a presence hidden in a cloud of radiance who called his name and asked if he wanted to go back.

“At that point, I thought ‘Well OK, I don’t know where I am; who are you?’ because there was all this light coming from Him but you couldn’t see Him. I said ‘Well I want to go back’ and He said ‘Well, if you want to go back, you must see in a new light’.

McCormack says he then questioned the presence as to whether he was the true light and He responded with a passage which he later realised was from the Bible (I John 1:5): “God is light and in him is no darkness at all”.

“When I looked towards Him, I saw no shadow, no evil. And I thought this is God and He revealed himself to me that He was God,” he says.“I’m standing there shaking, I mean I’m absolutely completely undone: He knows my thoughts, He knows my name - everything that’s inside me, nothing’s hidden from Him - and I’m thinking, that’s Almighty God and I’m standing here? Somebody’s made a serious mistake and has got the wrong person.”

Thinking they had “beamed the wrong person up”, McCormack says he began withdrawing from the light but the light pursued him and as it touched him, he was filled with “unconditional acceptance and love” and he broke down in tears. “I’ve never felt such love and so as the love got stronger, I just wept more,” he says.

McCormack says he began to list his sins and as he did, the love got stronger and stronger. “Then I knew the grace of God.”

God was still hidden in a cloud of radiance and McCormack says he then asked whether he could actually see and speak further with God. Not receiving a negative response, he stepped into the cloud and felt healing flow through him.

“I could hardly walk any further, it was too strong,” he says. When walking became too difficult he stopped and was immediately filled with a sense of lightheartedness. It was then that he saw the Son of God, Jesus Christ, dressed in white robes with his arms reaching out in welcome and his face radiating light. “I instantly feel like my human spirit had been regenerated back to the purity of a child."

Jesus moved and revealed an open door behind him through which he could see a new world of green pastures and blue skies. “I used to think heaven was a bunch of people sitting on clouds, playing harps...” he says. “Well, I was standing there looking at a whole new earth, a crystal clear river, fields, pastures, trees, flowers - all of it without any sign of mankind on it and with it no death or destruction or sickness. The light that was on the presence of Jesus was actually radiating through the entire creation.”

Knowing he was 'home' McCormack says he was about to enter the door when Jesus stepped back in front of him and asked him if he wanted to step in or to return to earth. McCormack’s immediate response was that he didn’t want to go back - after all, no-one loved him as the Lord had.

Then God showed him his mother’s face. “I’m looking at her thinking, 'Well, if I’m dead will my dear mother know that her son had actually gone to heaven or will she think her son is in hell?' And I thought well she’d have no comprehension that I was in heaven, none at all. No evidence that my life had changed. She would have been thinking ‘My son’s gone to hell...that’s devastating for her of course’.”

So he decided to return. God told him that if he did so, he “must see through my eyes of eternity”. Looking behind him, McCormack says he saw an image of his own family standing alongside thousands of other people. He asked God why he was being shown this image and was told that if he returned McCormack was to not only tell his own family of his experience, but all these other people also. Confessing to God that he didn’t love them, he says he was then filled with with God's own love for them.

“I had an impartation then of his heart towards humanity which of course has motivated me out of that revelation to go out into the world as soon as I could and tell people about it and not stop for the last 20 odd years.”

God’s voice still in his ears, McCormack found himself lying on a slab in a morgue where doctors were pushing a sharp spike into the sole of his foot in a final check to ensure he was dead. McCormack moved in response, terrifying the doctor who then saw his open eye looking at him.

“When I looked at him, he was gone, mate...” he says. “They weren’t using electrical pads, they weren’t trying to resuscitate me. I mean I had five times lethal toxins...it’s not like a heart attack where they were trying to bring you back, this was a toxin, a killer. So there was no need to resuscitate me in any other form or try any other treatment. It was cessation of life. Death.”

McCormack says he was immediately confronted with the fact that he had been in heaven and that he had been saved in what was clearly a miracle. He later learned he had been clinically dead for about 15 minutes.

Discovering that he was paralysed from the neck down, however, McCormack immediately asked God to heal him. “As soon as I did that, instantly power hit me like low-current electricity, waves of power and warmth went through me and within a few hours I was completely healed.”

Much to the amazement of the staff at the hospital, he was able to walk out of the hospital the next day.
Local villagers didn‘t react well to his return from the dead and began stoning him, thinking McCormack was a spirit returned to haunt them. “They freaked,” he said. “They asked me to stop and I put my arm out to show them the scars on my arm and they picked up stones...they were terrified. They had no idea I was flesh and blood.”

McCormack was eventually able to return to Australia and then to his home in Tauranga on New Zealand's Bay of Plenty. There he was introduced to the Bible, reading from Genesis to Revelation in six weeks. He says that he was overwhelmed when he found evidence for what he had experienced in the Bible.

“When I read the Bible, my jaw dropped on the ground, my eyes popped out on springs. My heart nearly punched out of my chest, I was thinking: 'Unbelievable, Why on earth didn’t somebody in the church read this to us when we were kiddies? Why didn’t somebody actually talk this stuff through?'”

McCormack worked on a family farm for a year and then answered the Lord’s call to go and “preach the Gospel to the nations”. Joining the local church, he embarked on a new life as a Christian which has seen him working as a missionary in Borneo, on the team of a church in Singapore and working in a broad range of different circumstances including in refugee camps and bible schools.

He was preaching in New Zealand one day when someone filmed him giving his testimony and from that point on has been keen to share it in whatever way possible. He’s since travelled across many parts of the world, from Canada to the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland to Israel and the United States. It’s now been recorded on audio tapes, on DVDs, been the subject of radio reports, newspaper articles and television documentaries. There’s even a movie. McCormack can’t count how many times he’s told his testimony to groups such as churches, high schools and universities but some - such as when he spoke at Royal Albert Hall in London last year - he recalls as special.

McCormack and his family - his Canadian wife Jane (whom he met in Singapore in 1987) and his three children Lisa, 6, Michael, 4, and Sarah, 2 - have been living in Europe for the past three years but were recently called to come to Australia to tell his testimony. “We felt Him say He’s going to open the heaven above this nation and it’s going to catch on fire, so we’re here,” he says.

Looking back now, McCormack says he had no idea at the time how greatly his life would be transformed by a diving accident in Mauritius.

“It changed me; it totally changed me,” he says of his experience. “I don’t live for this world. Now I live for eternity.”

• You can listen to an audio file of Ian giving his testimony at www.ianmccormack.com.
• Ian’s website - and his schedule while in Australia - is at www.aglimpseofeternity.org.