Heaven Is for Real Read online

  As Colton began to set up for an epic plastic-sword fight with an unseen

  vil ain, I marveled at his answer.

  He had already authenticated his experience by tel ing me things he

  could not otherwise have known. But now I had to square his answer, “three

  minutes,” with al 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 wasn’t possible that Colton could have seen and done

  everything he’d described so far in just three minutes. Of course, he wasn’t

  old enough to tel time yet, so maybe his sense of three actual minutes

  wasn’t the same as an adult’s. Like most parents, I was pretty sure Sonja

  and I weren’t 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 doesn’t 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. I’ve 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, Colton’s “three minutes” answer was as straight up

  and matter-of-fact as if he’d told me he’d had Lucky Charms for breakfast.

  As far as our clock goes, he could’ve been right. For him to leave his body

  and return to it, he couldn’t have been gone long. Especial y since we’d

  never received any kind of report saying Colton had ever been clinical y

  dead. In fact, the postoperative report was clear that even though our son’s

  prognosis had been grim, the surgery had gone just fine:

  OPERATIVE REPORT

  OPERATIVE DATE: 3/5/2003

  PREOPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Acute appendicitis

  POSTOPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Perforated appendicitis and abscess

  OPERATION: Appendectomy and drainage of abscess

  SURGEON: Timothy O’Hol eran, 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 al 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 didn’t die.

  How could he have gone to heaven if he didn’t 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 didn’t want to keep

  pushing the heaven issue. But final y, I couldn’t stand it anymore and hunted

  the house for Colton until I found him, down on his knees in the bedroom

  we’d converted to a playroom, building a tower of LEGOs. I leaned in the

  door frame and got his attention.

  “Hey, Colton, I don’t understand,” I began.

  He looked up at me, and I noticed for the first time that al the roundness

  had returned to his face, his cheeks fil ed out and rosy again after his

  il ness had drained them thin and sal ow. “What?”

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

  Colton’s gaze didn’t waver. “Wel , okay then, I died. But just for a little

  bit.”

  My heart skipped a beat. If you haven’t heard your preschooler tel you

  he was dead, I don’t recommend it. But Colton hadn’t died. I knew what the

  medical record said. Colton had never ceased breathing. His heart had

  never stopped.

  I stood in the doorway and mul ed 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 personal y who

  was taken to heaven, “Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not

  know—God knows. And I know that this man . . . was caught up to

  paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted

  to tel .”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 tel ing me he had died “for a

  little bit,” had only been trying to match up his pastor-dad’s 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, wel , 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, “Wel , I must have died then,

  because I was there.”

  Suddenly, he piped up again. “Daddy, remember when I yel ed for you in

  the hospital when I waked up?”

  How could I forget? It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. “Of

  course I do,” I said.

  “Wel , the reason I was yel ing was that Jesus came to get me. He said I

  had to go back because he was answering your prayer. That’s how come I

  was yel ing 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 he’d 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? Personal y? After I had yel ed 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

  al 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 Wilson—the same

  church I’d visited back in March while Sonja stayed back at the Harrises’

  home, nursing Colton when we al 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 formal y, often confiding in God without an intermediary.

  But Colton’s recent revelation that my raging prayers had ascended

  directly to heaven—and had received an equal y direct response—made

  me feel like I had some additional confessing to do.

  I didn’t 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 Colton’s 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

  cal ing 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 real y mad at God,” I continued. “I’m a guy. Guys d o something.

  And al I felt like I could do was yel at God.”

  I described briefly my attitude in that little room in the hospital, blasting

  God, blaming him for Colton’s 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 stil answer it ‘yes’?”

  What had I learned? I was reminded yet again that I could be real with

  God, I told my fel ow pastors. I learned that I didn’t have to offer some kind

  of churchy, holy-sounding prayer in order to be heard in heaven. “You might

  as wel tel God what you think,” I said. “He already knows it anyway.”

  Most importantly of al , I learned that I am heard. We al 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, don’t let them take me!” . . . when I was angry

  at God because I couldn’t go to my son, hold him, and comfort him, God’s

  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 wasn’t particularly interested in the instal ation 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 smal farming town thirty-eight miles due south of

  Imperial. Incorporated in 1887, it’s 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 val ey, 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.

  Suddenly Colton spoke up. “Dad, you had a grandpa named Pop, didn’t

  you?”

  “Yep, sure did,” I said.

  “Was he your mommy’s daddy or your daddy’s daddy?”

  “Pop was my mom’s dad. He passed away when I was not much older

  than you.”

  Colton smiled. “He’s real y nice.”

  I almost drove off the road into the corn. It’s a crazy moment when your

  son uses the present tense to refer to someone who died a quarter century

  before he was even born. But I tried to stay cool. “So you saw Pop?” I said.

  “Yeah, I got to stay with him in heaven. You were real y close to him, huh,

  Dad?”

  “Yes, I was,” was al I could manage. My head spun. Colton had just

  introduced a whole new topic: people you’ve lost, and meeting them in

  heaven. Crazily enough, with al the talk of Jesus and angels and horses, I

  had never even thought to ask him if he’d met anyone I might know. But

  then, why would I? We hadn’t lost any family or friends since Colton was

  born, so who would there have been for him to meet?

  Now this. I probably drove another ten miles toward Benkelman,

  thoughts charging through my mind. Soon, the cornfields were broken by

  neat squares of bronzed stubble, wheat fields past the harvest.

  I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made when I’d put ideas in

  his head—that people had to die, for example, before being admitted to

  heaven. I didn’t want him just feeding me back stuff to please me. I wanted

  to know the truth.

  On the left, a quarter mile off the road, a white church steeple seemed to

  rise from the corn. St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, built in 1918. I wondered

  what the people of this longstanding local fixture would think of the things

  our little boy had been tel ing us.

  Final y, as we crossed into Dundy County, I was ready to start asking

  some open-ended questions. “Hey, Colton,” I said.

  He turned from the window where he’d been watching a pheasant

  pacing us amid the corn rows. “What?”

  “Colton, what did Pop look like?”

  He broke into a big grin. “Oh, Dad, Pop has real y big wings!”

  Again with the present tense. It was weird.

  Colton went on. “My wings were real y little, but Pop’s were big!”

  “What did his clothes look like?”

  “He had white on, but blue
here,” he said, making the sash motion again.

  I edged the truck over to avoid a ladder someone had dropped in the

  road then steered back to the center of the lane. “And you got to stay with

  Pop?”

  Colton nodded, and his eyes seemed to light up.