Photo: Getty Images, Dave Basner
Madie Johnson's aunt, Tina Hines, recently died. This would normally be incredibly sad news however, Tina was revived. In fact, after suffering a heart attack, Hines was resuscitated six times - four by her husband with CPR and two more times at the hospital with a defibrillator. In total, Tina was considered dead for 27 minutes. When she was brought back for good, she wasn't able to talk because she had a tube in her throat, but she immediately signaled to her family to give her a pen. When they did, she wrote a haunting message to them: "It's real." They asked her what she meant and, with tears in her eyes, she pointed to the sky, clearly meaning heaven.
Madie was so moved by the moment that she had her aunt's statement of "it's real" tattooed on her wrist. She posted a pic of the ink on Instagram, as well as her aunt originally writing it, and shared the story behind it.
In her post about what happened, Madie wrote that her aunt's story is "too real not to share," adding, "[It] has given me a stronger confidence in a faith that so often goes unseen. It has given me tangibleness to an eternal hope that is not too far away."
When the tube had been removed from Tina's throat, she described more about what exactly she saw, saying, "It was so real, the colors were so vibrant." She revealed she saw black gates and Jesus standing in front of them, with a bright yellow glow behind him.
Tina has since made a full recovery -