Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back (7 page)

What have we been missing? I wondered aloud.

I dont know, she said. Its like he just pops out with new information all of a sudden.

I want to know more, but I dont know what to ask him.

We were both teachers, Sonja in the formal sense and I in the pastoral sense. We agreed that the best way to proceed was to just keep asking open-ended questions as the situation presented itself, and not fill in any blanks for Colton as I had, inadvertently, when I suggested the word crown when Colton was describing the gold thing on Jesus head. In the coming years, we would stick to that course so carefully that Colton didnt know the word sash until he was ten years old.

A couple of days after the conversation about the markers, I was sitting at the kitchen table, preparing for a sermon, and Colton was playing nearby. I looked up from my books and over at my son, who was armed with plastic swords and in the process of tying the corners of a towel around his neck. Every superhero needs a cape.

I knew I wanted to ask him about heaven again and had been turning over possible questions in my mind. I had never had a conversation like this with Colton before, so I was a little nervous about how to begin. In fact, I had never had a conversation like this with anyone before.

Trying to catch him before he actually did battle, I got Coltons attention and motioned him to come sit with me. He trotted over and climbed into the chair at the end of the kitchen table. Yes?

Remember when you were telling me what Jesus looks like? And about the horse?

He nodded, eyes wide and earnest.

You were in heaven?

He nodded again.

I realized I was starting to accept that, yes, maybe Colton really had been to heaven. I felt like our family had received a gift and, having just peeled back the top layer of tissue paper, knew its general shape. Now I wanted to know what all was in the box.

Well, what did you do in heaven? I ventured.

Homework.

Homework? That wasnt what I was expecting. Choir practice, maybe, but homework? What do you mean?

Colton smiled. Jesus was my teacher.

Like school?

Colton nodded. Jesus gave me work to do, and that was my favorite part of heaven. There were lots of kids, Dad.

This statement marked the beginning of a period that I wished we had written down. During this conversation and for the next year or so, Colton could name a lot of the kids he said were in heaven with him. He doesnt remember their names now, though, and neither do Sonja nor I.

But all I could think to ask was: So what did the kids look like? What do people look like in heaven?

Everybodys got wings, Colton said.

Wings, huh?

Did you have wings? I asked.

Yeah, but mine werent very big. He looked a little glum when he said this.

Okay . . . did you walk places or did you fly?

We flew. Well, all except for Jesus. He was the only one in heaven who didnt have wings. Jesus just went up and down like an elevator.

The book of Acts flashed into my head, the scene of Jesus ascension, when Jesus told the disciples that they would be his witnesses, that they would tell people all over the world about him. After he said this, the Scripture says, Jesus was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.1

Jesus went up. And will come down. Without wings. To a kid, that could look like an elevator.

Colton broke into my thoughts. Everyone kind of looks like angels in heaven, Dad.

What do you mean?

All the people have a light above their head.

I racked my brain for what I knew about angels and light. In the Bible, when angels show up, theyre sometimes dazzlingly bright, blinding almost. When Mary Magdalene and the other women showed up outside Jesus tomb on the third day after he was buried, the gospels say that an angel met them, sitting on the tombstone that had somehow been rolled away: His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow.2

I remembered that the book of Acts talks about the disciple Stephen. As he was being accused of heresy before a Jewish court, they saw that his face became as bright as an angels.3 Not long after, Stephen was stoned to death.

The apostle John in the book of Revelation, wrote that he saw a mighty angel coming down from heaven, surrounded by a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and that the angels face shone like the sun.4

I couldnt remember angels having lights over their heads specificallyor halos, as some would call thembut I also knew that Coltons experience of angels in storybooks and Scripture did not include lights over angels heads. And he didnt even know the word halo. I dont know that hed ever even seen one, since our bedtime Bible stories and the Sunday school lessons at church are closely aligned with Scripture.

Still, what he said intrigued me for another reason: A friend of ours, the wife of a pastor at a church in Colorado, had once told me about something her daughter, Hannah, said when she was three years old. After the morning service was over one Sunday, Hannah tugged on her moms skirt and asked, Mommy, why do some people in church have lights over their heads and some dont?

At the time, I remember thinking two things: First, I wouldve knelt down and asked Hannah, Did I have a light over my head? Please say yes!

I also wondered what Hannah had seen, and whether she had seen it because, like my son, she had a childlike faith.

Whoever humbles himself like this child . . .

What is childlike humility? Its not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of guile. The lack of an agenda. Its that precious, fleeting time before we have accumulated enough pride or position to care what other people might think. The same un-self-conscious honesty that enables a three-year-old to splash joyfully in a rain puddle, or tumble laughing in the grass with a puppy, or point out loudly that you have a booger hanging out of your nose, is what is required to enter heaven. It is the opposite of ignoranceit is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard.

All this flashed through my mind in an instant, but I remained noncommittal.

A light, huh? was all I said.

Yeah, and they have yellow from here to here, he said, making the sash motion again, left shoulder to right hip. And white from here to here. He placed his hands on his shoulders, then bent forward and touched the tops of his feet.

I thought of the man who appeared to the prophet Daniel: On the twenty-fourth day of the first month, as I was standing on the bank of the great river, the Tigris, I looked up and there before me was a man dressed in linen, with a belt of the finest gold around his waist. His body was like chrysolite, his face like lightning, his eyes like flaming torches, his arms and legs like the gleam of burnished bronze.6

Colton then made the sash motion again and said that people in heaven wore different colors there than the angels did.

By now my New Information Meter was nearly pegged, but there was one more thing I had to know. If Colton really had been to heaven and really had seen all these thingsJesus, horses, angels, other childrenand was up there (was it up?) long enough to do homework, how long had he left his body, as he claimed?

I looked at him, kneeling in the kitchen chair with his towel-cape still tied around his neck. Colton, you said you were in heaven and you did all these things . . . a lot of things. How long were you gone?

My little boy looked me right in the eye and didnt hesitate. Three minutes, he said. Then he hopped down from the chair and skipped off to play.

FOURTEEN ON HEAVEN TIME

Three minutes?

As Colton began to set up for an epic plastic-sword fight with an unseen villain, I marveled at his answer.

He had already authenticated his experience by telling me things he could not otherwise have known. But now I had to square his answer, three minutes, with all the rest. I stared down at my Bible, lying open on the kitchen table, and turned over the possibilities in my mind.

Three minutes. It wasnt possible that Colton could have seen and done everything hed described so far in just three minutes. Of course, he wasnt old enough to tell time yet, so maybe his sense of three actual minutes wasnt the same as an adults. Like most parents, I was pretty sure Sonja and I werent helping that issue, promising to be off the phone, for example, or finished talking in the yard with a neighbor, or done in the garage in five more minutes, then wrapping it up twenty minutes later.

It was also possible that time in heaven doesnt track with time on earth. The Bible says that with the Lord, a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.1 Some interpret that as a literal exchange, as in, two days equals two thousand years. Ive always taken it to mean that God operates outside of our understanding of time. Time on earth is keyed to a celestial clock, governed by the solar system. But the Bible says there is no sun in heaven because God is the light there. Maybe there is no time in heaven. At least not as we understand it.

On the other hand, Coltons three minutes answer was as straight up and matter-of-fact as if hed told me hed had Lucky Charms for breakfast. As far as our clock goes, he couldve been right. For him to leave his body and return to it, he couldnt have been gone long. Especially since wed never received any kind of report saying Colton had ever been clinically dead. In fact, the postoperative report was clear that even though our sons prognosis had been grim, the surgery had gone just fine:

OPERATIVE REPORT

OPERATIVE DATE: 3/5/2003

POSTOPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Perforated appendicitis and abscess

OPERATION: Appendectomy and drainage of abscess

SURGEON: Timothy OHolleran, M.D.

DESCRIPTION OF THE OPERATION: The patient was placed in a supine position on the Operating Table. Under general anesthesia the abdomen was prepped and draped in a sterile fashion. A transverse incision was made in the right lower quadrant and carried down through all layers in the peritoneal cavity. . . . The patient had a perforated appendix with an abscess. The appendix was delivered up in the operative field.

A thought hit me like a brick: Colton didnt die.

How could he have gone to heaven if he didnt die?

A couple of days passed as I chewed on that. It had only been a week or so since Colton first told us about the angels, so I didnt want to keep pushing the heaven issue. But finally, I couldnt stand it anymore and hunted the house for Colton until I found him, down on his knees in the bedroom wed converted to a playroom, building a tower of LEGOs. I leaned in the door frame and got his attention.

Hey, Colton, I dont understand, I began.

He looked up at me, and I noticed for the first time that all the roundness had returned to his face, his cheeks filled out and rosy again after his illness had drained them thin and sallow. What?

You said you went to heaven. People have to die to go to heaven.

Coltons gaze didnt waver. Well, okay then, I died. But just for a little bit.

My heart skipped a beat. If you havent heard your preschooler tell you he was dead, I dont recommend it. But Colton hadnt died. I knew what the medical record said. Colton had never ceased breathing. His heart had never stopped.

I stood in the doorway and mulled over this new tidbit as Colton returned his attention to his toys. Then I remembered that the Bible talks in several places about people who had seen heaven without dying. The apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth about a Christian he knew personally who was taken to heaven, Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not knowGod knows. And I know that this man . . . was caught up to paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.2

Then, of course, there was John the apostle, who described heaven in great detail in the book of Revelation. John had been exiled to the island of Patmos, where an angel visited him and commanded him to write down a series of prophecies to various churches. John wrote:

After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, Come up here, and I will show you what must take place after this. At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an emerald, encircled the throne.3

Rainbows . . . now where had I heard that recently?

As I stood there and thought through a scriptural basis for experiencing heaven without dying, I realized that Colton, in telling me he had died for a little bit, had only been trying to match up his pastor-dads assertion with what he knew to be the facts of his own experience. Kind of like walking outside and finding that the street is wet, and concluding, well, okay, it must have rained.

See, I had this tidy little box that said, People have to die to go to heaven, and Colton, trusting me, concluded, Well, I must have died then, because I was there.

Suddenly, he piped up again. Daddy, remember when I yelled for you in the hospital when I waked up?

Well, the reason I was yelling was that Jesus came to get me. He said I had to go back because he was answering your prayer. Thats how come I was yelling for you.

Suddenly, my knees felt weak underneath me. I flashed back to my prayers alone, raging at God, and my prayers in the waiting room, quiet and desperate. I remembered how scared I was, agonizing over whether Colton would hang on through the surgery, whether hed live long enough for me to see his precious face again. Those were the longest, darkest ninety minutes of my life.

And Jesus answered my prayer? Personally? After I had yelled at God, chastising him, questioning his wisdom and his faithfulness?

Why would God even answer a prayer like that? And how did I deserve his mercy?

FIFTEEN CONFESSION

The first weeks of July burned into the plains, nurturing the cornfields with all the heat of a giant greenhouse. Wedgewood blue skies arced over Imperial almost every day, the air buzzing with mosquitoes in the sunshine and singing with crickets by starlight. Around the middle of July, I drove over to Greeley, Colorado, for the church district conference. The gathering of about 150 pastors, pastors wives, and delegates from Nebraska and Colorado was meeting at the church pastored by Steve Wilsonthe same church Id visited back in March while Sonja stayed back at the Harrises home, nursing Colton when we all thought he had a stomach flu.

Roman Catholics practice confession as a sacrament, sharing their sins and shortcomings with a priest. Protestants practice confession, too, though a little less formally, often confiding in God without an intermediary. But Coltons recent revelation that my raging prayers had ascended directly to heavenand had received an equally direct responsemade me feel like I had some additional confessing to do.

I didnt feel good about having been so angry with God. When I was so upset, burning with righteous anger that he was about to take my child, guess who was holding my child? Guess who was loving my child, unseen? As a pastor, I felt accountable to other pastors for my own lack of faith. So at Greeley Wesleyan during the conference, I asked Phil Harris, our district superintendent, if I could have a few minutes to share.

He agreed, and when the time came, I stood up before my peers in the sanctuary that on Sunday mornings held around a thousand people in its pews. After delivering a brief update on Coltons health, I thanked these men and women for their prayers on behalf of our family. Then I began my confession.

Most of you know that before everything happened with Colton, I had broken my leg and gone through the kidney stone operation, then the mastectomy. I had had such a bad year that some people had started calling me Pastor Job.

The sanctuary echoed with gentle laughter.

But none of that stuff hurt like watching what Colton was going through, and I got really mad at God, I continued. Im a guy. Guys do something. And all I felt like I could do was yell at God.

I described briefly my attitude in that little room in the hospital, blasting God, blaming him for Coltons condition, whining about how he had chosen to treat one of his pastors, as though I should somehow be exempt from troubles because I was doing his work.

At that time, when I was so upset and so outraged, can you believe that God chose to answer that prayer? I said. Can you believe that I could pray a prayer like that, and God would still answer it yes?

What had I learned? I was reminded yet again that I could be real with God, I told my fellow pastors. I learned that I didnt have to offer some kind of churchy, holy-sounding prayer in order to be heard in heaven. You might as well tell God what you think, I said. He already knows it anyway.

Most importantly of all, I learned that I am heard. We all are. I had been a Christian since childhood and a pastor for half my life, so I believed that before. But now I knew it. How? As the nurses wheeled my son away screaming, Daddy, Daddy, dont let them take me! . . . when I was angry at God because I couldnt go to my son, hold him, and comfort him, Gods son was holding my son in his lap.

SIXTEEN POP

On a sun-drenched day in August, four-year-old Colton hopped into the passenger seat of my red pickup, and the two of us headed off to Benkelman. I had to drive out there to bid a job and decided to take Colton with me. He wasnt particularly interested in the installation of industrial-sized garage doors. But he loved riding in my little Chevy diesel because, unlike the Expedition where he had a limited view from the backseat, his car seat rode high in the Chevy, and he could see everything.

Benkelman is a small farming town thirty-eight miles due south of Imperial. Incorporated in 1887, its fraying a bit at the edges like a lot of communities in rural Nebraska, its population declining as technology eats up agricultural jobs and people move to bigger cities in search of work. I steered past the familiar fertilizer and potato plants that rise at the east end of Imperial, then turned south toward Enders Lake. We drove by the cedar-dotted municipal golf course on our left, and then, as we passed over a concrete dam, the lake sparkled below on our right. Colton looked down at a speedboat towing a skier in its foamy wake. We crossed the dam, dipped down in a valley, and motored up onto the stretch of two-lane highway that points straight south. Now acres of farmland fanned out around us, cornstalks six feet high bright green against the sky, and the asphalt cutting through it like a blade.