(OPINION) Up until the age of 16, Heidi Barr did not believe in Jesus, that is until she met Him face-to-face after a terrible horseback riding accident.
“I knew him immediately. Every cell in my soul knew everything about who He was. I should not have seen Jesus. Why should I see Jesus? My father told me Jesus was the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind,” she recalled in a recent interview with Jews for Jesus.
“[Yet] I knew Him. I have known Him my entire life and I love Him. I have loved Him with everything in me,” Barr said.
Barr, now a mom and grandmother, is sharing more of her childhood near-death experience in her new book, “What I Saw in Heaven: The Incredible True Story of The Day I Died, Met Jesus, and Returned to Life a New Person.
In her book, Barr shares about her life, family struggles, and the redemption she found through God’s amazing guidance and grace.
She tells readers how it was easy to spurn any belief in a higher power as a child because, although she was raised Jewish in a small Orthodox community in Iowa, her parents made it a point to tell her God did not exist.
“I was raised in a family that was atheist, but we belonged to this Orthodox synagogue and my father was not only an atheist [but] we were only allowed to discuss God in our home if we were denying His existence,” Barr shared during her interview with Jews for Jesus.
“He hated God,” she said flatly.
Barr said her father used to repeat this mantra almost daily: “There is no God. There is no heaven, there is no hell, you are an accident of science.”
Despite what Barr was told by her father, she said she believed in the “God of Abraham” and prayed to Him daily.
But all that stopped at the age of 12 when she began to endure sexual abuse from the synagogue’s rabbi.
“It kind of set off this spiral of not talking to God, getting into drugs, getting into dangerous situations until I was 15,” she explained.
Barr says, at the time, she only found comfort and joy from riding her horse, Heather. But a freak accident changed the trajectory of her life and brought her face-to-face with the love, compassion, forgiveness, and inexpressible joy of Christ.
“I took off, headed out to hills on Heather, bareback…I was sitting there enjoying the day…when I suddenly heard hoof beats and I knew exactly what that meant,” she described.
An Arabian white horse was uncontrollably running from a nearby barn, its owner was barely able to hang on.
“She came towards me,” Barr explained. “The horse ran right by us, almost clipped us, and ran past. Heather reared up. The first time she reared up, I dropped the reins and grabbed her mane.
The second time she reared up, her back feet stepped off the trail and she flipped over backward onto me. She fell across my body, fracturing my pelvis, breaking my back.”
According to Barr’s account, those injuries weren’t fatal, but when the horse fell across her chest, she died.
“The moment she fell across my chest, I left my body,” she continued.
Barr says she found herself 40 feet up in the air looking down at the commotion taking place near the horse stable.
“I watched my horse roll over my dead body and I was tossed like rag doll…I saw my little sister scream and cover her eyes with her hands. I saw my [other] sister in the car with her face pressed against the window. I could see the Arabian running to the barn with the man flapping on her back,” she recalled.
Then Barr noticed a white light, right near her shoulder.
“And I turned to look over my right shoulder and there was a man up there with me,” she described. “And I knew Him. He then came closer and He had this big grin on his face and I said, ‘Hi, I know you,’ and it was Jesus.”
Barr immediately recognized Him, despite never learning about him.
“Every cell in my soul knew everything about who He was. I should not have seen Jesus. Why should I see Jesus? I’m Jewish. My father told me Jesus was the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind…and yet there was Jesus.”
Barr said that in that moment all she could think about was that she knew Him.
“I knew Him. I have known Him my entire life and I love Him. I have loved Him with everything in me,” she said. “All there was for me was Jesus.”
Barr gives an account, in great detail, of the personality of Jesus.
