Sid Roth - After a Horrific Plane Crash, I'm Falling into Hell
Sid Roth: Mickey, there was a historic date in your life, August 15, 1968. You're just doing the normal thing. You're a skydiver. That's not too normal. Why did you like skydiving?
Mickey Robinson: Well Sid, ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with adventure. I looked at everything that flew over my house, whether it was an airplane or the Goodyear blimp. I studied the astronaut program from its birth in national geographic and always was fascinated with flight, and always to fly. Of course, I liked the TV superman.
Sid Roth: What is like floating in space? What does it feel like?
Mickey Robinson: Some of the misconceptions is that you get that sinking when you get on an elevator. No, because you're not attached that's supporting gravity, like even if you're in an airplane gravity is holding you against the seat. But if you got out the airplane, you begin moving very fast, 32 feet per second squared, and so you hit, within a thousand feet you'll get to terminal velocity, which is you won't go any faster if you don't change your body position. It's about between 125 and 130 miles an hour. It actually feels like you're floating and your body actually makes a tremendous aerodynamic device. By changing your body position you can track, fly.
Sid Roth: Is there a high that someone gets when they do that?
Mickey Robinson: There is a real high. I mean, if you like that kind of stuff, I was a natural athlete. I played football.
Sid Roth: All right, let me take you, August 15, 1968, you're going for your wonderful flying and you're in the airplane, and when did you first realize something was wrong?
Mickey Robinson: Well to me, at that point, after only 20 jumps I was so proficient I became a professional, which is unheard of. And so to get in and out of an airplane with a practice jump is as casual to get in your car and drive to work. It was no psysch...
Sid Roth: It was automatic.
Mickey Robinson: No psych up ya know? That's not the cool part. A matter of fact that is actually the boring part. So I was waved at the people and was kind of falling asleep. The airplane did the pre-flight checkup. We took off. We were going probably a hundred miles an hour, maybe 100, 150 in the air. And the first thing I remember is the pilot yelled, slapped me on the side and said, 'that's it, we're going down'. We lost our engine. I was awake. I was kind of drowsy because I knew it was going to take a long time. We were going to let out two students, one an altitude 4000 feet, actually 2800 feet his first jump, another one at 4000 feet. It's going to take time to go around and around. So I was so into this, the flying part was kind of boring. I was sitting, there were five skydivers and the pilot. Three of us were professionals, two were students. So my first realization something was wrong was that moment and then it was just seconds, and we lost our lift, too, which is the aerodynamic physical property, which makes airplanes fly, lift. This plane, it was a new plane for him and that was like a rocket, so you really rotated with a steep angle. Finally we lost the engine and completely quit flying, so it just drops the air down and stalls it. It drops straight down like rocket.
Sid Roth: Tell me what happened at the crash.
Mickey Robinson: Well we impacted a giant oak tree and I was flung forward. My body was going as fast as the plane was and then suddenly it wasn't. But my face stopped my body going a hundred miles an hour, so I had a severe head injury and my face was just torn up from here to here. The airplane cartwheeled on its wings and slammed in the ground. The crash was devastating. There was confusion. What I'm about to tell you is really vague. I have a vague kind of dreamlike remembrance of some of the things. The two students were banged up and they were in shock and the third one helped rush them out of the plane. The fourth man that should have been the first one out of the plane, he was right next to the baggage drawer, which had been removed from the six-passenger Piper Cherokee (plane name) was just leaving and as he was leaving, beginning to run away, flames went the front of the plane started to catch on fire. And then he heard screaming and realized that the pilot and myself were trapped inside this burning airplane. And this guy who was my friend and my mentor in professional skydiving went back inside the burning airplane and saw me with my legs sticking through a hole that was torn where the wing that had been attached to the fusel lodge that was pulling on my right hand. I was soaked with fuel and I was on fire from head to toe like you see in the movie 'saving private ryan' or something like that.
Sid Roth: That is unreal what you're describing.
Mickey Robinson: And I was stuck. I couldn't get out of this thing that had been my chariot of pleasure and had been now my funeral pyre. I was burning alive. And somehow with supernatural strength this man pulled toward those parachute straps loose, dragged me away from airplane and got me on the ground, and was hard to put the fire out because of the high octane of fuel. And he got it out, and he yelled to the pilot, and said, 'undo your seatbelt', because the pilot was the only one who was in his seat. He said, 'I'm going to come back and get you'. But by that time the wing on the left side exploded, the vapors exploded and it was too intense and he was in fact killed. And they rushed me to the closest little hospital.
Sid Roth: Did they say any chance that you could survive?
Mickey Robinson: Well you know, the first guys on the scene was the guy that was in the paramedics, and the paramedic came, and a neighbor must have seen the fire, the crash, and called an ambulance, and we were in a country area, but not far from a suburb of Cleveland. And a paramedic put an oxygen mask on my face and when he did the whole right side of my face slid off and fell on the ground.
Sid Roth: Oh my gosh.
Mickey Robinson: And my rescuer, my skydive buddy was kind of paNicky and hysterical, and he actually punched, knocked the paramedic out in shock, cut the mask off because it didn't work on my face, and put the oxygen in my mouth and just held it in there.
Sid Roth: Just the tube.
Mickey Robinson: Just the tube because they didn't know. I asked dan, I said, 'how bad is it with the smoke'? He didn't know in my condition how it would be to make it to the hospital. I was a young professional athlete. I was in perfect condition, but I was really severely injured. And the problems with my kind of injuries, I mean, the shock can take you right out. The burns that I had was massive. Of course, I had a head injury, and the cuts and all that, and the shock to your system, you could just die from shock. Your body can just go into shock and die. But I in fact lived through the night and the next day. And then what happens is the exposure to the things the burns can cause, the complications and everything. They tried heroically with medicine and treatment, and all the technology of that day.
Sid Roth: The pain must have been awful.
Mickey Robinson: Pain, there's no drug that can stop this kind of pain. They say and I remember the pain was unbelievable. The relief came as that I shortly began to go comatose. My brain, the brain is what caused the swelling and I would go in a coma.
Sid Roth: So you're blind in one eye. Your body is not operating. Your brain is not operating. Your digestive system.
Mickey Robinson: And I started getting massive infection.
Sid Roth: Oy vey. Listen, we'll be right back and guess what happens? He leaves that body and goes to heaven. Be right back.
Sid Roth: Hello. Sid Roth here with Mickey Robinson. Mickey, what happened from that airplane crash when you were in the hospital, what was wrong with you?
Mickey Robinson: Several progressive complications, massive weight loss as a result of the burns and the conditions I was in. I went from 170 pounds, perfect athlete, professional athlete, to 90 pounds.
Sid Roth: All right. What were the burns, what percentage of your body, what type?
Mickey Robinson: Third degree almost down to the bone.
Sid Roth: I don't understand third degree.
Mickey Robinson: That means all the epidermis, all the fatty tissue all the way into muscle, all the way down, in some places right down to the bone. Severe third degree burns over a large portion of my body and second degree burns over other portions of my body, brain injury. I was blinded my right eye. My nervous system in my legs, the nerves died in the front part of my legs were, both legs were nerve damaged and I had a bilateral foot drop that were withered like bird claws. I mean, they did everything they knew how to do, every kind of treatment.
Sid Roth: So what did these top doctors say?
Mickey Robinson: Well the doctors at the hospital I was at did everything. They were going to amputate this arm because this hand was so badly infected. But after they had tried everything they brought in a specialist, one of the leading specialists.
Sid Roth: You also, the reason you went down to 90 pounds is your digestive system was affected.
Mickey Robinson: A combination of things. The type of burns that I had, the evaporation process alone, it burns 40 calories a day and I'm taking, I'm not able to take any. So it just is a tremendous over a period...
Sid Roth: I don't need to be a doctor to say you didn't stand much of a chance.
Mickey Robinson: No, I didn't think from the beginning I had a chance. But they tried as hard as they could, and finally when they exhausted everything they brought in a specialist. At the end of his summary he says, 'there's nothing that can be done for this young man'. And from that point I made them let me alone, they're going to try and get as much legal morphine as they could and just let nature take its course so I could die. At that point I had an unheard of, I had never, I had no knowledge of this. I was raised with nothing. I had never heard of, I never met anybody that had an experience with God or they told me about the power of God, or anything like that. But as I laid there shaking in that horrible condition in such pain, and remember I was wide awake. I can remember as if it happened this morning. My spirit, my inner man, you see, Sid, we are all, you are spirit. You have a soul and you live in a body. You really are a spirit. You're an internal spirit. I'm busy on the earth.
Sid Roth: Most people are just worried about their emotional side.
Mickey Robinson: They're worried about what they're going to do today and next week.
Sid Roth: Yes, but and they're missing the whole purpose of life.
Mickey Robinson: Well there's a wholeness of life and there's these years, which are important, but there is something else that's called eternity, that I was about to get a view of.
Sid Roth: Okay. Did you actually die?
Mickey Robinson: I, my spirit sat up in my body and my spirit was ejected from my body, and I went into a realm that I understand now, but in a second, instantly, I knew, see, time was drawn and I aware of eternity. And it's the most profound thing in the world. As long as you and I are walking around here we're always conscious, tick, tick, ticking with time. You get up in the morning, go to bed at night. We're conscious in the physical plane. Everything is related to time. Everything in the spirit is related to eternity. The colors in the spirit world are more colorful. Everything is sharper, the emotions, everything. And you don't, like logic and reason, let anything happen. You just know that you know. It's like having truth automatically all the time. And I was being drawn. There was a white light out in the distance and I was being drawn in that light, and I could feel this desire to go. And as I was approaching that I could feel something in my right side. And I look, and literally I saw this, I could see and feel, and taste the nature of this thing that's closing, this black. It was blacker than black, and it was a bottomless pit without a bottom, and it was closing. And the more it closed in front of me, the more I felt the nature of it. It's the separation of all life. There is no experience. There is no matter. There is no chance of changing anything.
Sid Roth: No reversal.
Mickey Robinson: No reversal. Irreversible, eternal separation. It's more horrible and terrifying, and hopeless that I can describe and in human terms. It was closing, it began to eclipse that with light. From the time I guess I had, I was raised in a denomination, went to church every day and heard all about Jesus.
Sid Roth: All right. You were raised, from my notes, you were raised Catholic.
Mickey Robinson: I went Catholic school.
Sid Roth: But you heard about Jesus.
Mickey Robinson: Heard all about Jesus. He wasn't real. I never met anybody that told me he was real. He was way back then and I'm busy on the earth trying to be mr. Cool, be the athlete. I worked in a stock brokerage firm during the day, graduated high school. I could do a lot of things because of my God-given talents, my looks and my abilities, and all that. I'm a skydiver. It was all temporary. I didn't give thought even about possibly going to Vietnam. I was living for the pleasure of the moment not knowing that there was something else that was going on. And now I'm on my way to the hospital for the first time in my life. I knew that this man, young man that could probably do a lot of things just by his own efforts, I wasn't going to be able to help myself this time. And I said, 'God, I'm sorry. Please give me another chance'. The times are ticking for an operation. I'd say, and I'd pray, and I'd say, 'please, I'm sorry. I want to live. Give me another chance'. And now I'm standing on the very edge of eternity feeling this blackness swallowing, knowing that I'm that close that if I am sealed I'm gone forever. I screamed in my spirit, 'God, I'm sorry. I want to live. Give me another chance'. And instantly, I was standing in the presence in the throne room of Almighty God. Instantaneously I knew I would never die for eternity. Simultaneously, I was bathed and baptized in the undiluted love of God the Father. Now I can't say that in words and do it justice.
Sid Roth: I know. But I want to understand what you're saying.
Mickey Robinson: I felt God's love not based on my merits. I felt God's purest most concentrated form of love. Now I didn't see new Jerusalem. I didn't see angels. I didn't see Mickey Robinson's mansion under construction, there's a Holy Ghost jacuzzi over there or whatever. I didn't see nothing. But I was standing in this, if you can imagine if you get the ability to see radiation, you know it's invisible. But if you could see the invisible with your visible eyes, I could see this golden light and it's flowing like a river from my left to my right, and I was standing, and there was golden flecks in it, and it was moving. And somehow I knew and could feel this river is alive and it was in front of me, behind me, it was underneath me, and it was going right through my spirit man. And I was more alive than any comprehension that any person could ever being alive. That is because your spirit and my spirit are like a tuning fork and we're tuned to the vibration of God.
Sid Roth: How would you react if you had that kind of an experience then you find yourself back in your body and the body is as bad as it was when you left? Don't go away. We'll be right back.
Sid Roth: Hello. Sid Roth here with Mickey Robinson and how would you like to be a skydiver? The airplane crashes. You lose the sight of one eye. You're legs are so withered up that the nerves are all gone. You can't digest any food. Your thinking process isn't right. And you die, and you go to heaven, and you have an encounter with Jesus. Why did you come back, Mickey?
Mickey Robinson: Well funny thing is when I came back it was so bizarre to my spirit. I could feel myself literally traveling from the third heaven to the second heaven, the earth's atmosphere and feel my spirit pressing in my body, and I could hear out of these ears and see the sealing of the eye that wasn't blind. And I heard myself speaking in this beautiful language, worshiping God. I didn't know what it meant.
Sid Roth: The Bible talks about supernatural languages and false tongues.
Mickey Robinson: I heard that. I was doing it. My brain said, what the heck are you doing then it stopped. And I was surrounded by about half a dozen doctors and nurses, and they were staring at me, and I had the ability to be able to read their heart, and they were scared to death. And I felt bad for them because I was so full. Rather than being freaked out or scared, or angry, I was now filled with something I had never experienced before. I was so full of peace. Sid, if I could put this in a bottle I'd be the wealthiest drug dealer in the world.
Sid Roth: You talked about the thrill of skydiving. How does that compare to this rarified air and this love of God you experienced?
Mickey Robinson: There is no comparison. This is, this realm is other than, one of the descriptions of the word 'holy' means other than. It is, this is more alive than being, more ecstatic than any type that your imagination can even stretch to. God wants to have us have communion with him where his love is really the thing that turns us on, and I was so full of overflowing with the love of God, faith, joy. They're all thinking this guy, they were scared because I had died and came back, and I was talking in this language, and these poor guys think, how are we going to explain this. He says, if he does that again I'm going to get the blank out of here.
Sid Roth: Okay. Listen, you can't walk. You can't see. You can't think. You can't eat. You have no future. You must have been, started to get very depressed.
Mickey Robinson: It as the opposite. I couldn't wait to live and get out and fulfill these promises that I had received.
Sid Roth: Yeah, but they think you're going to die again.
Mickey Robinson: Everything medically, every doctor had said that looked said, I had six or seven complications that each one of them on a healthy person was fatal. And I didn't die. And then after a while...
Sid Roth: What happened to your legs? How can you walk? I don't understand.
Mickey Robinson: One leg started to get healed through prayer, I mean, through God. You see, the power of God, that river that I saw in heaven, that river is now inside me. The love of God that I felt was now inside me and that began to overcome death and the destruction that happened to my body. Over a period of time, God healed my leg. The other leg, I just would talk to my legs and I'd see my legs move. This leg worked, this one didn't work. And then one day I was instantly healed. That leg, there is no explanation.
Sid Roth: Why did you talk to your legs?
Mickey Robinson: I just was kind of compelled. I never knew about the ability to heal. I just talked to my legs. I'd go to therapy. Physical therapy, I knew it was good for me because I wanted to get out and go skydiving again. And when I had the surgery, which was twice a week, I didn't have therapy, so I'd work out in my room. When I was working out I would tell my body to come back alive again.
Sid Roth: But what about your eye? You're blind.
Mickey Robinson: I was blind for 5-1/2 years and God restored my sight, and the doctors had no explanation.
Sid Roth: Why did the doctor, what did the eye doctor, the specialist say about your eye when you got your vision back?
Mickey Robinson: Well first they put a preservative cornea because my eye was going to explode three months after my operation. It was taken from a cadaver and it was one giant cataract, and they made eyelids and they sewed my eye together to preserve my eye so I wouldn't have a dead eye. And then they said, maybe we can do a transplant. Later on, they said the eye is dead. It's not going to work. So I kept bugging the eye specialist and after five and a half years he said he'd do it. During the operation, under the microscope, when they took off the cornea and were going to put a live cornea on, they said the eye is dead, not light reactive, the pupil is wrinkled. Seven days later, I just laid in bed. By then I was with my wife Barbara. I said, block all the light out of the room, and just fasted and prayed for seven days. And when they took the bandage off I could see. They said, 'you can't see'. I said, 'i can see out of my eye. I can see'. And they just said it's unexplainable, it's unmedical. They had no explanation whatsoever.
Sid Roth: You are even now gradually everything that was destroyed is coming back to life. Do you believe it's that river you were talking about?
Mickey Robinson: It's the river of life. And it's talked about in the Bible from the very beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible. And in the end of the Bible it talks about when the river goes out from the temple and it touches things, everything that it touches comes to life. I believe that there are hurting people right now that where it hurts, a lot of people when they hear my story, no matter what seems to be a business thing, I've been on the media, I've been in schools, I've been in businesses, I've been in colleges, and they would say invariably, 'all my scars are on the inside'. There's a lot of hurts, a lot of hurting people. And the one thing is God sent me back to be a messenger of hope that in him there's more than hope. There's hope in this life and in the life, the eternal life that's to come. And it's not just an eternal life. There's hope in this life.
Sid Roth: Now is there any, in your opinion, I don't want any platitude or anything, is there any hopeless situation in this life?
Mickey Robinson: Yes there is.
Sid Roth: What?
Mickey Robinson: To reject all the goodness that God has provided. Most people have been hurt or have misinformation about how to approach God, how to receive God. It is really simple.
Sid Roth: What do you do, let me ask you this question now. You have a son that's in a wheelchair. You believe all things are possible. How do you feel about him?
Mickey Robinson: For 31 years now the Lord has forced me to publically preach and to tell my story, and go into these arenas. Our firstborn son, we have four children, was born with cerebral palsy and tremendous suffering. He's smart, he's articulate, he talks, but he's had tremendous suffering. And so it was a bit of a conflict. We didn't ever doubt the goodness of God and he is a good remarkable young man, 30 years old. Something incredible happened four months ago.
Sid Roth: What's that?
Mickey Robinson: He started to walk and there's no explanation. I'm even afraid to talk about it because it's so awesome. We have suffered. What we went through with our son Michael makes my airplane crash look like a cake walk. Here is a beautiful young man who wants to live more than anybody. That's why I say the gift of life is so important. Whatever kind of life you have right now, find a way to live it to its fullest and to see him at this stage when it was all given up for him, he started to walk, and it's just a miracle. And I believe if God can have him walk he can heal everything within his body
Sid Roth: Listen, the river is flowing. Quickly, I want you to pray that that life go into all the death that people have right now. Right now, pray.
Mickey Robinson: All of you that are hearing this, you have heard of a broken man. There is no reason while I'm sitting here today, 38 years later, twice as long alive as I would have been dead except for the real God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the only true God. There is only one God. There's lots of spirits, but there is only one true God. If it wasn't for God I'm a dead man. I'm not here. But he sent me back to be a voice of life and a voice of hope that in every situation there is extreme love of God and intervention. He wants to intervene in your life. Whatever your problem is right now or whatever problem you don't think you have, if you don't know God, believe me you need to know the living God. He created you for a purpose and it's not just to hang around this earth. It's brief, whether it's 19 years, it would be 19 years, I'm 57 now, whether I live to be a hundred or not, it's like compared to eternity. What you do now you can choose to know and love God. If you have a problem, if it's inside, if it's your heart, your emotions, if it's physical, if it's relational, if you feel like you're backed in a corner, the God that saved me, if you want to know God like I know God, I know the real God, not some religious made up God, the God that saved me and caused my son, four months ago, to start walking. This will touch your life.
Sid Roth: Listen, I tell you a fact. The only way to know this God is to be separated from your sins and to believe that Yeshua, that's Hebrew for Jesus, took your sins on himself. If you repent, tell God you're sorry, say, Yeshua, I want to know you, that life that's been radiating, that river that's been radiating from Mickey and myself, I tell you it's invading you and you are whole. In Jesus' name you are whole, whole, whole.