Mary Jo Rapini is addicted to running.

“I am kind of a high anxious, high energy person, and when I go running it’s my time to zone out,” she said. She has run marathons, even a 100 mile race, but four years ago the running stopped.

The wife and mother of two nearly died. She was living in Lubbock, lifting weights in the gym when she heard something pop in her head.

Rapini had an aneurysm — an artery in her brain had burst. Doctors said she had a 50-50 chance of survival.

“So they said it was an eight-inch cut,” Rapini said.

The operation lasted eight hours, and she lived to talk about it.

But she believes the real miracle happened the night before surgery.

Drifting in and out of consciousness, she said she suddenly saw a light that surrounded her and gave her a feeling of warmth.

She was having a near-death experience.

“And then I came out and there was this incredible room and it was brilliant and light, and something was holding me,” she said.

She said the light was a shade of pink, and she believes she was being held by God and he talked to her.

“He called me by my name, and he said, Mary Jo you can’t stay,’ that’s the first thing he said,” she recalled. “Then he said, ‘let me ask you a question: Have you ever loved anyone the way you have been loved here?’”

And she said no. She was so moved that she decided to put it in words. She wrote a book called, “Is God pink? Dying to heal.”

“This was an encounter with my God,” she said.

Rapini is hardly alone. People around the world have claimed to have near-death experiences. Testimony to those experiences can be found on the Internet.

It is obvious these experiences are real, but there is an ongoing debate over why they happen, is it truly spiritual as Mary Jo believes, or is there a scientific explanation.

But Dr. Michael Beauchamp, a neuroscientist at UT Houston, said studies do show that people sometimes have near-death experiences when the brain is short circuited by a lack of oxygen, like during an aneurism.

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Mary Jo Rapini

He also admits something spiritual may partly explain what’s going on.

“Of course I think the spiritual component is important in all these phenomena,” Dr. Beauchamp said. “Science can’t really explain the spiritual part of it; we can only talk about the physical brain mechanisms, that might start this phenomena or get the ball rolling so to speak.”

Six months after her operation, Rapini ran a 33-mile race.

To her there is nothing mysterious or scientific about what happened in a hospital room in Lubbock.

“I pray more I reflect more, I am more honest,” she said.

It turns out, her life-threatening illness, was also life-changing.