Violent Car Crash Sends A Boy to Heaven, He Returns With Messages For You
After a violent car accident, teenage Aldo McPherson traveled with Jesus to heaven and hell. Following a supernatural and miraculous healing, Aldo came back with messages from heaven.
In this excerpt, Retha McPherson, his mother, explains the journey and how one particular message from Aldo changed her life . . . and it can change yours too.
At the outset of 2004, to an outsider looking in, my life could have been described as perfect.
I was crowned as Mrs. South Africa, and my business was flourishing. I had a wonderful husband at my side, two beautiful boys to fill the quiver…and I was totally sold out to the world and all the glitz and glamour it had to offer me.
For the most part, my life revolved around my children. After struggling to conceive with both of them, I was like a protective hen over her chicks. My kids were not allowed to drive with anyone besides me. I was determined to protect them – I will take care of them, I will provide, I will protect, will decide. I was controlling everyone around me. My entire world revolved around me, myself, and I, until the Lord brought me to face a big red stop sign in June 2004. There I learned how weak I really was.
An automobile accident changed the course of my picture perfect life, irrevocably. My husband, Tinus, our two sons, and I were returning home from one of my speaking engagements as Mrs. South Africa. We were on a busy highway, when a stationary vehicle in the middle of the road, left Tinus no other option but to swerve off the road to avoid a collision and to miss the oncoming traffic. Josh, my youngest child, was two years old at the time, and Aldo, my eldest, was twelve. Both the children were thrown from the vehicle on impact. We found Josh lying near the wreckage, but Aldo was nowhere to be found.
After what felt like an eternity, I found Aldo’s limp body on the other side of the highway. His skull was cracked and hot blood was trickling from his ears. He was already in a coma. I heard the sound of another oncoming vehicle that swerved off the road to avoid the accident scene, and I immediately jumped up from where we laid hidden. At that moment, the vehicle’s headlights completely blinded me, and suddenly my whole body started shaking. When my body relaxed, I felt a fire running over me, followed by the peace of God that truly transcends all human understanding. Although I kneeled at my child’s broken body, I still experienced a peace that was totally supernatural.
Nothing can prepare any parent for such a moment. Since then, His peace has never left me. Yes, I do go through valleys and over hills just like the rest of you, but His peace has always been with me. There, at the side of the road, kneeling beside my unconscious son, I met the God of the supernatural. Aldo was immediately airlifted to the hospital. The emergency medical team tried to reassure us that he was in good and capable hands, but they also warned us that he was badly hurt, and they couldn’t guarantee that he would pull through. Their biggest concern was his head injury that resulted from the intensity of the impact. We later found out that his midbrain, brainstem, and the front part of his left lobe sustained the most damage. For weeks after the accident, Aldo was still in a coma.
One night I had a dream, and in this dream I could clearly see that my son was at the brink of death. In fact, I thought it would be mere moments before he breathed his last breath. In the dream, I saw his fingers shrinking and his lips turning blue. (In the natural, we had been vigorously fighting for his life for weeks, but he showed no signs of improvement and he was still in a coma. To tell you the truth, I was starting to doubt if we could win this battle.)
In the dream I said to him, ‘Aldo, Mommy is going to let you go to Jesus now.’
But he looked at me and replied back, ‘No, Mom. You must speak life over me!’
I didn’t really know what he wanted me to say by ‘speaking life,’ but the Holy Spirit, our Wisdom from God, came to my aid. Suddenly, the words of John 10:10 were illuminated in my heart. It was as if a light was switched on, and I knew and understood that the devil came to kill, steal, and destroy – but Jesus Christ came that we may have life and life in abundance! This was the life Aldo wanted me to speak over him!
In the dream, I immediately started speaking life over Aldo as he had told me to do. I could visibly see the strength and life slowly returning to Aldo’s crumpled body. His fingers started growing and color returned to his lips.
I woke up very puzzled by the dream, but I knew something had changed and that we were at a turning point in his recovery.
One week passed, seemingly with no change in his condition. He was still in a coma, and the doctors still had little hope for his recovery. After my dream, I had hoped to see an immediate change in his condition, but nothing happened. His frail little body still seemed lifeless. Nevertheless, Tinus and I took turns, and we kept on speaking Scriptures, proclaiming the life Jesus came to give, over and over into Aldo’s spirit. The dream was so real to me; I knew God gave it to me for a very specific reason.
What I did not comprehend at that stage, was the spiritual law of sowing and reaping. First, there needs to be seeds of life in the ground before a harvest of life can spring forth. By speaking words of life you sow life, and with time you will see the fruit of life come into your storehouse.
Aldo’s heart rate was still very low, and his chance of survival was, medically speaking, hanging by a thread. I closed my ears to the doctor’s reports and repeatedly said, ‘Aldo, you shall have life in abundance!’
I remember standing at the end of his bed, listening to the machines, and feeling totally helpless. I realized that I had no control over what would happen next; whether he lived or whether he died, was not in my hands. It doesn’t matter who you are, or how much money and influence you have; God, and God alone, holds the power over life and death. This mother that was always in full control of each and every situation, suddenly realized she could do nothing!
Heaven & Hell
Retha & Aldo McPherson
In my desperation, I ran to the room next to ICU where we were sleeping, pulled my jacket over my head, and called out to God with everything inside of me. I called with my entire being – spirit to Spirit…and God answered. The Word of God tells us; those who seek God, will find Him! At that moment, He shined a bright light into my heart, and my whole life seemed to flash before my eyes. It is a very sobering experience when you look at your life through God’s light (His light is so bright, it exposes everything), and then realize that nothing is hidden from before His eyes.
It was here that I came to the end of myself, and all I could utter was, ‘Father, help me! I am lost!’ The, I in my life was always written in a capital letter, but in the presence of the Almighty I AM, the I had no other choice but to bend its knee. In His presence, pride cannot stand. There every knee bows spontaneously and every tongue proclaims that Jesus is Lord (see Philippians 2:10-11).
Only once you are faced with the reality of who God really is do you begin to understand for what purpose He has created you – to be one with Him, totally dependent on Him, loving Him from a pure heart, and worshipfully fearing Him. I know today that total dependency on God is the door to intimacy with Him. Intimacy was something I never understood before; in fact, I didn’t even know it existed! For forty years of my life, I worshiped God from my flesh. God is spirit, and that is why He says He is looking for a people who will worship Him in spirit and truth. That is the reason why I could never hear His voice.
But on this day, things were different. My spirit connected to God’s Spirit, and I heard God speaking to me in an audible voice: ‘Retha, do you believe My Son Jesus paid the full price on the cross; that His sacrifice was perfect and complete?’ I was raised in the Church and knew the answer to that question from my dogma. I immediately answered, ‘Yes, Lord.’ Although I was a churchgoer, I didn’t really know God, or fully understand the blood of Jesus. I found out that day, that there is a big difference between knowing about Jesus and actually knowing Him. To know Him is truth and life. To know about Him is rules, regulations, and tradition. Please, I urge you to listen carefully to my words today – to belong to a church is not enough! The King is seeking a love relationship with His Bride and a love relationship is much more than an hour on a Sunday.
After Father God asked me that initial question, He spoke to me in the most loving voice I have ever heard: ‘Retha, My Son gave His life for you. Now I am asking you – are you willing to give your life to Me?’
At that moment, God showed me the cross and Jesus hanging on it. And here, for the first time in my life, I understood the blood of Christ. It is the blood of the Lamb that truly and completely frees us, heals us, and restores us.
I then saw a veil drop from heaven and as it tore open; I saw the outer court, the inner court, and the Holy of Holies. I also intrinsically knew the life I had led for the past forty years was only built in the outer court.
God said to me, ‘I want you to take off all your masks and come follow Me. I am not interested in your pretenses or superficial good works, but in your entire life! You must repent of your sin and turn your back on it. I want to cleanse you with the blood of Jesus. Only the blood of Jesus can cleanse sin and remove it from you as far as the East is from the West. I will never think upon it again once the blood of the Lamb has washed it clean.’
Down on my knees, face to the ground, I repented as events flashed before my eyes and as the Holy Spirit convicted me in my heart. Finally, after forty years, I was freed in one moment. I could see the selfish I on the cross with Jesus, because I had died and my life was now hidden with Christ in God (see Colossians 3:3). But I was also raised with Him to a new life! Like Paul, I could now also say it is no longer I that live, but Christ that lives in me; Jesus, my hope of glory! (see Galatians 2:20; Colossians 1:27.)
Thereafter, God said to me, ‘You need to be filled with My Holy Spirit.’
‘Father, You know how many times I have asked this of you before. Why can I only receive this gift now?’
Knowingly, His reply came, ‘I could not fill you My child, because there was no place for the Holy Spirit in your life. You were too full of yourself. A person needs to come to Me empty (dead to self), before I can fill him with My Holy Spirit.’
I always thought of myself as building my house on the Rock, only to discover with a shock, that my life was built on sinking sand. What I had been seeking for so long, through striving and my works, God gave me in an instant. He could fill me with His precious Holy Spirit because I was finally empty of ‘Retha.’ I handed my life over to God and gave the Holy Spirit full permission to take over, and then God said, ‘Retha, you can now enter the Holy of Holies. I have been waiting a long time for you to come.’
What was supposed to be the worst day of my life turned out to be the best day, because that day, I met the King! And this is where deep calls unto deep, where spirit meets Spirit, where weakness is turned into strength, and mourning into dancing. The greatest treasure is to know Him and to be known by Him. In His presence you will find love, peace, acceptance, healing for a broken heart, and healing for a broken body. It is here, in this place, that I was overwhelmed by His goodness and felt Him smiling over His creation. I sensed how He loved the way He created me, even my curly hair that brings me so much frustration!
We have to realize that everything we will ever need is found in Him. There we will hear His heartbeat, and there He will reveal Himself to us. One second in His presence and my destiny changed forever! Finally, the veil over my eyes was removed.
‘Father, please, I never want to lose this!’ I said through my tears. I cried for the forty years, that I never knew there was more to my walk with God than just head-knowledge about Him. There I realized I am His beloved daughter, not merely just a face in the crowd.
God spoke to me again and said, ‘You could have been here a long time ago, but you were busy worshiping another god.’
Taken aback, I replied, ‘No, Lord. That can’t be! I have been a Christian all my life!’
‘My child, anything you love more than Me is an idol (see 1 John 5:21). It can be your job, your body, your husband; it can even be your children.’
(In my case, my children were definitely an idol in my life, but I am sad to say they weren’t the only one.)
‘Are you willing to offer your child to Me?’
Everything in me turned cold at His final question. Just as God asked it of Abraham, He asked it of me. He was asking me to sacrifice my Isaac. (Maybe He is even asking the same question of you today.) I realized I could not risk losing this precious gift of His presence, and that is why I gave God permission to have His way with Aldo. ‘Yes, Lord. Take him. He belongs to You now.’
I realized then, that our priorities need to come in line with God’s order: always God first, then our spouse, then our children, then our job. If we put God anywhere except right at the top of our list, we will never walk in the fullness of our divine purpose.
God says to all His children whose priorities are not in order: ‘I am a jealous God and I have this against My children, that they have forsaken their first love. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent and do the first works’ (see Revelation 2:4-5).
God was definitely not my first love in the past. My children held that place, then my husband, then my job, and the last few minutes of the day belonged to God. Normally, I would be lying in bed by then asking God for all the things I thought I needed, and if He didn’t respond in my prescribed time period, I would grumble.
Only after laying down my life before the King, was I allowed entrance into the Holy of Holies – the throne room of God. God’s shekinah glory drenched the whole place. The first thing I wanted to do was to fall on my face before the King, and that is exactly what I did. I saw Aldo lying with me, and God’s hand was stretched out toward him.
‘I am going to raise up this child, and He will tell the world that Jesus is alive! He no longer belongs to you, he now belongs to Me; and you, My child, will have to walk the walk of faith. Faith is not what you see, but what you hope for. Remember, life is not about you, and from now on your lives belong to Me.’
To my shame, I thought to myself, ‘But today is different, Lord. Today, it is about me. Just look at my child and see my broken heart!’
God knew my thoughts and answered, ‘It is not even about your pain or heartache. At the end of the day, it is all about Me. You need to hand over everything in your life, so I can breathe My life into it. I let all things work together for the good of those who love Me and who are called according to My purpose’ (see Romans 8:28).
When I finally opened my eyes, almost two hours had passed by. I ran back to the ICU to find my son breathing on his own, even after they switched off the machines. Two hours earlier, we were planning for the worst, but now I had new hope, the God kind of hope – I had faith!
Even after they switched off the machines and Aldo breathed on his own, he was still in a coma for a long time and suffered a lot of pain. At long last he woke up, but his muscles were spastic and he couldn’t eat, or walk, or talk. The doctors could do nothing more for him and we were given permission to take him home.
Through it all, we never stopped speaking life over him. As an act of faith, we started doing exercises with Aldo, and we firmly placed our hope in Jesus, believing that He would make him walk again.
Throughout this recovery process, there were many different kinds of therapists visiting him every day. One day, a therapist brought him the alphabet and a blank piece of paper. She encouraged him to draw on the paper, attempting to relieve some of the frustration he was dealing with. I silently sat and looked at the scenario playing off in front of me.
With a heart full of faith, I asked him, ‘Aldo, do you want to write?’ His head was drooping, but with the slightest movement of his head he indicated to me, in a way that only a mother could understand. Without saying a word, I heard a loud and clear, ‘Yes, definitely Mom!’ in my spirit.
I put the pen in his spastic hand and supported his palm with my hand. Slowly the movement started, and he wrote, ‘Thank you, Mommy, that you gave me to Jesus. If you didn’t do it, I would have been dead today.’
You can just imagine how I jumped up and down from excitement! How did he know that? He was in a coma, and I was on the other side of the ICU when that happened.
Later he wrote to me, ‘Mommy, do you remember at the accident scene, while you were laying over me in the grass, you looked up into Jesus’ eyes? He came and picked me up and took me to heaven with Him. He showed me heaven and hell. He was busy teaching me the entire time while we were in heaven. There were a lot of kids in heaven. I saw Moses and Abraham. The angels and everyone there were so happy, and nobody was sick.’
In another one of his letters he wrote:
Will you please always work for Jesus, Mommy? We know that He is alive because we were both with Him in the throne room. He is going to heal me 100 percent. Like clay, God will form me into a new man with His hands, all for His honor. God will use me because I am His child and I will lift up His name. I honor God because I am alive!
And this is how we started communicating with our son. For months, Aldo only wrote us letters, until we saw the next miracle taking place in front of our eyes: Aldo started talking! Very slowly, in monotone, he began conveying only his most basic needs, but it was the sweetest sound imaginable after months of silence.
Due to the nature of his injury, what he says doesn’t always come out the way he intends and that is why he prefers to write when he has something important on his heart. We quickly learned that most mornings he has a message from God that he wants to write down. We bought him a journal to pen these messages each morning as the Holy Spirit imprinted them on his heart the previous night.
And so the first book, A Message From God, came to be. Aldo wrote about the children he saw in heaven, the houses, Moses, Abraham, and so much more. In the book the Bride of Christ is encouraged, and warned, to prepare herself for the return of the King, because He is coming soon.
Our family came to know a supernatural God with whom nothing is impossible. Aldo was sent back by God for a specific purpose. Aldo walks with God throughout the day, and at night Jesus takes him on heavenly journeys. Aldo saw heaven and hell, but mostly only wrote about heaven. When we asked him to write about hell, he would say, ‘Jesus said at the right time He will talk about hell.’
Well, the time is at hand.
Heaven and Hell is the second book co-authored by Retha McPherson and her teenage son Aldo.
It tells of Aldo’s miraculous healing and their supernatural journey since a car accident almost claimed Aldo’s life in 2004. The book contains journal entries in Aldo’s own handwriting wherein he warns the bride of Christ to be ready for the soon arrival of the King. During Aldo’s coma Jesus took him to heaven and hell. “Aldo rarely wanted to talk or write about hell. Jesus said he had to wait for the right time,” Retha explains. She goes on to say, “That time is now here. He recently told me Jesus said to him, ‘Aldo, tell My bride – BE PREPARED, I am coming soon.’”
Aldo’s letters will open your eyes to the reality of heaven and hell and the implications of your choices here on earth. The book explains that the road of dying to self and living in Christ is what purifies the bride, and this can only be done if you walk by faith and not by sight – believing that God is who He says He is.
