Under Heaven Podcast: Roderick Jefferson - Flatline to Faith

Under Heaven Podcast brings you a deeply moving episode. Trish talks with Roderick Jefferson, an executive leader, author, and survivor of a near‑fatal stroke, to explore how purpose can emerge from life’s most unexpected interruptions. 

Roderick recounts the moment his body began to fail during a keynote trip and an out‑of‑body encounter where he learned about his new purpose. He shares the long journey that helped him rebuild his life, and the four F’s: faith, family, friends, and fun that now guide every decision he makes.

Roderick's book Stroke of Success has become a tool to help others find balance, resilience, and hope.  This conversation is a testimony of grace, survival, and the God who gives purpose even in the hardest chapters of our lives.

Roderick: roderick@roderickjefferson.com                     https://www.roderickjefferson.com/ 

Trish: patricia@lookingup24.org

#StrokeOfSuccess #RoderickJefferson #FaithAndResilience #PurposeAfterPain #StrokeSurvivorStories #MiracleTestimony #HealingJourney #SecondChanceLife #NDE

Under Heaven Podcast, Faith, Trish Hodges, Testimony, Christian Women, Encouragement, Testimony

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 1:41

Hi Teresa, how are you? It is so great to see you.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

It is good to see you again. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Thank you for the opportunity of coming in. I want to kind of set the stage first of all. Let's go back to the future if we can. So, as you said, I spent 30 years in corporate in very powerful and successful, yet stressful, positions for the last 30 years. Companies like Oracle and Salesforce and eBay and HP and all those things. And what I thought I was doing was being groomed for that next level of life. Little did I know what that actually meant, though. Right. And I'll tell you in just a moment how things actually changed. So I was a high-level athlete earlier in life. So, and this will tie directly into the story of the night when I actually flatlined and died. And what I found out later in life is that I had a really big heart, literally. I have something called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which is an enlarged heart. I'm a big guy, 6'4, 6'5. And it happens to a lot of us that are that size. And what happens is the normal heart squeezes at about 65 to 75 percent on average. When you get down to 20%, I've found out now, flatlining, and you die. Well, remember that. So now I'll tell you the story of what happened. I was in Los Angeles getting ready for a keynote, and was yeah, the normal things. Let's walk the hotel, let's, you know, learn our way around and where the nooks and crannies, and how do I, you know, sample the foods and all those things. And I was having a great time. And I had my team with me, and the night before we were having dinner, like we always do. Um, and I looked up, and what I didn't realize is that I had literally passed out in the middle of a sentence. And they were looking at me like, boss, are you okay? And I said, Absolutely. Why do you ask? They said, Because we were talking and you just fell asleep. And I was like, Oh, that's odd. I know I've been tired. So, you know what? I'm gonna go back to my room. I'm gonna grab some sleep and get ready for tomorrow, you know, do a little research and those kind of things. On the way back, I just didn't feel like myself. I felt like I was literally walking in quicksand to the point where I had to remind myself and my body lift your right leg, lift your left leg, lift your right leg. And by the time I got to the room, I felt like I walked across America. I mean, I was exhausted. And my room was really close to the restaurant, and that was concerning. So, fast forward, I fall asleep like every other night. I wake up the next day, and when I'm on the road, my wife and I always jump on a call. Hey, let's touch spaces. What went on yesterday? How's the family? How are the kids? Those kind of things, right? And she said, You don't sound like yourself. And in my mind, I sounded exactly the way I sound right now. And she said, No, no, something's wrong. Now, here's a caveat: a friend of hers had recently had a stroke, so thank God she knew the protocol for stroke, and she walked me through it. Started with, no, say your ABCs. And I was like, Really? Come on now. I'm 55, I think I know my my A B C, but I didn't. So it was A B L X Q T M Z O R. And I and it was really slow, and now I start to stutter. And she says, count to 10. 1, 2, 52, 45, 16. And she said, jump on FaceTime with me. I need to see your face and see if it's drooping. My face isn't drooping. Typical guy, I'm fine, I can get through this, right? And it just kept getting worse. And now my legs and my arms are starting to numb and tingle a bit. And so thankfully, she called my director that was on my team at the time. He called 911, and we're on our way to the hospital. Um, I get there, they check my heart, but they don't check my head, which was kind of odd because I'm stuttering at that point so bad that um I literally can barely get words out. Here's miracle number one. They release me 90 minutes later from the emergency room. That just doesn't happen. Um, fast forward, we're and that was the day I was supposed to fly home from Los Angeles. I live up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Miracle number two. I get on the plane, I pass out, I make the flight back. And now I don't remember the first three or four days in the hospital. So this part my my wife is telling me um by by my team informing her and also what she does. So we get to Oakland, they bring me out in a wheelchair and I'm slumped over. And she said she was terrified because she's like, I've never seen my husband. I'm a big man, and you know, I kind of fill up a room, but I was not myself. So she, my son takes my car, takes it home from the airport. She takes me directly to the emergency room, gets in, meets with the neurologist and and the cardiologist. Miracle number three. The first thing they say to her is mid-stroke, cabin pressure, altitude. Medically, there's no reason your husband should be alive. He's a miracle. Fast forward, I'm at the hospital now for a couple of weeks, and one night I was having a really tough time breathing. And so they put the oxygen on me, and then all of a sudden, I hear code blue, and it's my room number. Lights are flashing, all kinds of machines are beeping at me, and suddenly I go from beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and I'm flatlined. Miracle number four. I float out of the body, I'm up in the corner of the room, I never leave the room. I'm looking down, the doctors are sucking fluids out of me, they're doing chest compression, and I'm watching all this happen. Now, bear in mind, this all sounds kind of like Charlie Brown's teacher. Oh, womp, womp, womp, womp, womp. Or if you've ever had, you know, gas or or twilight when you go to the dentist, that's how it sounded. I could hear things, and it was muffled, and I couldn't really see, but I could hear that the machine I was still flatlined. And so, and just for a bit more uh of the story, this whole story happened four years ago. This wasn't 20 years ago. At that point, my entire left side is paralyzed. I can't audibly speak, which I know God has a sense of humor because my stroke as someone as a keynote speaker now who gets paid to talk, it was in the middle of my speech center. So this was to slow me down and remind me one that he's in control. And secondly, so I could learn the difference between listening and hearing because I couldn't talk. And so back to the story. I look to my left and I see my mom, beautiful and radiant as ever, with the same purple moo moo that she always wore when I was young. But here's something different. My mom died in 1999. Remember, this story is only four years ago. So she came back to her baby to comfort me. And I said, Okay, mama, you know, good and faithful servant. I have done everything that I can, I'm ready to go home. And she said, Excuse me for a moment, and she said, Um, no, baby, I was sent here to tell you you're going to be fine, they're gonna figure it out. But God has a new purpose for you for your life. And she told me a few things that I'm supposed to do, and now all of a sudden, shh, I look over and she's gone. Mama, we're we're we're mama, and so now I'm sucked back into my body, and my chest is killing me from the chest compression, and now I hear the word that nobody ever wants to hear. Clear. He's starting to come down to hit me with the paddles. Thank God he's on my right side because remember, my left side is completely paralyzed, and I'm still flatlined. At this point, I go from beep to beep, beep, beep, and I grab his hand right before he hits me with the paddle. Now they're all rushing around, he calls in for the emergency response team, they come and start doing all kinds of protocol. Fast forward. Two more weeks and off. I've now taken speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy, and speech therapy. And it's starting to work, so they release me back home. But there's still a problem. I'm stuttering so bad that I literally for two weeks stopped talking because I can't get words out. I'm so frustrated. Again, I get paid to talk. And at that point, I decided I'm gonna do what I did every night. I had the same prayer. It wasn't Lord, heal me, fix me, get me back on the stage. It was literally, God, please just let me wake up tomorrow. That's all. So for that old adage of tomorrow's not promised, it has a different meaning for me because I had a night where I had no tomorrow. And so now what I've done is completely transitioned. And I'll tell you one of the things that my mom told me while I was flat wet. My job is to come back and to give a smile to what she called the invisible people. That's the folks that check you in at the hotels, the um valets, you know, your waiters and waitresses. And it could even be the people that are in the grocery store that you see, they just look like they need a smile. Because she, as she said, that may be the only smile they get all day, and more importantly, it may be the only thing that makes them feel human, seen, and loved. That's just one of the things. If you want to know the rest, you got to read the book, right? And I'm giving a whole lot of stuff in the book, and I'm I'm kind of condensing now. Okay, but the important part is my change is my what I call my four F's. That's faith, family, friends, and fun. And especially that last week. Because as we become adults, the one thing that we rarely make time for is fun. I remember about two weeks before my stroke, and maybe that was my precursor now in hindsight. I was talking to my daughter, and she said, Dad, you know what? You've flown all over the world, you've met kings and queens, you've had dinner with President Obama, you've done it all. But what do you do just for you? And what do you do for fun? So I looked at her and I said, What is this fun you speak of, child? Right? In jest. But I realized when she said that that I don't do anything just for me. And the other thing that really hit me was as a male, my job, and I was grew up in the South, and I'm in Texas and Luzine, and I was always taught my job is to provide and protect for my family. And I took that very, very seriously. But when I was in corporate, I'm flying around in jets and helicopters and doing all these things that I was just speaking of. I realized that I was getting taken further away from my family. But my ego had convinced me because I was making X amount of money and they had the life, they went to the right school, we had the right cars, we had the great neighbors, that I was doing what I was supposed to. But what I didn't realize, because I was living through the lens of ego, was that they didn't want any of those the big vacations and all that. They wanted dad there. I miss my daughter's eighth-grade graduation. She's 36 now. I still hear about that to this day. I miss football games, basketball games, dance recitals with my son. And I asked them later. They're both adults now. I said, Did I provide a good life for you? And she said, Oh, absolutely, Dad. And my son said, But we wish we would have had you. I remember I had been on the road for two weeks straight. London, Paris, Geneva, Sao Paulo, Rio, Toronto, Beijing, Hong Kong, Sydney. In 18 months, I went to all those places. I had become nothing more than the guy that came home, saw the family, occasionally helped with homework, and hit the dry cleaners, and I was right back on the road. And I remember I had come back from one trip for two weeks, and I told my wife, I just want greasy tacos. I'm so sick of hotel food. I'm sure many out there can understand. And my son looks at me and he says, Dad, Thursday shake and bake died. And it hit me. It wasn't just the words of a small child, it was confirmation that they had an entire life without me. I was just funding it, but I wasn't a part of it. I was so busy making a life that I wasn't actually living a life with my family. And so now as a keynote speaker, my signature speech goes along with my best-selling book called Stroke of Success. And what it talks about, a small bit of it, I'd say probably 10-15% of it, is actually about my stroke. The rest of it is what happens when we're all striving for success to get to that next level, or you're having difficulties in life, in your marriage, in your friendships, at work, whatever it may be. What are you doing to stop for a moment and actually figure out how to get through that rather than burying yourself in work or burying yourself in substances or whatever it may be? Look, life is life, and we're all going through something. And I always ask my friends that are in corporate or entrepreneurs, I ask them all the time. I love what you're doing, but at what cost? Because it's gonna cost you something. When you're burning at the candle at both ends of the candle, I am an example of what happens when both of those meet in the middle. You know what happens? It's not a bigger fire, it actually fizzles out, and that's what happened to me. And I hate to see that happen to anyone else. So if I can say one thing, stop for a moment and evaluate are you just building a life or are you actually living that life? I got to the point to where I loved me probably a little too much, to be honest, at that time. But I also realized that I couldn't walk past the mirror and look at it because I didn't like the person I had become. Because I'd gotten so far away from my foundation, away from my faith, away from my family, from my friends, and certainly away from fun. If you take anything away from this, and you may think, oh, well, I've never had a stroke, I probably won't. Ah, contrario. My master stroke was actually my second. I didn't even realize I had the first one. That is why strokes are called silent killers. And I also found out from the American Stroke Association that one out of every four humans over the age of 25 on the planet will incur some form of a stroke in their lifetime. It may have just felt like dizziness, it may have felt like you had a migraine, you may have just been really tired. Don't take it for granted that everything is okay. One, please, I implore you, if you're feeling these things, go see a doctor. And if you start any numbing, any numbing, any tingling, please call 911, because the one thing that can save you is time. The faster they can get to that, the easier. If you are a caregiver, I not just of stroke, but in general, I wrote an entire chapter in my book dedicated to you, the caregivers, to not only thank you, but to give you some best practices of what I've seen work and not work. Also to validate, if no one else does, to validate the things that you're doing, and maybe the people you're taking care of don't even know how to say thank you or are incapable of it. That's that thank you to you. Because the things that you do are a lot of things, but easy is not a lot of them. So please take care of yourself, be good to yourself, and give yourself the same amount of grace that you give others. Unfortunately, at times we talk to ourselves in ways that we would never allow anyone else to talk to us that way, or that we would ever talk to our friends or family. But we think it's okay for us to do it to ourselves. Stop for a moment, and every day, here's what I do. I've got a whiteboard right here in front of me. I write on that board four things. Professionally, three things that I'm going to do today in my business before I turn off or walk away from my laptop. That fourth one is something I'm going to do just for me personally. Sometimes it's go out in my backyard and just listen to the birds and watch the hummingbirds in the feeder. Sometimes it's take my dogs on a long walk. Sometimes it's basket robins. Right? And here's the thing: don't treat that fourth thing as a treat or a cheat day like we've all done on diet. No cheat days. Incorporate that as a part of your life and your everyday existence. And then you will learn to not just love, but to like yourself. And I can guarantee you, other people will start feeling different and notice difference in you. There are times, hey, let's go and have a barbecue. Hey, let's get together for dinner. And for me, it was like, you know what, I'd love to, but I've got this project going, I've got this thing I've got to write, whatever it is. Try this, these words. Yes, let's do that. Because I may not have tomorrow to do it, or you may not be here tomorrow. So, Trish, I want to thank you so much for allowing me to share my testimony, my test, as well as As some of my stories and best practices. And my goal is to the listeners of this. I may not be able to make your life easier. But my hope is that through what I've talked about today, I can make it just a little bit better. And if I do that, then one, you've got a bigger smile than you had before you heard the stories. And secondly, my mama's smiling right now. And that means the world to me.

SPEAKER_00 22:33

Such a blessing. And I thank you so much. The pleasure is all mine to have you here today. And I know, you know, you've showed us how life can change in just an instant. And you've showed us how we can get off track so easily thinking we're doing the right thing, the right thing. And um I I've I've seen experiences with people that I know, my own husband had a very similar experience, too. Um and he had the same things like you said, you know, he his purpose was to provide for us and protect us. And I did share your interview with him even because you know what, so many people need to hear what you're saying. And I can't wait to read your book. You want to hold that book up again? And I do encourage people, where can they get it? Where can they get it?

SPEAKER_01 23:30

For those that would like the book, if you go to roderickjefferson.com, you can actually get a signed personalized copy of this. And my team will then ship it out to you. But not just that. Oh, there are a few goodies in there that will surprise you. I've got a magnet that actually tells the steps of stroke protocol. I've got a number of things. I've got stickers, I've got bookmarks, all kinds of stuff. And you'll get all of that at roderickjefferson.com.

SPEAKER_00 24:06

Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. I'm so glad that you have those signs on a little uh magnet. That is so awesome. And would you repeat the four F's? You had faith, family, friends and fun. Friends and fun. And we need we need those. Absolutely. God created us. God created us to enjoy each and every one of those. And in the in the process, as we are looking to Him, as we are having fun and uh prayer time and just time with our family, we begin to do what we've been called to do. And it all begins to fall in place, even in the workplace. And I'm so, so happy to have Venice had you on here. And I just want to speak to our audience and encourage you, get this book. There will be so much more in it, because it's something you might be helpful for you, but it might be helpful for perhaps a husband or a child. You have grown children that are just going, going, going for the the you know, commercial world to make make money, to buy cars and things like that. And this book and Roderick's testimony will help them realize there's more to life than that. There is so much more.

SPEAKER_01 25:33

Thank you. And and and I smile because I think about something my uncle used to say. He asked me, he said, nephew, have you ever seen a hearse with a U-Haul connected to the back of it? I said, No, he said, then let's think about what's really important. It's none of the physical stuff. And so I was talking to my wife recently, and and you know, I'm of an age, and I said, you know what, let's talk about what happens whenever it is, whether it's two months, two weeks, 30 years from now. Right. Here's something I want you to keep in mind. At my going away, first of all, I don't want it to be a sad occasion because I've gone home and I am blessed now. I get to see all the people over again that dead have gone. But more importantly, I want it to be a celebration. But there are some rules, and there's only really one big one. No one can talk about anything that I did professionally, any of the books that I wrote, any of the keynotes that I gave. They can only talk about one thing and one thing only. How did I make them feel when I walked away from a conversation or a dinner with them? Because to me, that's really what matters right now. It's how did I make them feel and what did I touch them with, and maybe even what were they able to learn that they can now in turn hand that off. Because to me, legacy is what happens when no one is watching. It's not the things that you want to make this my legacy, it's the things that you do when no one else knows you've done them. That these people walk away and go, at the funeral, oh well, he may have done this, this, and this. And people in the audience go, I had no idea that he was doing those things. And I don't want that for an ego stroke. I want it because at that moment when they're telling that story, whoever that may be, their soul smiles because they are now transported back to the moment of that memory. If I can do that, then you know what? Mission accomplished.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

Mission accomplished.

SPEAKER_01 27:41

I've served my purpose.

SPEAKER_00 27:44

Yes, awesome. Very good. Would you like to close out um our our meeting today with a prayer for those that are listening?

SPEAKER_01 27:54

Absolutely. Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity today to share your wonderfulness, for your grace, Lord, and for being here today to be able to share that. And if there's anyone out there that has felt less than or not seen or not felt, may they be touched by my testimony today, and may they now stop for a moment and thank you for that smile, for that warmth that they felt. For those that are caregivers, I pray that you give them energy, that you continue to touch them as they are helping others. And for those that are dealing with difficulties, whether it be medical or physical or emotional, Lord, remember that all they have to do is stop for a moment, reach out to you and ask that you would take this off of them and that you can leave everything, not almost, but everything at your feet. And I am remembered every day that every time I try and drive the bus, I hit a tree or I hit a wall. But Lord, when I turn over the steering wheel to you, I am reminded in the passenger seat by how beautiful the view is. And may others feel that same. In your heavenly name I pray. Amen.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Amen and amen. That was beautiful. Thank you so much, Roderick. Bless you and your family and the words that you speak. And I just remind my viewers to speak life, to choose hope, and remember that you are always loved. Bye-bye. Thank you again, Roderick.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 29:43

Thank you for being with us today on Under Heaven. I trust this conversation encouraged your heart and reminded you of God's faithfulness. If today's episode blessed you, please click like, subscribe, and share the hope with others. Until next time, blessings.