Heaven Is for Real Read online

  church. The man who had passed away wasn’t a member of our

  congregation, but people in town who don’t attend services regularly often

  want a church funeral for a loved one. Sometimes the deceased is a friend

  or relative of a church member.

  Colton must have heard Sonja and me discussing the upcoming service

  because he walked into the front room one morning and tugged on my

  shirttail. “Daddy, what’s a funeral?”

  I had done several funerals at church since Colton was born, but he was

  at that age where he was starting to become more interested in how and

  why things work.

  “Wel , buddy, a funeral happens when someone dies. A man here in

  town died, and his family is coming to the church to say good-bye to him.”

  Instantly, Colton’s demeanor changed. His face fel into serious lines,

  and he stared fiercely into my eyes. “Did the man have Jesus in his heart?”

  My son was asking me whether the man who had died was a Christian

  who had accepted Christ as his Savior. But his intensity caught me off

  guard. “I’m not sure, Colton,” I said. “I didn’t know him very wel .”

  Colton’s face bunched up in a terrible twist of worry. “He had to have

  Jesus in his heart! He had to know Jesus or he can’t get into heaven!”

  Again, his intensity surprised me, especial y since he didn’t even know

  this man. I tried to comfort him as best I could. “I’ve talked to some of the

  family members, and they told me he did,” I said.

  Colton didn’t seem entirely convinced, but his face relaxed a bit.

  “Wel . . . okay,” he said and walked away.

  For the second time in a couple of weeks, I thought, Man, those Sunday

  school teachers sure are doing a good job!

  That weekend, Sonja dressed Cassie and Colton in their Sunday best,

  and we headed the half block down to the church to get ready for the

  funeral. As we pul ed up in the SUV, I saw the Liewer Funeral Home

  hearse parked outside. Inside, we found the burnished oak casket

  standing off to one side of the foyer.

  Two sets of open doorways led from the foyer into the sanctuary where

  the family was gathering for the “flower service.” Before moving to Imperial,

  I’d never heard of a flower service, but now I think it’s a real y nice idea.

  The family gathers before the funeral service, and the funeral director

  points out each plant, wreath, and flower arrangement, explains who sent it,

  and reads aloud any message of sympathy attached. (“These beautiful

  purple azaleas come to you in loving memory from the Smith family.”)

  The pastor is supposed to be in the flower service. I peeked into the

  sanctuary and caught the funeral director’s eye. He nodded, indicating they

  were ready to begin. I turned to gather Colton and Cassie, when Colton

  pointed to the casket. “What’s that, Daddy?”

  I tried to keep it simple. “That’s the casket. The man who died is inside

  it.”

  Suddenly, Colton’s face gathered into that same knot of intense concern.

  He slammed his fists on his thighs, then pointed one finger at the casket

  and said in a near shout, “Did that man have Jesus?!”

  Sonja’s eyes popped wide, and we both glanced at the sanctuary

  doorway, terrified the family inside could hear our son.

  “He had to! He had to!” Colton went on. “He can’t get into heaven if he

  didn’t have Jesus in his heart!”

  Sonja grabbed Colton by the shoulders and tried to shush him. But he

  was not shushable. Now nearly in tears, Colton twisted in her arms and

  yel ed at me, “He had to know Jesus, Dad!”

  Sonja steered him away from the sanctuary, hustling him toward the front

  doors of the church, with Cassie fol owing. Through the glass doors, I could

  see Sonja bent down talking to Cassie and Colton outside. Then Cassie

  took her stil -struggling brother by the hand and started walking the half

  block toward home.

  I didn’t know what to think. Where was this sudden concern over whether

  a stranger was saved, whether he “had Jesus in his heart,” as Colton put it,

  coming from?

  I did know this much: Colton was at that age where if something popped

  into his head, he’d just blurt it out. Like the time I took him to a restaurant in

  Madrid, Nebraska, and a guy with real y long, straight hair walked in, and

  Colton asked loudly whether that was a boy or a girl. So we kept Colton

  away from funerals for a while if we didn’t know for sure the deceased was

  a Christian. We just didn’t know what he would say or do.

  TWELVE

  EYEWITNESS TO HEAVEN

  It wasn’t until four months after Colton’s surgery, during our Fourth of July

  trip to meet our new nephew, that Sonja and I final y got a clue that

  something extraordinary had happened to our son. Sure, there had been a

  string of quirky things Colton had said and done since the hospital.

  Colton’s insisting we pay Dr. O’Hol eran because Jesus used the doctor to

  help “fix” him. His statement that Jesus “told” him he had to be good. And

  his strenuous, almost vehement funeral performance. But rushing by as

  brief scenes in the busyness of family life, those things just seemed . . .

  wel , kind of cute. Except for the funeral thing, which was just plain weird.

  But not supernatural weird. It wasn’t until we were driving through North

  Platte on the way to South Dakota that the lights came on. You’l remember

  I was teasing Colton a little as we drove through town.

  “Hey, Colton, if we turn here, we can go back to the hospital,” I said. “Do

  you wanna go back to the hospital?”

  It was that conversation in which Colton said that he “went up out of” his

  body, that he had spoken with angels, and had sat in Jesus’ lap. And the

  way we knew he wasn’t making it up was that he was able to tel us what

  we were doing in another part of the hospital: “You were in a little room by

  yourself praying, and Mommy was in a different room and she was praying

  and talking on the phone.”

  Not even Sonja had seen me in that little room, having my meltdown with

  God.

  Suddenly, there in the Expedition on our holiday trip, the incidents of the

  past few months clicked into place like the last few quick twists in a

  Rubik’s Cube solution: Sonja and I realized that this was not the first time

  Colton had let us know something amazing had happened to him; it was

  only the most clear-cut.

  By the time we got to Sioux Fal s, we were so busy getting to know our

  cute baby nephew, catching up on family news, and visiting the waterfal

  that we didn’t have a lot of time to discuss Colton’s strange revelations. But

  during the quiet moments before sleep, a flood of images tumbled through

  my mind—especial y those horrible moments I’d spent in that tiny room at

  the hospital, raging against God. I thought I had been alone, pouring out my

  anger and grief in private. Staying strong for Sonja. But my son said he

  had seen me . . .

  Our mini-vacation passed without any new disasters, and we returned to

  Imperial in time for me to preach on Sunday. The fol owing week, Sonja

&
nbsp; and her friend Sherri Schoenholz headed to Colorado Springs for the

  Pike’s Peak Worship Festival, a conference on church music ministry. That

  left just me and the kids at home.

  Like any prudent tornado-belt family, we have a basement below our

  one-story home. Ours is semifinished, with a smal office and a bathroom

  that lead off a large, multipurpose, rumpus room area. Colton and I were

  down there one evening, as I worked on a sermon against the comforting

  background of my preschooler’s action-figure war.

  Colton was three years and ten months old at the time of his surgery, but

  in May we had celebrated his birthday, so he was now official y four. A big

  boy. The little party we had thrown was al the more special since we’d

  nearly lost him.

  I don’t remember exactly what day of the week it was when Colton and I

  were hanging out in the basement. But I do remember that it was evening

  and that Cassie wasn’t there, so she must’ve been spending the night with

  a friend. As Colton played nearby, my attention drifted to our Arby’s

  conversation about Jesus and the angels. I wanted to probe deeper, get

  him talking again. At that age, little boys don’t exactly come up and offer

  you long, detailed histories. But they wil answer direct questions, usual y

  with direct answers. If Colton real y had a supernatural encounter, I certainly

  didn’t want to ask him leading questions. We had taught Colton about our

  faith al his life. But if he had real y seen Jesus and the angels, I wanted to

  become the student, not the teacher!

  Sitting at my makeshift desk, I looked over at my son as he brought

  Spider-Man pouncing down on some nasty-looking creature from Star

  Wars. “Hey, Colton,” I said. “Remember when we were in the car and you

  talked about sitting on Jesus’ lap?”

  Stil on his knees, he looked up at me. “Yeah.”

  “Wel , did anything else happen?”

  He nodded, eyes bright. “Did you know that Jesus has a cousin? Jesus

  told me his cousin baptized him.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” I said. “The Bible says Jesus’ cousin’s name is John.”

  Mental y, I scolded myself: Don’t offer information. Just let him talk . . .

  “I don’t remember his name,” Colton said happily, “but he was real y

  nice.”

  John the Baptist is “nice”?!

  Just as I was processing the implications of my son’s statement—that he

  had met John the Baptist—Colton spied a plastic horse among his toys

  and held it up for me to look at. “Hey, Dad, did you know Jesus has a

  horse?”

  “A horse?”

  “Yeah, a rainbow horse. I got to pet him. There’s lots of colors.”

  Lots of colors? What was he talking about?

  “Where are there lots of colors, Colton?”

  “In heaven, Dad. That’s where al the rainbow colors are.”

  That set my head spinning. Suddenly I realized that up until that point, I’d

  been toying with the idea that maybe Colton had had some sort of divine

  visitation. Maybe Jesus and the angels had appeared to him in the

  hospital. I’d heard of similar phenomena many times when people were as

  near death as Colton had been. Now it was dawning on me that not only

  was my son saying he had left his body; he was saying he had left the

  hospital!

  “You were in heaven?” I managed to ask.

  “Wel , yeah, Dad,” he said, as if that fact should have been perfectly

  obvious.

  I had to take a break. I stood and bounded up the stairs, picked up the

  phone, and dialed Sonja’s cel . She picked up and I could hear music and

  singing in the background. “Do you know what your son just said to me?!”

  “What?” she shouted over the noise.

  “He told me he met John the Baptist!”

  “What?”

  I summarized the rest for her and could hear the amazement in her voice

  on the other end of the line.

  She tried to press me for details, but the worship conference hal was

  too loud. Final y we had to give up. “Cal me tonight after dinner, okay?”

  Sonja said. “I want to know everything!”

  I hung up and leaned against the kitchen counter, processing. Slowly, I

  began to wrap my mind around the possibility that this was real. Had our

  son died and come back? The medical staff never gave any indication of

  that. But clearly, something had happened to Colton. He had authenticated

  that by tel ing us things he couldn’t have known. It dawned on me that

  maybe we’d been given a gift and that our job now was to unwrap it, slowly,

  careful y, and see what was inside.

  Back downstairs, Colton was stil on his knees, bombing aliens. I sat

  down beside him.

  “Hey, Colton, can I ask you something else about Jesus?”

  He nodded but didn’t look up from his devastating attack on a little pile

  of X-Men.

  “What did Jesus look like?” I said.

  Abruptly, Colton put down his toys and looked up at me. “Jesus has

  markers.”

  “What?”

  “Markers, Daddy . . . Jesus has markers. And he has brown hair and he

  has hair on his face,” he said, running his tiny palm around on his chin. I

  guessed that he didn’t yet know the word beard. “And his eyes . . . oh, Dad,

  his eyes are so pretty!”

  As he said this, Colton’s face grew dreamy and far away, as if enjoying

  a particularly sweet memory.

  “What about his clothes?”

  Colton snapped back into the room and smiled at me. “He had purple

  on.” As he said this, Colton put his hand on his left shoulder, moved it

  across his body down to his right hip then repeated the motion. “His

  clothes were white, but it was purple from here to here.”

  Another word he didn’t know: sash.

  “Jesus was the only one in heaven who had purple on, Dad. Did you

  know that?”

  In Scripture, purple is the color of kings. A verse from the gospel of Mark

  flashed through my mind: “His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than

  anyone in the world could bleach them.”1

  “And he had this gold thing on his head . . .” Colton chirped on

  enthusiastical y. He put both hands on top of his head in the shape of a

  circle.

  “Like a crown?”

  “Yeah, a crown, and it had this . . . this diamond thing in the middle of it

  and it was kind of pink. And he has markers, Dad.”

  My mind reeled. Here I’d thought I was leading my child gently down this

  conversational path but instead, he’d grabbed the reins and gal oped

  away. Images from Scripture tumbled through my mind. The Christophany,

  or manifestation of Christ, in the book of Daniel, the appearance of the

  King of kings in Revelation. I was amazed that my son was describing

  Jesus in pretty much human terms—then amazed that I was amazed, since

  our whole faith revolves around the idea that man is made in God’s image

  and Jesus both came to earth and returned to heaven as a man.

  I knew by heart al the Bible stories we’d read him over the years, many

  from the Arch series, Bible storybooks I’d had as a child. And I knew our

  church’s Sunday school lessons a
nd how simplified they are in the

  preschool years: Jesus loves you. Be kind to others. God is good. If you

  could get a preschooler to take away just one three- or four-word concept