Multiple New York Times best-selling author and documentary director Sebastian Junger had a near-death experience in June 2020. This was due to an unexpected abdominal hemorrhage, which he survived thanks to his doctors. This led him to explore the topics of death, near-death, and the afterlife in his 2024 book In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of An Afterlife. After he had escaped death, Junger, a committed atheist, had several deep moments of reflection:

But I didn't die, and it made me wonder what this new part of my life was supposed to be called. The extra years that had been returned to me were too terrifying to be beautiful and too precious to be ordinary. A week after I came home, I found myself sitting at a window looking at a crab apple tree in the backyard. The branches were waving in the wind, and I had the thought that they'd be waving in exactly the same way if I'd died, only I wouldn't be here to see them. The moment would be utterly beyond my reach. Eventually [my wife] Barbara asked if I felt lucky or unlucky to have almost died and I didn't know how to answer. Was I blessed by special knowledge or cursed by it? Would I ever function normally again?

Junger flipflopped daily from wondrous thankfulness to existential dread:

Barbara said she couldn't take much more of me like this and made the excellent point that I had an opportunity to experience the insights of terminal illness without - almost certainly - having to pay the price. What was I learning? What could I come away from this with? My father had continued reading history books until the last weeks of his life. Would I keep practicing music if the news were bad? Reading? Running? What would be the point - but then, what's the point anyway?

Possible Preaching Angle:

Unbelievers are given an opportunity to come to faith by God, but sadly many hedge, delay, and then go back to their old ways, ultimately untouched by their experience.