Key Takeaway
God called him by name after Howard Olson, a former atheist, collapsed into despair in Vancouver.
An out of body experience lifted him to the living room ceiling, where he saw both his present crisis and a future stage of hope.
That same night a tower of white light spoke his name and told him the pain had a purpose: to give hope and courage to others.
Six months later a pastor he had never met repeated those private words in front of 700 people, and Olson gave his life to Christ.
He now walks in spiritual authority, praying for the sick and teaching believers to treat Scripture as an instruction manual, not a theory.
God called him by name on a night when Howard Olson should have been only another broken man in a Vancouver living room, not a witness to an out of body experience. The marriage that had begun with a five minute civil ceremony in Hong Kong and a three week party had come home to a city that stripped him of work, money, and the golden touch he had trusted for years. He did not believe in God. He was not hunting for a miracle. He was trying to survive the next hour.
What happened next would pull him through the ceiling of that house, into a tower of white light, and onto a path of spiritual authority he had never imagined.
From Prestige to Collapse When Hope Ran Out
Olson had lived as a captain of industry.
He flew close to 280 days a year. His wife stood just as high in her field. They bought the big house and the big life after Asia, then watched it crumble before he even started the job that had brought them to Vancouver.
A merger erased the position. Business after business failed. For about two years he wrestled with despair so heavy that he tried to throw himself out a window.
The glass would not give.
“What’s the purpose of my life?” he asked into that silence.
A man with no church past and no language for prayer does not reach for Scripture first. He reaches for an exit. Then a Saturday phone call landed. A partner told him the latest company, the last shot, would declare bankruptcy on Monday. His wife burst into tears. Olson heard himself say they would be all right. She thought he had lost his mind. Six months earlier he had been at that window. That weekend, something in him had begun to believe again.
Doctors and bankers had no category for what came next. The diagnosis of his life was simple and brutal.
He was finished.
The Out of Body Experience That Split the Room in Two
In the middle of that conversation Olson left his body.
“I literally floated out of myself and basically rose up to the living room ceiling,” he said.
From above he watched himself speak with his wife. Then the couch vanished, the wall vanished, and he stood on a stage under hot lamps, smelling the crowd, pouring hope into thousands of people who hung on every word. It felt like half an hour.
Then he slammed back into his skin.
His wife had seen the other side of the same moment.
“Your eyes went gray. Your body went limp. You became a ghost. I could look right through you,” she told him.
She had been ready to call an ambulance. They could not reconcile the two views. She had watched him die. He had watched a future he did not yet believe.
That night, about three in the morning, a tower of white light fell out of the ceiling into his sleeping body and threw him onto the floor. He crawled back onto the bed and told her it was not him. In a house where the word God had only been used as a curse, she answered that if those words were coming out of his mouth, they had to be true.
The Night God Called Him by Name
This is what the light said.
“Howard Olson.” An audible voice. “Howard Olson, I’ve given you incredible gifts and incredible talents and all of these years you’ve done nothing with them.”
He had seen the world, made more money than most can count, and still missed the point.
“I want you to give hope and courage to those that have lost it, but they don’t know where to find it. But you’ll never be able to touch their hurting hearts if you’ve never felt their kind of pain, which is why I let you go through what I let you go through. Go back to bed. I love you. You’re going to be okay.”
There was no fear in the room.
“You feel warmth and love whenever you encounter him,” Olson said.
They did not talk about it for months. Life stayed quiet. Then a January morning, sitting alone, he heard a voice like a bullhorn in the living room: today I want you to go to church. He yelled at the noise to shut up. It got louder. He yanked the yellow pages. They opened on Coastal Church. Service at eleven. It was already 10:30. He showered.
His wife wanted nothing to do with it.
Community prayer had not yet formed around him. Heaven had simply refused to let him stay lost. The out of body experience and the night God called him by name were already a double witness.
The third witness was waiting in a sanctuary of 700 strangers.
The Turning Point Spoken From a Stranger’s Pulpit
Pastor Dave, a man Olson had never met, preached, then stopped.
“God knows you are here, he said. God knows you found us in the yellow pages an hour ago. God knows you had an experience six months ago so strange you told almost no one.”
Then the pastor quoted the tower of light word for word: gifts and talents wasted, hope and courage for people who have lost both, pain that would one day become a bridge.
Olson was undone. If you need proof, he later said, it does not get more.
The pastor would not point him out. He only asked if Olson was ready to know who God is. Looking up, the former atheist answered that whatever he had been doing was not working. He was in. He gave his life to Christ that morning.
What some would have filed under hallucination, he and his wife now called a summons. Spiritual authority did not land as a theory.
It landed as a name spoken twice, then preached back to him in public.
Healing, Decrees, and the Greater Miracle of Purpose
Hunger for Scripture hit him like a fever. Hotel Bibles he once shut in confusion now pulled him in like a mystery he could not put down. Faith, he learned, comes by hearing.
Signs would follow those who believe.
He began to treat the words in red as an instruction manual, not a museum piece. “It’s not a theoretical construct,” he said. “It’s a set of instructions and all you got to do is follow the instruction manual.”
The first public steps looked small and then sudden.
At a secular chamber event he took a terrified Iranian woman aside, declared that God had not given her a spirit of fear but power, love, and a sound mind (Timothy 1:7), and watched her cry out and fall as fear left. In a Ladner parking lot he knelt at a stranger’s knee, commanded inflammation to go in the name of Jesus, and heard her say the pain was gone. She chased him through the grocery aisles telling anyone who would listen.
He treats that moment as a living reading of Job 22:28: decree a thing, and it shall be established.
During the pandemic he heard the Lord again in morning devotions: start a call, teach the body who they are, decree promises over the nation. Decree for Canada was born from that order.
The greater miracle, though, was not the stage of thousands he had seen from the ceiling. It was a man who once could not stay in his own life now speaking hope into other people’s pain, and a marriage that had watched him become a ghost and then become a witness.
He still jokes that God chose him because of his mouth. He asked why him. The answer came specific.
“Cause I know you had a big mouth and I knew you’d use it.”
No Spirit of Fear Gets the Final Word
Olson tells skeptics and churchgoers the same thing.
Fear, anxiety, and the pull toward death are not merely moods. He calls fear a master principality and says Jesus already handed believers authority over it (Luke 10:19). You lift the shield of faith or you hand the shield to doubt.
He wants medical professionals, executives, and quiet sufferers to know that a diagnosis of hopelessness is not the last sentence.
He hopes his story sends people into what he calls the miracle zone, not by copying his out of body experience, but by saying yes to the next small nudge. Pray in the parking lot. Open the church listing. Tell the truth about the night God called him by name and then tell the truth about your own night.
“He’s just looking for your yes.”
If you are at a window of your own, remember his. It would not break. A voice still knows your name.
Share this testimony with someone who thinks God is silent. Then listen for the nudge, and go.
Watch the Miracle Unfold
The full depth of Howard Olson’s journey lives on the Jan The Miracle Hunter YouTube channel at https://youtube.com/@JanTheMiracleHunter. Watch the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSkM9vpHY-8
In his own words you will hear:
The out of body experience from the living room ceiling, and his wife’s cry that he had become a ghost.
The tower of white light and the moment God called him by name and sent him back to bed with love.
Pastor Dave repeating the private words in front of 700 people Olson had never met.
The parking lot knee that lost its pain, and the charge to treat Scripture as an instruction manual for spiritual authority.
Praise God! We give Him all honor and glory for this miracle!
