Dr. Pamela Pyle wasn’t a believer when she started her career in medicine, but a series of supernatural events changed that reality.
Pyle, author of “Anticipating Heaven: Spiritual Comfort and Practical Wisdom for Life’s Final Chapters,” told CBN News she started practicing medicine in 1989 — a time when she and her husband didn’t have a personal relationship with God.
“Beginning my practice in medicine … I saw so many things — acute cases, tragedies, accidents — that I didn’t have a solution for,” she said. “As a physician, it was discouraging, especially as a young physician. I had some really tragic cases early on.”
But when Pyle reached her mid-30s, something happened that shifted her faith dynamic: her husband accepted Jesus after a near-death experience (NDE).
“I was in the ambulance at the time,” she recalled of the terrifying ordeal. “He was unconscious, and I didn’t think he would survive. But Jesus did save him, both physically and spiritually.”
Pyle said her husband experienced a “cold darkness” and a troubling NDE that left him thinking quite differently about life once he survived:
“I think Jesus gave him that taste of death,” she said, noting the experience eventually became part of the couple’s testimony.
But Pyle said she wasn’t initially receptive to the experience or the life change that followed.
“When he recovered enough to be able to kind of relate this experience to me, and he was this transformed person, I wasn’t very happy,” she said, expressing her belief that the NDE was something other than supernatural. “I was so … sure that he’d had some kind of neurologic event due to low blood flow.”
Even with neurological testing, though, everything came back normal. Over time, her husband’s relationship with Jesus grew, and Pyle remained perturbed by it.
“He was reading the Bible, kind of hiding from me because I had a lot of anger then,” she said, explaining her reluctance to embrace faith based on the past and wondering why her husband had so radically shifted and changed. “He prayed for me … for two years and we had a miracle in our life during that time.”
Pyle’s husband just kept praying as she journeyed, but then another event shocked the couple. Their son, who was born blind, experienced an incredible miracle: the return of his sight.
The healing started with what she described as “an incredible experience at a church,” where people came up to pray over her son and family. She believes that prayer made an impact.
“He had nystagmus, which is that wandering of the eyes because there’s nothing to focus on, and we just thought he was a really attentive watching everything,” Pyle said. “It was a really hard experience for a good friend who was our pediatrician having to tell us that he was blind.”
After the aforementioned church service, Pyle’s husband was changing his son’s diaper. At the time, he was wearing a tie with stripes on it. He tossed the tie over his shoulder and his baby son suddenly looked at it and focused — something that shocked him.
The baby was focusing with his eyes.
“It was unreal,” Pyle said. “As a non-believer then, I’m like, ‘Well … there’s a medical explanation for this, which, it wasn’t even until it was much later that [I] look back and go, ‘Well, it had to have been a miracle.’”
She continued, “The doctors, they didn’t have an explanation for it.”
Eventually, Pyle accepted Christ and now openly shares her faith, with these events helping her along the way. She believes she’s seen other miracles as well.
Her book “Anticipating Heaven: Spiritual Comfort and Practical Wisdom for Life’s Final Chapters” explores eternity and preparing for the end of life — something she’s had to cope with a great deal as a doctor.
Pyle, who knows full well not everyone receives a healing, said she’s seen suffering over the years but also knows God’s goodness.
“My theology is: God is good and I trust Him,” she said. “It’s just … years and years of … having to see suffering and living through suffering, but then always loving God and trusting Him with outcomes.”