A Glimpse of Heaven

The Testimony of Lisa Ann Renfro (1965–2024)
NDE As told to and preserved by Claudia Reed

I didn’t set out to write this story. I set out to keep a promise.

But before I can tell you what happened to Lisa Ann Renfro, you need to know who she was.

Lisa was the oldest of two sisters, growing up in the 80s with that perfect mix of independence, edge, and heart that defined that era. She would be the first to tell you she had a bit of a wild side back then—but underneath it all, she was always fiercely loyal. The kind of friend who showed up, who stayed, who loved deeply and didn’t do anything halfway. She was a St. Louis girl at heart. That was home. That was where her story started. She was a protective older sister to Jayna, an amazing woman, and a loving mom and grandmother too. 

But in 2017, Lisa made a bold decision to start over. She moved to the Lake of the Ozarks to build a new life—one she chose intentionally. And she didn’t just ease into it… she went all in. She got her real estate license and quickly began building a career that reflected who she was: driven, smart, relational, and completely committed. She worked in both residential and commercial real estate, including projects with Dollar General stores and Old Kinderhook. And she was good—really good. By the early 2020s, she had become the #1 in sales revenue in the Lake area.

But something else was happening during that time, too. As she was building her life at the lake, she was also growing in her faith. Lisa loved God—not in a quiet, surface-level way, but in a way that was becoming deeper, more personal, and more real to her with each passing year. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t polished. But it was genuine.

And then, in June of 2021, everything changed.

What started as something small—antibiotic eye drops—turned into a severe anaphylactic reaction. It escalated quickly. Life-threatening quickly. She was with her daughter, Jordan, at the time, and that moment—what Jordan did next—would save her life. Jordan recognized immediately that something was very wrong, and instead of trying to make it to the hospital, she made a split-second decision to pull into a nearby firehouse. That decision changed everything.

The firefighters administered four EpiPens just to stabilize Lisa before rushing her to the hospital. Once there, she was intubated and placed in intensive care. Her body was shutting down. And while doctors worked to save her life, Lisa was experiencing something else entirely.

She would later try to explain it to me over the course of many conversations, and every time she did, she struggled—not because she didn’t remember, but because there simply aren’t words for what she experienced. She said it didn’t feel like she was floating away the way people might expect. She said it felt like she was vibrating—not gone, not fully here, but somehow existing between two places at once. She knew she was in a hospital bed, and at the same time… she knew she was somewhere else. Somewhere more real than anything she had ever known.

The first thing she became aware of was the sound. But calling it “music” doesn’t really capture it. She described it as a deep, resonating vibration—a kind of “booming yet quiet hum.” It wasn’t separate from the space around her. It was the atmosphere. It filled everything, and it carried something with it—reverence, worship, a kind of holiness that wasn’t just heard, but felt through her entire being.

Then there was the light. Not a light off in the distance. Not something she was moving toward. It was everywhere—an all-encompassing, living light that surrounded her completely. And in the middle of that light… she saw Him. Jesus.

She told me His presence was overwhelming in the most peaceful way—not frightening, not disorienting, just absolute. And what struck her most were the details. She kept coming back to His coat. It was seamless—no beginning, no end. It didn’t sit still. It moved in every direction at once, as if it existed outside of the rules we live by here. The fabric itself seemed alive, glowing, shifting, flowing. And within it were tiny lights—like stars—each one part of a whole that was somehow perfectly unified. It wasn’t stitched together. It was held together by something divine.

And as she tried to explain all of this to me, she would always stop at some point and say the same thing: “I’ve never felt more alive than I did there.” Not peaceful the way we casually use the word—completely free. Free of fear, free of pain, free of weight. She loved Jesus – he was love. She told me there are no English words that fully describe it, that everything about Jesus and that place—every sound, every sensation—was different from anything here, and better.

At some point during that experience, she became aware that she had something she needed to do. She said Jesus communicated (without words) that she needed to remove something. At the time, she didn’t fully understand what that meant—only that it had something to do with freedom. And in that state, somehow aware of both worlds at once, she began pulling at something. What she was actually pulling was the intubation tube in her airway.

There was resistance. It wasn’t easy. It was physical and difficult. But she knew she had to do it. That moment—the act of pulling that tube—became the bridge back to her body.

When she came to, she realized what had happened. The tube had caused lasting damage to her vocal cords. But she was alive. And as she came back into consciousness, something came with her: “Amazing Grace.”

She told me that while she was in that in-between place, the words of that song started coming to her. At first, she couldn’t remember all of it, but the more she sang, the clearer it became—almost like the song itself was pulling her back, anchoring her. That song and particularly Christian music, stayed with her for the rest of her life.

After that experience, everything shifted—but not in a way that erased her humanity. Lisa didn’t suddenly lose all fear of dying. She still had questions. She still carried the weight of what her body had been through, and the reality of what it would mean to leave behind her daughter, her sister, and her two beautiful granddaughters. But what she did have was something deeper than certainty—she had assurance. She knew that Jesus was real. She knew heaven was real. And even in the moments where fear or anxiety crept in, there was something underneath it all that hadn’t been there before—a quiet knowing that she had seen what waited on the other side.

That assurance would matter more than she could have known at the time.

And about a year later, that knowledge would be tested. In August of 2022, she was diagnosed with pancreatic (bile duct) cancer like her father had battled. And yet she walked through it differently than most people would. There was a peace about her that didn’t make sense unless you knew what she had seen. She had already been there. She already knew.

We spent a lot of time together, and with her beautiful sister Jayna, during that last year of her life—sitting, talking, sometimes laughing, sometimes just being quiet. And through all of it, she kept sharing pieces of her experience with me. That’s why I kept writing things down—every detail, every description, every moment she tried to explain something that doesn’t really belong to this world.

Because she had a mission. She wanted people to know what she had seen. She wanted them to know that Jesus and heaven are absolutely real. 

When I was asked to speak at her memorial, I remember standing there feeling the weight of getting it right. This wasn’t just a story—it was hers. And when I finished, the room was silent. Then people came up to me—some with tears in their eyes, some saying they had goosebumps, one man telling me it brought him back to the faith he had as a child.

That’s when I knew this wasn’t just something meant to be spoken once. It needed to be written.

Lisa Ann Renfro passed away in July of 2024. But I don’t think of this as the end of her story. I think of it as the reason she came back.

And this… this is my way of keeping the promise I made to her—to make sure her glimpse of heaven reaches anyone who needs to hear it.

Because if there is one thing Lisa was absolutely certain of, it’s this— Jesus is 100% light and love, and heaven is real.