"Christ's Appearance to Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection" is a painting by Russian artist Alexander Ivanov (1806–1858), completed in 1835. The painting is housed in the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg.
Special to United Methodist Insight | Feb. 3, 2026
I attended the funeral of my cousin, Francis “Mac” McDonough, last week at the United Methodist Church in Lime Ridge, WI, where I served briefly as an interim pastor for two months in 2014. The church was packed. Our voices swelled upwards to the heavens as we sang the old favorites, “In the Garden” and “How Great Thou Art.”
Francis “Mac” McDonough (1939-2026) of Lime Ridge, WI, told his cousin John Sumwalt about an out of body experience.
Mac and I were double cousins. His mother, Maureen, was my great Uncle Clarence Sumwalt’s daughter. Mac looked very much like Clarence’s brother, my beloved grandfather, James Archie Sumwalt. Mac’s father was Tuck McDonough, who was the son of Clara McDonough, the sister of my dear grandmother, Leona Long.
Tuck and Maureen ran a gas station in Lime Ridge. My dad, Leonard Sumwalt, and my mother, Bernice Long Sumwalt, used to take us there when we lived on the farm across from Weston High School in the late 1950s. Mac starred in football and baseball there. His Weston baseball team finished third in the state in 1957.
Mac told me of an out-of-body experience he had when he was eight years old. He saw an old man who may have been our ancestor, Edward John Long, who came to America from Tipperary, Ireland in 1850. I included his account in my book, “How to Preach the Miracles:”
“When I was in the third grade at Lime Ridge Grade School, I got very sick and was shaking with the chills. I walked outside and went next door to Grandma Clara McDonough’s house. She took me in and laid me down in the living room on a parlor bed, covered me up and then left. I remember floating over to the big stove and being above it to keep warm. Then Grandma came back in with some more blankets. I was watching her as she leaned over me on the couch. It was then that I became aware of a little old man, all white hair and a big mustache, on the side of the room motioning for me to go down by my Grandma. I found out later that the little old man was my Great-Grandfather, but that he had been dead for quite a while. I never told my Grandma.”
Millions of people have had out-of-body and near-death experiences – and told about what they have seen.
Most people in our society take accounts like these about as seriously as ghost stories told around a campfire, no matter how credible the source might be. We find it difficult to integrate out-of-body and visitation experiences, even when they are reported by people we love and trust. We believe them, but we put the idea into a compartment that rarely affects our everyday life in the “real world.” We don’t know what to do with views of reality that are radically different from the accepted scientific worldview by which most of us live.
The Apostle Paul also addresses this issue in a dialogue about resurrection with doubtful Christians in the Corinthian church, saying, “If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body..." (1 Cor.15:35-51).
It is not as difficult to believe that we have both a physical and a spiritual body as it is to comprehend that a person who has died and left the physical body behind can come back, seemingly appear out of thin air as Jesus did, and pass through walls that feel solid to the touch (Luke 24:36-43, John 20:19-23).
In his book, “Reunions,” psychologist Raymond Moody tells about a woman who came to him after her son died from cancer. She missed him terribly. Dr. Moody writes:
“One day I received an incredible call from her. A few days after her visit to my clinic, she awoke from a deep sleep ... There standing in her room was her son. As she sat up in the bed to look at him, she could see that the ravages of cancer were gone. He now looked vibrant and happy as he had before his disease ... The woman was in a state of ecstasy. She stood up and faced her son and began carrying on a conversation. ‘I couldn't believe it was him... so I asked if I could touch him.…’ ...her son stepped forward and hugged her. Then the woman said, he lifted her right off the ground and over his head.”
If this is true, and I believe it is because I have talked to people whose word I trust who have had these kinds of experiences, there is more to this world and the world to come than most of us are aware of in our everyday lives.
John Sumwalt
The Rev. John Sumwalt is a retired United Methodist pastor and the author of “Vision Stories: True Accounts of Visions, Angels & Healing Miracles.”