Heaven Is for Real Read online

  Sonja, Colton, and me bringing up the rear. In a corner of the room

  decorated to look like a bamboo hut, the keeper was displaying the

  undisputed star of the Crawl-A-See-Um, Rosie the Spider. A rose-haired

  tarantula from South America, Rosie was a furry arachnid with a plum-size

  body and legs six inches long, thick as pencils. But the best thing about

  Rosie from a kid’s point of view was that if you were brave enough to hold

  her, even for a moment, the zookeeper would award you with a sticker.

  Now, if you have little kids, you already know that there are times they’d

  rather have a good sticker than a handful of cash. And this sticker was

  special: white with a picture of a tarantula stamped in yel ow, it read, “I held

  Rosie!”

  This wasn’t just any old sticker; this was a badge of courage!

  Cassie bent low over the keeper’s hand. Colton looked up at me, blue

  eyes wide. “Can I have a sticker, Daddy?”

  “You have to hold Rosie to get a sticker, buddy.”

  At that age, Colton had this precious way of talking, part-serious, part-

  breathless, gol y-gee wonder. He was a smart, funny little guy with a black-

  and-white way of looking at life. Something was either fun (LEGOs) or it

  wasn’t (Barbies). He either liked food (steak) or hated it (green beans).

  There were good guys and bad guys, and his favorite toys were good-guy

  action figures. Superheroes were a big deal to Colton. He took his Spider-

  Man, Batman, and Buzz Lightyear action figures with him everywhere he

  went. That way, whether he was stuck in the backseat of the SUV, in a

  waiting room, or on the floor at the church, he could stil create scenes in

  which the good guys saved the world. This usual y involved swords,

  Colton’s favorite weapon for banishing evil. At home, he could b e the

  superhero. I’d often walk into the house and find Colton armed to the teeth,

  a toy sword tucked through each side of his belt and one in each hand: “I’m

  playing Zorro, Daddy! Wanna play?”

  Now Colton turned his gaze to the spider in the keeper’s hand, and it

  looked to me like he wished he had a sword right then, at least for moral

  support. I tried to imagine how huge the spider must look to a little guy who

  wasn’t even four feet tal . Our son was al boy—a rough-and-tumble kid who

  had gotten up close and personal with plenty of ants and beetles and other

  crawling creatures. But none of those creepy-crawlies had been as big as

  his face and with hair nearly as long as his own.

  Cassie straightened and smiled at Sonja. “I’l hold her, Mommy. Can I

  hold Rosie?”

  “Okay, but you’l have to wait your turn,” Sonja said.

  Cassie got in line behind a couple of other kids. Colton’s eyes never left

  Rosie as first a boy then a girl held the enormous spider and the

  zookeeper awarded the coveted stickers. In no time at al , Cassie’s

  moment of truth arrived. Colton braced himself against my legs, close

  enough to see his sister, but trying to bolt at the same time, pushing back

  against my knees. Cassie held out her palm and we al watched as Rosie,

  an old hand with smal , curious humans, lifted one furry leg at a time and

  scurried across the bridge from the keeper’s hand into Cassie’s, then

  back into the keeper’s.

  “You did it!” the keeper said as Sonja and I clapped and cheered. “Good

  job!” Then the zookeeper stood, peeled a white-and-yel ow sticker off a big

  rol , and gave it to Cassie.

  This, of course, made it even worse for Colton, who had not only been

  upstaged by his sister but was now also the only stickerless Burpo kid. He

  gazed longingly at Cassie’s prize, then back at Rosie, and I could see him

  trying to wrestle down his fear. Final y, he pursed his lips, dragged his gaze

  away from Rosie, and looked back up at me. “I don’t want to hold her.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But can I have a sticker?”

  “Nope, the only way to get one is to hold her. Cassie did it. You can do it

  if you want to. Do you want to try? Just for a second?”

  Colton looked back at the spider, then at his sister, and I could see

  wheels turning behind his eyes: Cassie did it. She didn’t get bit.

  Then he shook his head firmly: No. “But I still want a sticker!” he insisted.

  At the time, Colton was two months shy of four years old—and he was very

  good at standing his ground.

  “The only way you can get a sticker is if you hold Rosie,” Sonja said.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to hold her?”

  Colton answered by grabbing Sonja’s hand and trying to tug her away

  from the keeper. “No. I wanna to go see the starfish.”

  “Are you sure?” Sonja said.

  With a vigorous nod, Colton marched toward the Crawl-A-See-Um door.

  TWO

  PASTOR JOB

  In the next room, we found rows of aquariums and indoor “tide pools.” We

  wandered around the exhibits, taking in starfish and mol usks and sea

  anemones that looked like underwater blossoms. Cassie and Colton

  oohed and aahed as they dipped their hands in man-made tide pools and

  touched creatures that they had never seen.

  Next, we stepped into a massive atrium, bursting with jungle leaves,

  vines tumbling down, branches climbing toward the sky. I took in the palm

  trees and exotic flowers that looked as if they’d come from one of Colton’s

  storybooks. And al around us, clouds of butterflies flitted and swirled.

  As the kids explored, I let my mind drift back to the summer before, when

  Sonja and I played in a coed softbal league, like we do every year. We

  usual y finished in the top five, even though we played on the “old folks”

  team—translation: people in their thirties—battling teams made up of

  col ege kids. Now it struck me as ironic that our family’s seven-month trial

  began with an injury that occurred in the last game of our last tournament of

  the 2002 season. I played center field, and Sonja played outfield rover. By

  then, Sonja had earned her master’s degree in library science and to me

  was even more beautiful than when she’d first caught my eye as a

  freshman strol ing across the quad at Bartlesvil e Wesleyan Col ege.

  Summer was winding down, but the dog days of the season were in ful

  force with a penetrating heat, thirsty for rain. We had traveled from Imperial

  about twenty miles down the road to the vil age of Wauneta for a double-

  elimination tournament. At nearly midnight, we were battling our way up

  through the bracket, playing under the blue-white glow of the field lights.

  I don’t remember what the score was, but I remember we were at the tail

  end of the game and the lead was within reach. I had hit a double and was

  perched on second base. Our next batter came up and knocked a pitch

  that landed in the center-field grass. I saw my chance. As an outfielder ran

  to scoop up the bal , I took off for third base.

  I sensed the bal winging toward the infield.

  Our third-base coach motioned frantical y: “Slide! Slide!”

  Adrenaline pumping, I dropped to the ground and felt the red dirt

  swooshing underneath my left hip. The other team’s third basema
n

  stretched out his glove hand for the bal and—

  Crack!

  The sound of my leg breaking was so loud that I imagined the bal had

  zinged in from the outfield and smacked it. Fire exploded in my shin and

  ankle. I fel to my back, contracted into a fetal position, and pul ed my knee

  up to my bel y. The pain was searing, and I remember the dirt around me

  transforming into a blur of legs, then concerned faces, as two of our

  players, both EMTs, ran to my aid.

  I dimly remember Sonja rushing over to take a look. I could tel by her

  expression that my leg was bent in ways that didn’t look natural. She

  stepped back to let our EMT friends get to work. A twenty-mile ride later,

  hospital Xrays revealed a pair of nasty breaks. The tibia, the larger bone in

  my lower leg, had sustained what doctors cal a “spiral break,” meaning

  that each end of the break looked like the barber-pole pattern on a dril bit.

  Also, my ankle had snapped completely in half. That was probably the

  break I had heard. I later learned that the cracking sound was so loud that

  people sitting in the stands at first base heard it.

  That sound replayed in my head as Sonja and I watched Cassie and

  Colton scamper ahead of us in the Butterfly Pavilion atrium. The kids

  stopped on a smal bridge and peered down into a koi pond, chattering

  and pointing. Clouds of butterflies floated around us, and I glanced at the

  brochure I’d bought at the front desk to see if I could tel their names. There

  were “blue morphos” with wings a deep aquamarine, black-and-white

  “paper kites” that flew slowly and gently like snippets of newsprint floating

  down through the air, and the “cloudless sulfur,” a tropical butterfly with

  wings the color of fresh mango.

  At this point, I was just happy to final y be able to walk without a limp.

  Besides the hacksaw pain of the spiral break, the most immediate effect

  of my accident was financial. It’s pretty tough to climb up and down ladders

  to instal garage doors while dragging a ten-pound cast and a knee that

  won’t bend. Our bank balance took a sudden and rapid nosedive. On a

  blue-col ar pastor’s salary, what little reserve we had evaporated within

  weeks. Meanwhile, the amount we had coming in was chopped in half.

  The pain of that went beyond money, though. I served as both a volunteer

  firefighter and high school wrestling coach, commitments that suffered

  because of my bum leg. Sundays became a chal enge too. I’m one of

  those pastors who walks back and forth during the sermon. Not a holy-

  rol ing, fire-and-brimstone guy by any stretch, but not a soft-spoken minister

  in vestments, performing liturgical readings either. I’m a storytel er, and to

  tel stories I need to move around some. But now I had to preach sitting

  down with my leg propped in a second chair, sticking out like the jib on a

  sail. Asking me to sit down while I delivered the Sunday message was like

  asking an Italian to talk without using his hands. But as much as I struggled

  with the inconvenience of my injury, I didn’t know then that it would be only

  the first domino to fal .

  One morning that October, right about the time I’d gotten used to

  hobbling everywhere on crutches, I awoke to a dul throbbing in my lower

  back. I knew instantly what the problem was: kidney stones.

  The first time I had a kidney stone, it measured six mil imeters and

  required surgery. This time after a round of tests, doctors thought the

  stones were smal enough to pass. I don’t know whether that was a good

  thing, though: I passed them for three days. I had once slammed my middle

  finger in a tailgate and cut the tip off. That was like baking cookies

  compared to this. Even breaking my leg into four pieces hadn’t hurt as

  bad.

  Stil , I survived. By November, I’d been hobbling around on crutches for

  three months, and I went in for a checkup.

  “The leg’s healing correctly, but we stil need to keep it casted,” the

  orthopedist said. “Anything else bothering you?”

  Actual y, there was. I felt a little weird bringing it up, but the left side of my

  chest had developed a knot right beneath the surface of the nipple. I’m

  right-handed and had been leaning on my left crutch a lot while writing, so I

  thought maybe the underarm pad on that crutch had rubbed against my

  chest over a period of weeks, creating some kind of irritation beneath the

  skin, a cal us of some kind.

  The doctor immediately ruled that out. “Crutches don’t do that,” he said.

  “I need to cal a surgeon.”

  The surgeon, Dr. Timothy O’Hol eran, performed a needle biopsy. The

  results that came back a few days later shocked me: hyperplasia.

  Translation: the precursor to breast cancer.

  Breast cancer! A man with a broken leg, kidney stones, and—come on,

  real y?—breast cancer?

  Later, when other pastors in my district got wind of it, they started cal ing

  me Pastor Job, after the man in the biblical book of the same name who

  was struck with a series of increasingly bizarre symptoms. For now,

  though, the surgeon ordered the same thing he would’ve if a woman’s

  biopsy had come back with the same results: a mastectomy.

  Strong, Midwestern woman that she is, Sonja took a practical approach

  to the news. If surgery was what the doctor ordered, that’s the path we

  would walk. We’d get through it, as a family.

  I felt the same way. But it was also about this time that I also started

  feeling sorry for myself. For one thing, I was tired of loping around on

  crutches. Also, a mastectomy isn’t exactly the manliest surgery in the world.

  Final y, I’d been asking the church board for a long time to set aside money

  for me for an assistant. Only after this second round of kidney stones did

  the board vote to authorize the position.

  Instead of feeling grateful as I should have, I indulged myself with

  resentment: So I have to be a cripple and be on the verge of a cancer

  diagnosis to get a little help around here?

  My pity party real y got rol ing one afternoon. I was down on the first floor

  of the church property, a finished basement, real y, where we had a

  kitchen, a classroom, and a large fel owship area. I had just finished up

  some paperwork and began working my way upstairs on my crutches.

  Down at the bottom, on the first step, I started getting mad at God.

  “This isn’t fair,” I grumbled aloud, as I struggled up the stairs, one crutch

  at a time, one step at a time. “I have to suffer and be in this pathetic state

  for them to give me the help I’ve needed al along.”

  Feeling pretty smug in my martyrdom, I had just reached the top landing

  when a stil , smal voice arose in my heart: And what did my Son do for

  you?

  Humbled and ashamed of my selfishness, I remembered what Jesus

  said to the disciples: “A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant

  above his master.”1 Sure, I’d had a rough few months, but they were

  nothing compared with what a lot of people in the world were going

  through, even at that very minute. God had blessed me with a smal group

  of believ
ers whom I was charged to shepherd and serve, and here I was

  griping at God because those believers weren’t serving me.

  “Lord, forgive me,” I said, and swung forward with renewed strength, as if

  my crutches were eagles’ wings.

  The truth was, my church was serving me—loving me through a special

  time of prayer they’d set aside. One morning in the beginning of

  December, Dr. O’Hol eran cal ed me at home with strange news: not only

  was the tissue benign; it was entirely normal. Normal breast tissue. “I can’t

  explain why,” he said. “The biopsy definitely showed hyperplasia, so we

  would expect to see the same thing in the breast tissue removed during the

  mastectomy. But the tissue was completely normal. I don’t know what to

  say. I don’t know how that happened.”

  I knew: God had loved me with a little miracle.

  THREE