Heaven Is for Real Read online

  around you instead of being a straight edge like an ordinary desk. When I

  was a teenager and knee-deep in wood shop at school, I spent many

  hours in my parents’ garage, refinishing Pop’s desk. Then I moved it into

  my room, a sweet reminder of a salt-of-the-earth man.

  From the time I put the desk into service, I kept a photo of Pop in the top

  left drawer and pul ed it out every now and then to reminisce. It was the last

  picture ever taken of my grandfather; it showed him at age sixty-one, with

  white hair and glasses. When Sonja and I married, the desk and the photo

  became part of our household.

  After Colton started talking about having met Pop in heaven, I noticed

  that he gave specific physical details about what Jesus looked like, and he

  also described his unborn sister as “a little smal er than Cassie, with dark

  hair.” But when I asked him what Pop looked like, Colton would talk mainly

  about his clothes and the size of his wings. When I asked him about facial

  features, though, he got kind of vague. I have to admit, it was kind of

  bugging me.

  One day not long after our drive to Benkelman, I cal ed Colton down to

  the basement and pul ed my treasured photo of Pop out of the drawer.

  “This is how I remember Pop,” I said.

  Colton took the frame, held it in both hands, and gazed at the photo for a

  minute or so. I waited for his face to light up in recognition, but it didn’t. In

  fact, a frown crinkled the space between his eyes and he shook his head.

  “Dad, nobody’s old in heaven,” Colton said. “And nobody wears glasses.”

  Then he turned around and marched up the stairs.

  Nobody’s old in heaven . . .

  That statement got me thinking. Sometime later, I cal ed my mom in

  Ulysses. “Hey, do you have pictures of Pop when he was a young man?”

  “I’m sure I do,” she said. “I’l have to hunt them down, though. Do you

  want me to mail them to you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t want them to get lost. Just make a copy of one and mail

  that.”

  Several weeks passed. Then one day, I opened the mailbox to find an

  envelope from Mom containing a Xerox copy of an old black-and-white

  photograph. I learned later that Mom had dug it out of a box that she’d

  stored in a back bedroom closet since the time Cassie was a baby, a box

  that hadn’t seen daylight since two years before Colton was born.

  There were four people in the picture, and Mom had written an

  accompanying note explaining who they were: My Grandma El en, in her

  twenties in the photo, but now in her eighties and stil living in Ulysses. My

  family had last seen her just a couple of months before. The photo also

  showed my mom as a baby girl, about eighteen months old; my Uncle Bil ,

  who was about six; and Pop, a handsome fel ow, twenty-nine years young

  when the photo was snapped in 1943.

  Of course, I’d never told Colton that it was bugging me that he didn’t

  seem to recognize Pop from my old keepsake photo. That evening, Sonja

  and I were sitting in the front room when I cal ed Colton to come upstairs. It

  took him a while to make his appearance, and when he did, I pul ed out the

  photocopied picture Mom had sent.

  “Hey, come here and take a look at this, Colton,” I said, holding the

  paper out for him. “What do you think?”

  He took the picture from my hand, looked down, and then looked back at

  me, eyes ful of surprise. “Hey!” he said happily. “How did you get a picture

  of Pop?”

  Sonja and I looked at each other, astonished.

  “Colton, don’t you recognize anyone else in the picture?” I said.

  He shook his head slowly. “No . . .”

  I leaned over and pointed to my grandma. “Who do you think that is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s Grandma El en.”

  Colton’s eyes turned skeptical. “That doesn’t look like Grandma El en.”

  I glanced at Sonja and chuckled. “Wel , she used to look like that.”

  “Can I go play?” Colton said, handing me the picture.

  After he left the room, Sonja and I talked about how interesting it was

  that Colton recognized Pop from a photo taken more than half a century

  before he was born—a photo he’d never seen before—but didn’t

  recognize his great-grandma whom he had just seen a couple of months

  back.

  After we thought about it, though, the fact that the Pop Colton said he

  spent time with was no longer sixty-one but somewhere in his prime,

  seemed to us a good news/bad news scenario: The bad news is that in

  heaven, we’l stil look like ourselves. The good news is, it’l be the younger

  version.

  TWENTY-THREE

  POWER FROM ABOVE

  On October 4, 2004, Colby Lawrence Burpo entered the world. From the

  moment he was born, he looked like a carbon copy of Colton. But as with

  al kids, God had also made him unique. If Cassie was our sensitive child

  and Colton was our serious one, Colby was our clown. From an early age,

  Colby’s goofiness added a fresh dose of laughter to our home.

  One evening later that fal , Sonja had settled in with Colton to read him a

  Bible story.

  She sat on the edge of his bed and read him the story as Colton lay

  under his blanket, head nestled in his pil ow. Then it was time for prayer.

  One of the great blessings of our lives as parents has been listening to

  our kids pray. When they are smal , children pray without the showiness

  that sometimes creeps into our prayers as grown-ups, without that sort of

  “prayer-ese,” a language meant to appeal more to anyone listening than to

  God. And when Colton and Cassie offered prayers in their plain, earnest

  way, it seemed that God answered.

  Early on, we developed the practice of giving the kids specific things to

  pray for, not only to build their faith, but also because praying for others is a

  way to develop a heart for needs outside your own.

  “You know how Daddy preaches every week?” Sonja said now as she

  sat beside Colton. “I think we should pray for him, that he would get a lot of

  good study time in this week so that he can give a good message in

  church on Sunday morning.”

  Colton looked at her and said the strangest thing: “I’ve seen power shot

  down to Daddy.”

  Sonja later told me that she took a moment to turn these words over in

  her mind. Power shot down?

  “What do you mean, Colton?”

  “Jesus shoots down power for Daddy when he’s talking.”

  Sonja shifted on the bed so that she could look directly into Colton’s

  eyes. “Okay . . . when? Like when Daddy talks at church?”

  Colton nodded. “Yeah, at church. When he’s tel ing Bible stories to

  people.”

  Sonja didn’t know what to say to that, a situation we’d grown used to

  over the past year and a half. So she and Colton prayed together, sending

  up flares to heaven that Daddy would give a good message on Sunday.

  Then Sonja slipped down the hal to the living room to share their

  conversation with me. “But don’t you dare wake him up to ask him about

  it!” she said.

  So I had to wait un
til the next morning over breakfast.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said, pouring milk into Colton’s usual bowl of cereal.

  ”Mommy said you were talking last night during Bible story time. Can you

  tel me what you were tel ing Mommy about . . . about Jesus shooting down

  power? What’s the power like?”

  “It’s the Holy Spirit,” Colton said simply. “I watched him. He showed me.”

  “The Holy Spirit?”

  “Yeah, he shoots down power for you when you’re talking in church.”

  If there were comic-strip thought-bubbles over people’s heads, mine

  would’ve been fil ed with question marks and exclamation points right then.

  Every Sunday morning before I give the sermon, I pray a similar prayer:

  “God, if you don’t help this morning, this message is going to fail.” In light of

  Colton’s words, I realized I had been praying without real y knowing what I

  was praying for. And to imagine God answering it by “shooting down

  power” . . . wel , it was just incredible.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  ALI'S MOMENT

  After Colby was born, Sonja and I had found that the dynamics of taking the

  kids with us everywhere had changed. Now we were outnumbered three to

  two. We decided the time had come for a regular babysitter, so we hired a

  very mature, responsible eighth grader named Ali Titus to watch the kids

  for us. On Monday nights, Sonja and I stil played coed softbal on our “old

  people’s” team, though my sliding days were over.

  One Monday evening in 2005, Ali came over to babysit Cassie, Colton,

  and Colby so we could go to our game. It was around 10 p.m. when we

  pul ed back into the driveway. Sonja got out and went inside to check on

  Ali and the kids while I shut the garage down for the night, so I didn’t hear

  what happened inside until a few minutes after the fact.

  The interior garage door leads into our kitchen, and when she walked in,

  Sonja later told me, she found Ali at the sink, washing up the supper

  dishes . . . and crying.

  “Ali, what’s wrong?” Sonja said. Was it something with Ali, or something

  that had happened with the kids?

  Ali pul ed her hands from the dishwater and dried them on a towel.

  “Um . . . I real y don’t know how to say this, Mrs. Burpo,” she began. She

  looked down at the floor, hesitating.

  “It’s okay, Ali,” Sonja said. “What is it?”

  Ali looked up, eyes ful of tears. “Wel , I’m sorry to ask you this, but . . .

  did you have a miscarriage?”

  “Yes, I did,” Sonja said, surprised. “How did you know that?”

  “Um . . . Colton and I had a little talk.”

  Sonja invited Ali to sit on the couch with her and tel her what happened.

  “It started after I put Colby and Colton to bed,” Ali began. Cassie had

  gone downstairs to her room, and Ali had given Colby a bottle and then put

  him down in his crib upstairs. Then she headed down the hal , tucked

  Colton into his bed, and came out to the kitchen to clean up from the

  evening meal she’d fed the kids. “I had just turned the water off in the sink

  when I heard Colton crying.”

  Ali told Sonja that she went to check on Colton and found him sitting up

  in his bed, tears streaming down his face. “What’s wrong, Colton?” she

  asked him.

  Colton sniffled and wiped his eyes. “I miss my sister,” he said.

  Ali said she smiled, relieved that the problem seemed to have a simple

  solution. “Okay, sweetie, you want me to go downstairs and get her for

  you?”

  Colton shook his head. “No, I miss my other sister.”

  Now Ali was confused. “Your other sister? You only have one sister and

  one brother, Colton. Cassie and Colby, right?”

  “No, I have another sister,” Colton said. “I saw her. In heaven.” Then he

  started to cry again. “I miss her so much.”

  As Ali told Sonja this part of the story, her eyes wel ed with fresh tears. “I

  didn’t know what to say, Mrs. Burpo. He was so upset. So I asked him

  when he saw this other sister.”

  Colton told Ali, “When I was little, I had surgery and I went up to heaven

  and saw my sister.”

  Then, Ali told Sonja, Colton began crying again, only harder. “I don’t

  understand why my sister is dead,” he said. “I don’t know why she’s in

  heaven and not here.”

  Ali sat on the bed beside Colton, as she put it, “in shock.” This situation

  definitely wasn’t on the normal “in case of emergency” babysitting list, as

  in: (1) who to cal in case of fire; (2) who to cal in case of il ness; (3) who to

  cal in case child reports supernatural experience.

  Ali knew Colton had been extremely il a couple of years before and that

  he’d spent time in the hospital. But she hadn’t known about what had

  happened in the operating room. Now she had no idea what to say, even

  as Colton shrugged off his covers and crawled up in her lap. So as he

  cried, she cried with him.

  “I miss my sister,” he said again, snuffling and laying his head on Ali’s

  shoulder.

  “Shh . . . it’s okay, Colton,” Ali said. “There’s a reason for everything.”

  And they stayed that way, with Ali rocking Colton until he cried himself to

  sleep in her arms.

  Ali finished her story, and Sonja gave her a hug. Later, Ali told us that for

  the next two weeks, she couldn’t stop thinking about what Colton had told

  her, and how Sonja had confirmed that before his surgery, Colton hadn’t

  known anything about Sonja’s miscarriage.

  Ali had grown up in a Christian home but had entertained the same

  doubts as so many of us do: for example, how did we know any one

  religion is different from any other? But Colton’s story about his sister

  strengthened her Christian faith, Ali said. “Hearing him describe the girl’s

  face . . . it wasn’t something that a six-year-old boy could just make up,”

  she told us. “Now, whenever I am having doubts, I picture Colton’s face,

  tears running down his cheeks, as he told me how much he missed his

  sister.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  SWORDS OF THE ANGELS

  From a kid’s perspective, maybe the best thing that happened in 2005

  was the release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. During the

  Christmas season, we took the kids to see the movie on the big screen.

  Sonja and I were excited to see the first high-quality dramatization of C. S.

  Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, books we had both enjoyed as kids.

  Colton was more excited about a movie that featured good guys fighting

  bad guys with swords.

  In early 2006, we rented the DVD and settled into the living room for a

  family movie night. Instead of sitting on the furniture, we al sat on the

  carpet, Sonja, Cassie, and I leaning against the sofa. Colton and Colby

  perched on their knees in front of us, rooting for Aslan, the warrior lion, and

  the Pevensie kids: Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan. The house even

  smel ed like a theater, with bowls of Act I buttered popcorn, hot out of the

  microwave, sitting on the floor within easy reach.

  In case you haven’t seen The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it is