Tricia Barker wasn’t religious even though she grew up in a Christian household. But everything changed for her after she got into a horrific near-death experience. At the age of 21, she got into a car accident while driving her Honda Civic in Austin, Texas, to a 10km running race.
The crash was devastating, she went into shock and was unable to move.
‘Even though I wasn’t a believer, I made one little plea in the wreck: “If there is a God, this is going to be a hard day. Please help me. Let me live. Let me walk again.”‘, she told Daily Mail. Miracously, a nurse happened to be driving by and stopped her car at the scene and ran to help Triia. The nurse called an ambulane and instructed Tricia to not move.
When Tricia was rushed to the hospital it was found that she had a fractured spine, broken foot and various internal injuries. CT scans and MRI were conducted but Tricia didn’t have health insurance and had to wait 17 hours for surgery.
‘They were going to have to do spinal surgery, and I was deeply afraid that I would be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. But the surgeons gave me hope,’ Tricia told Daily Mail. Before the surgery she had to sign documents and noticed that the documents said she had a “17 percent chance of death.”
As a strong atheist, that didn’t scare her as she believed ‘death is just death’ and there was nothing but blackness after one dies.
However what happened on the operating table changed her perspective forever. Under anaesthetic, Tricia recalled she found herself suspended between two worlds. One was where she was a broken body lying on an operating table, and another that would redefine everything she thought she knew about life and death.
‘I popped up out of my body… I was looking down at myself. The minute I left my body, I felt total clarity and so much smarter than I’d ever been. There was no pain – just peace.’
‘I saw these “light beings” behind the surgeons. They were made up of this silvery-white, gold, yellow and blue light. They were androgynous, neither male nor female,’ she said.
‘The first thing that hit me was that they were incredibly intelligent. They looked at me very deeply and it’s like they were communicating through telepathy… They sent this light through the back of the surgeons into their hands, and it lit up my whole body.
‘I knew light was communication. They showed me an image of me running and they told me I was going to be okay.’
Tricia’s montitor flatlined but she could see it happening, as if she were an outside observer.
‘I thought, “I’m technically dead, so I can do whatever I want outside of this body.” And I didn’t want to look at what the surgeons were going to do to try to revive me.
‘It was definitely an out-of-body experience that became a near-death experience.’
Tricia was succumbing to internal injuries on the operating table but didn’t know. Later she was told that she was technically dead for a total of three minutes before surgeons were able to revive her.
She says that during this time she moved through walls, doors and corridors, passing through the hospital and saw her stepfather and mother in the waiting room.
‘He was at a vending machine getting a candy bar. I thought he didn’t eat sweets or was on a carb-free diet, so I thought it was funny,’ she said.
She continued and said that she moved “beyond our universe” and into the afterlife. She saw her grandfather there who had died when she was just ten.
‘When I saw him, I almost didn’t recognise him because he looked so young and healthy. I forced my spirit to transform into the child version of myself,’ she said adding that her vision seems to affirm one of the most enduring myths of the afterlife – that we’re reunited with loved ones not as they were in old age, but in the prime of their lives.
The grandfather asked her, “Do you want to keep going towards God?” I knew my body wasn’t doing so well in the physical world, so of course I wanted to see God.’
Tricia continued to drift through afterlife until a ‘booming voice – not really male or female’ hit her like lightning.
‘It was just something you could not deny, like a vibration. I knew it was God. It shakes you to the very core of your being. It’s nothing but pure love.’
The speaker told Tricia that she was destined to teached and to show students ‘how to live a life full of joy and passion and fun and belief in themselves’. At the time, she wanted to be a lawyer. That’s when she woke up gasping in the ICU.
She asked for a pen and paper and wrote down everything. Initially her family was sceptical when Tricia shared everything but it changed when she described seeing her stepfather buying a candy bar from the hospital vending machine – a detail her mother confirmed.
A minister late gave her parents a pamphlet condemning near-death experiences as ‘delusions from the devil’.
‘They were just done with talking about it,’ says Tricia. ‘They took the stance that they were right and I was wrong.’
After recovering, she returned to college, switched from law to teaching, and discovered her true calling in life.