(LifeSiteNews) — The prophet Amos says that God always tells His prophets before He acts. Indeed, there are those who are called by God to give incredible testimonies of Him in their lives.
My guest on today’s episode of The John-Henry Westen Show is Ed Jozsa, a pilot who learned this firsthand after suffering a severe car crash.
In May 2017, Jozsa suffered a head-on collision while driving two of his children to soccer. While he lived a Catholic life before the accident, he says that if he were asked if he were going to heaven, he would have said yes, not only because he was a Catholic, but because he was living according to what he now knows are the standards of the world. While his family suffered as a result of the accident, he tells me that it was “the best day of my life,” and that he would not change it, calling it “the beginning of a new life.”
Upon describing the accident, he explains that while the eight other people it affected walked away with relatively minor injuries, Jozsa says that the “mass chaos” of the crash was focused in his body. He was trapped in his car for over two hours, yards away from his house, his car spun around to face it.
The first thing that struck Jozsa after the crash was the “immense” pain, which he says he had to live with for weeks. He also describes his injuries, one of which has only been observed in cadavers, and the injuries to his spleen should have killed him within 20 minutes. Yet more than five hours later, he arrived at the hospital still alive, much to the surprise of his doctors. Because of his injuries, Jozsa has not been able to fly a plane since.
Jozsa also maintains that he knew that he was not going to die – knowledge he attributes to God. He was flown to Indianapolis, where he was cared for by the doctors that specialize in car crashes because of the Indianapolis 500 race. Since Jozsa is originally from Pennsylvania, going to Indiana only to get his first airline job, he considers the location of the crash and the involvement of those specialist doctors another “miracle.” His doctors, furthermore, told him that he would be addicted to pain killers, suffer depression, and never walk again.
Jozsa relates that his wife prayed that God would strengthen her faith before the wreck. If she did not have faith, Jozsa believes that she “would have been lost.” Because of the wreck, furthermore, the family’s faith has increased. “Everybody came out of this a stronger believer, because they witnessed the miracles, the impossibilities, they saw it all,” he says.
“I have been given a blessing that that every day is an opportunity to suffer, and every day is an opportunity for me to be like Simon of Cyrene, to pick up my cross and to carry it with joy and happiness,” he says. Jozsa relates that he asks Our Lord every day if He can “fill” his offering, which Jozsa carries every day for the souls in purgatory, for whatever Christ or Our Lady need, and as a prayer. Suffering, he maintains, is an opportunity we all have, that we all suffer from one thing or another, and that we must suffer and pick up the cross to attain eternal life.
While in the hospital, Jozsa underwent a mystical experience. He recalls that while in his hospital bed, he saw a bright square on the wall into which he was pulled, going through a bright “backwards tunnel” at a fast rate. At the end of the tunnel was darkness, and he was in a room where he no longer existed. He looked down at another scene from his life and began living it again. The vision in the room was so clear that it “almost hurt” his eyes, making life seem “foggy” in comparison. He also remembered having a knowledge of all things infused into his mind. However, Jozsa also realized that he had lost God.
God, Jozsa says, holds all of our souls in His hands – something he realized when he was in that room. The way God holds the soul, he also tells me, is such that if evil is to enter our lives, it must come “from the front” – we must invite evil in ourselves. “To lose God’s touch was horrifying, and horrifying is infinitely underrating to what I’m telling you,” Jozsa asserts. “It was horrifying. And … there was just such misery and fear.” Jozsa further maintains there was an entity behind him that Jozsa knew would tell him the truth and exuded neither love nor hatred but indifference.
Jozsa asked the being if he was in hell, to which it responded no. When asked if he was in purgatory, the being again said no. The being told him, Jozsa recounts, that he was in “forever,” and that where Jozsa would go from there was his own decision. From there, Jozsa saw a hellish vision, something that made him aware of his sin and feel as though he was buried in an “ocean” of it. “I could feel the weight, the cumulative weight of a lifetime of my sin crushing down on me,” he tells me. “And I was, I was just living, I was misery.”
Seeing that he knew he could get out, Jozsa attempted to apply all his infused knowledge, reciting all of Shakespeare and doing complex logic, but he found that all the knowledge in the world was not enough for him to get out. Looking at where he was, he was in agony over the loss of God, saw that the judgment was just, and agreed to it. When he did that, a light that was above him the whole time, and a blood-red liquid behind it, became brighter. When he admitted he could do nothing, he shot up above both and found himself on a green knoll. The being was back, and when asked, told Jozsa that the ordeal was over. From there, Jozsa found himself back in his hospital bed after a moment of black.
The following morning, Jozsa sent his wife away because any external stimulus put him in agony. A little later, a new nurse came, and Jozsa asked him for pain medicine. The nurse informed him that a mistake was made that morning, and Jozsa could not be given any more pain medicine until 8:00 the next morning, it now being 6:00 the morning before. And then the nurse started talking with him and sitting next to him. Not about any medicinal thing, but simply talking.
The nurse told Jozsa that he was a traveling nurse who would not return to that hospital for months. Meanwhile, Jozsa says his prognosis was such that he would have to spend months upon months in that hospital. He and the nurse spoke for three-quarters of an hour, and the nurses Jozsa speaks to tell him repeatedly that no nurse has such time, let alone that there is such a thing as a nurse who changes hospitals per diem.
“It’s funny, because I always thought that he was an angel,” says Jozsa. “And even if he wasn’t, he did something that we all can do, and he acted like an angel to me. And it’s something that we have the opportunity to do with each other.”
Jozsa closed his eyes again after the nurse left and found himself looking into a deep pit, wherein he saw creatures with multiple mouths and eyes covered in blood, wailing in despair and sorrow. He opened his eyes,to find himself back in bed, though every time he opened his eyes, he found himself looking back into hell. He compares the fear to a lack of God, but he found that the fear was one of despair. He prayed to Christ to send the Holy Ghost so the visions would stop, though he admits he thought Christ would not send the Spirit and attempted to keep his eyes open.
Resolving to pray again, Jozsa asked Christ to take the pain, though thinking it unfair to ask One Who died for the world, Jozsa asked Christ if he could carry the pain for the salvation of the world. Prayer itself, meanwhile, was a “foreign thought” to Jozsa, and he had never heard of redemptive suffering, hence he believes that prayer comes from God. Upon praying to Christ about the Passion, Jozsa closed his eyes to find a ball of light the size of a grapefruit before him.
When he opened his eyes, he heard a voice say “brain damage.” Closing his eyes, Jozsa saw the light again, but opening his eyes he heard “brain damage” again. Meanwhile, Jozsa miraculously suffered no brain damage. Upon going to press the button to call the nurse, Jozsa heard a voice tell him, “Look at it. It is the Holy Spirit.” He heard the voice again when he tried to press the button, though Jozsa relates that he heard the same voice at other times in his life, at one point prompting him to save a girl from danger when he was a teenager.
Closing his eyes again, Jozsa realized the light was the Holy Ghost, and the light moved at a fast rate through space, growing until He became an immense light. Looking at the light, Jozsa says a fog covered it, and formed a cross. The light, he also understood, had an immediate power everywhere, and that no one could conquer it. “His power was everywhere,” Jozsa says. “And it was vast.” Like the other vision, Jozsa had complete knowledge, but he adds that this time the clarity did not hurt him. He also describes how he was filled with God, and how he went into God.
Jozsa woke up the next morning with no pain, but the pain came back the following day, the next time he took pain medicine. Once he got home, Jozsa didn’t take any of the pain medicine, understanding what redemptive suffering was. Speaking to his faith, Jozsa goes to daily Mass when he can. He speaks with a spiritual director and confesses his sins regularly, also offering daily commentaries on the daily Mass readings based on his experience. Because of his experience, however, he says that his sins weigh on him more than most, and he says he can see sin coming.
Now, Jozsa sees it as his mission to make people aware of redemptive suffering. The Enemy, he says, lies to people and gets them to think that our happiness can be found in this world. However, Jozsa insists that the way we spend eternity depends on how we act and honor God in this life.
For more from Ed Jozsa, tune in to this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.
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