“The first time you open your parachute, it’s pretty amazing. It’s so peaceful. The panorama—you’re hanging a half a mile above the earth. So it wasn’t about the adrenaline; it was about the pleasure. It was about the pleasure of being in free fall. Feeling like you could fly.”
Mickey Robinson was a professional skydiver; he loved falling from the heavens and drifting safely to earth. But one day just after takeoff for a practice jump, the plane’s engine stalled, hurling Mickey and his companions toward the ground at over 100 miles an hour. “The motor just quit and we had an aerodynamic stall. It was no hope. You had seconds, and then we impacted.”
The plane hit the ground and cart wheeled to a stop. “With my leg sticking out what was now a hole inside of the fuselage, and with my hand I was pulling, but something had a hold of my equipment, and I was trapped. And I was soaked with airplane gasoline and on fire from head to toe.”
His friend fought through the flames and pulled Mickey out. In severe pain and losing consciousness, Mickey asked God for help. “For the first time in my life, a man that was totally self sufficient, I relied on my own natural ability and my own strength. For the first time in my life, I called out to a God I didn’t even know and never served. I just said, ‘God, please help me. I’m sorry. Give me another chance.’”
At the hospital, it was quickly evident to the doctors that his chances of survival were not good. “They didn’t think I’d make it through the night. They thought I’d die of shock. I had head trauma, massive lacerations, tremendous burns over my body, and I had some internal injuries they really didn’t even know about. My organs were actually shutting down. I had sepsis, that’s interior infection all over the inside of your lining of your body. My body was fighting a battle that in the natural there was no way it could win. I could feel just life leaking out of me.”
“At that point I had an experience– I had no grid for this at all. My inner being, my spirit man went perpendicular to my body. I was like immediately ejected and transported and I all of a sudden was thrust into a spiritual dimension. I looked at myself and there was nothing wrong with me. This was a real place. And I was also traveling. I had no control over what was going on. I was like on an upward glide path. I saw a white portal in the distance and I felt a peace about it –emanating from it. So I was heading towards there.”
“Then I felt a pressure on my right side just as I was about there. And I looked. I looked into something I can only describe as blacker, an abyss that was blacker than black. This was eternal. This thing, the more I looked at it, the more it closed to where I was almost by this white portal and it was eclipsing it and I cried out the same, clumsy, desperate thing I’d said in the ambulance, in the emergency room, on the operating table, ‘No God! I’m sorry. I want to live. I want to be alive.’ And as those words gushed out, desperately out of my spirit, I was thrust through this white portal and instantly I was standing in the presence of Almighty God. And I knew I would never die. It transcended everything I knew or could imagine about the great things in the world. It went above and beyond all –anything I could imagine.”
Mickey clearly remembers how he felt, “The love of God is, It’s so pure, it’s so perfect, it’s so incredible. I didn’t see any creatures, I didn’t see any angels, I didn’t see the pearly gates, Peter checking ID’s, and all this stuff in people’s concepts. I didn’t see any of that. But the glory of God, the radiance of God, but mostly God Himself and the magnificence of His love is—the undiluted love of God was being poured into me. There was nothing negative allowed to be in the presence of God. So I was pure and I was innocent. And it’s so incredible the ecstasy, the bliss, the joy, all the stuff we’ve read about, when you really experience it, we don’t have words. We’re going to have to invent new words.”
Despite wanting to stay in heaven, Mickey says he was sent back to his body. He says, “My spirit came back from the presence of God, came to the hospital, sank into my body, much like when a person would slip a glove on their hand. And I was so full of life and love. And around the bed was about a half a dozen doctors and nurses, and I had this ability to know what they were experiencing. And these people were terrified. They just saw me die and come back to life. And they were scared of what they saw. And there I am, whatever was left of my face had a silly grin, I was full of joy. I was so happy to be alive and I had—I had this love and I didn’t know what to call it. But I loved everybody and everything.”
Mickey says from that day on he began to see God working miracles in his life. Doctors said he would not be able to walk again due to nerve damage in his legs, but the nerves regenerated and after five years of blindness in his right eye, his sight was restored. “Part of God’s love is His ability to restore. And everything that was lost, He’s been restoring. You really appreciate your life when it’s restored. I think any amount of restoration; we need to really thank God for it. And to think that the huge amount of restoration I have, I need to be grateful every day.”
He wrote a book detailing his experiences called Falling into Heaven. Mickey says of all the miracles he has been a part of in his life, it is God’s love that has meant the most to him.
“I’m blown away that God loves me. I’m blown away that I –God took a mess and made a masterpiece out of it. Not my masterpiece; His.”
Mickey has traveled the world proclaiming the love of God and the healing power of Jesus that he has experienced during his second chance at life on earth.
“There’s only one path to God.” He says, “Jesus says, ‘I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And no one comes to the Father but through Me.’ The blind see. The lame walk. The dead are raised. I didn’t have leprosy, but I did have pretty bad skin problems. And He binds up the broken hearted. If we did a forensic study, and checked all the fingerprints, they would only add up to Jesus Christ. He’s the same yesterday, today, and forever. Nobody else could do this but Jesus Christ.