Best of God Reports Interviews

There has to be more to life than just this. They have fame, they have fortune — everything I want — but I can tell there’s something missing.

It was a blustery Saturday along the coast of Maine, with whitecaps forming to the horizon’s edge. Jane Dobson received some jolting news that morning, October 2, 2010. A close friend in Wisconsin had passed away the night before.

“She was a beloved sister in Christ, a very dear friend of mine,” Jane notes. “Her husband got up and thought she was asleep, but suddenly he realized she wasn’t breathing.” Her friend Kathleen died from a massive, unexpected heart attack at age 67.

Jane began to grieve for her friend. The Dobson house was full of weekend guests – their kids and old family friends, which made it more difficult for Jane to find time alone with God. Before she received the bad news about her friend, she had been praying that Jesus would reveal Himself in new ways to her house-guests.

“The wind was blowing so hard I couldn’t open my windows even an inch,” Jane recalls. But then suddenly, about 2:00 p.m., the wind stopped. “It went from big white caps to flat calm – like a mill pond,” she notes. “That usually doesn’t happen in October in Maine.”

Due to the favorable weather change, Jane’s husband, Bill, suggested they go for a ride on their boat. Everyone quickly agreed and the group of 10 piled into the Dobson’s 36-foot Hinckley picnic boat, “Lady Jane,” and set out along the coast of Maine.

Jane continued to grieve on the boat. “Everybody left me alone because I was so sad,” she notes. Jane, a retired nurse with an active prayer ministry, offered praise for Kathleen’s life and asked Jesus to send comfort. 

After an hour on the vessel, Jane felt a noticeable change in the atmosphere. As their boat rounded a bend close to Owl’s Head State Park’s majestic lighthouse, something unusual happened.

In some near-death experiences, people report they were drawn toward “the light.” But in this horrifying near-death experience for an atheist art professor, he was drawn into the darkness of hell, which dramatically altered the course of his life.

“I was a double atheist,” says Howard Storm, who became a tenured art professor at Northern Kentucky University by age 27. “I was a know-it-all college professor, and universities are some of the most closed-minded places there are,” he notes.

On the last day of a three-week European art tour he led, his group had returned to their hotel in Paris after a visit to the artist Delacroix’s home and studio. As Howard stood in his room with his wife and another student, suddenly he screamed and dropped to the floor in agony.

“I had a perforation of the small stomach, known as the duodenum,” he recalls. At first, Howard thought he was shot, and he glanced around the room to see if he could spot a smoking gun. As he writhed in pain on the ground, kicking and screaming, his wife called for a doctor.

In 2013 Caleb Byerly woke up with a start and began to furiously write in his journal everything he saw in a rather unusual dream. For the previous five years, the small-town North Carolina resident had been engaged in mission outreach to indigenous people and tribal areas in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands.

“In the dream, I was standing on top of this mountain. I was looking out across the mountain, and I saw a tribe of people,” he told The Unseen Story. Caleb and his wife, Gladys, live in Moravian Falls, a town of 1400 in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains.

He had never seen the tribe before, so he asked, “What tribe are you? What people are you?”

“We’re the Tinananon tribe,” they replied.  Caleb had never heard of this people group and he began to carefully observe their actions in his dream.

Mark Ellis is the founder of GodReports.com. After a mission trip to the southern Philippines in 2004, God gave him the vision for the God Reports website, which launched in 2009. He serves on the board of Morning Star News and the Birtcher Family Foundation. He is also the senior editor for ASSIST News. God Reports supports and encourages Christian missions by sharing stories and testimonies from the mission field — in written and video form, along with stories of general interest and concern to its audience.

As a child she was taught to believe the Jews were monsters that wanted to kill Arab children. By God’s grace, she overcame a culture of hatred and found a new reason for hope after she settled in the United States. “I grew up in a culture of jihad and martyrdom,” says Nonie Darwish, the founder of Former Muslims United.

He grew up in a Christian family in Dallas, the youngest of eight children. At about nine-years-old he began to experience same-sex attraction.

“I didn’t know where it came from or what to make of it,” says Becket Cook, author of A Change of Affection: A Gay Man’s Incredible Story of Redemption. “It was an odd sensation. I knew I couldn’t talk about this. It was a secret I held for many years.”

His Lebanese grandfather dates their family to the days of Noah. His Green Beret father influenced his pathway to the Marines and then to the CIA’s Special Operations Group, America’s most secretive paramilitary operators. Now God is using his training in clandestine activities for another purpose – recovering missing and exploited children.

“My mission is rescuing children who are abducted,” says Bazzel Baz, the founder of the Association for the Recovery of Children (ARC). His team members include former CIA and National Security Agency personnel, and others from the Secret Service and military Special Forces. “This nation spent a certain amount to make us the best in the business, to go places and do things nobody else can do.”

“I can go places where the FBI won’t go, because their hands are tied by politics.”

When doctors inexplicably missed four-year-old Colton Burpo’s burst appendix, and the resulting infection nearly took his life, his father railed at God as Colton’s life seemed to slip away.