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.
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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.” She shares about her life, family struggles and the redemption she found through God’s amazing guidance and grace.
Barr 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 says 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.
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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.
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