Heaven Is for Real Read online

  on Sunday mornings, that was a huge accomplishment.

  Now here was my kid, in his matter-of-fact, preschooler voice, tel ing me

  things that were not only astonishing on their face, but that also matched

  Scripture in every detail, right down to the rainbow colors described in the

  book of Revelation,2 which is hardly preschool material. And as he

  babbled, Colton asked me, his pastor-dad, every so often, “Did you know

  that?”

  And I’m thinking, Yeah, but how do you know it?

  I sat in silence for a few moments as Colton resumed his bombing

  campaign. As would become a pattern for the next couple of years, I sat

  there and tried to figure out what to ask him next. I thought through what he

  had said so far . . . John the Baptist, Jesus and his clothes, rainbows,

  horses. I got al that. But what about the markers? What did Colton mean

  when he said Jesus has markers?

  What are markers to a little kid?

  Suddenly, I had it. “Colton, you said Jesus had markers. You mean like

  markers that you color with?”

  Colton nodded. “Yeah, like colors. He had colors on him.”

  “Like when you color a page?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wel , what color are Jesus’ markers?”

  “Red, Daddy. Jesus has red markers on him.”

  At that moment, my throat nearly closed with tears as I suddenly

  understood what Colton was trying to say. Quietly, careful y, I said, “Colton,

  where are Jesus’ markers?”

  Without hesitation, he stood to his feet. He held out his right hand, palm

  up and pointed to the center of it with his left. Then he held out his left palm

  and pointed with his right hand. Final y, Colton bent over and pointed to the

  tops of both his feet.

  “That’s where Jesus’ markers are, Daddy,” he said.

  I drew in a sharp breath. He saw this. He had to have.

  We know where the nails were driven when Jesus was crucified, but you

  don’t spend a lot of time going over those gruesome facts with toddlers

  and preschoolers. In fact, I didn’t know if my son had ever seen a crucifix.

  Catholic kids grow up with that image, but Protestant kids, especial y

  young ones, just grow up with a general concept: “Jesus died on the

  cross.”

  I was also struck by how quickly Colton answered my questions. He

  spoke with the simple conviction of an eyewitness, not the carefulness of

  someone remembering the “right” answers learned in Sunday school or

  from a book.

  “Colton, I’m going up to get some water,” I said, real y only wanting to exit

  the conversation. Whether or not he was done, I was done. I had enough

  information to chew on.

  “Okay, Daddy,” Colton said and bent to his toys.

  Upstairs, in the kitchen, I leaned against the counter and sipped from a

  water bottle. How could my little boy know this stuff?

  I knew he wasn’t making it up. I was pretty sure neither Sonja nor I had

  ever talked to Colton about what Jesus wore at al , much less what he

  might be wearing in heaven. Could he have picked up such a detail from

  the Bible stories we read to the kids? More of Colton’s knowledge about

  our faith came from that than from a month of Sundays. But again, the

  stories in the Bible storybooks we read to him were very narrative-

  oriented, and just a couple of hundred words each. Not at al heavy on

  details, like Jesus wearing white (yet Scripture says he did). And no

  details on what heaven might be like.

  I took another sip of water and racked my brain about the cousin thing

  and the “markers.” He didn’t get that stuff from us. But even on the details I

  didn’t understand at first, like the “markers,” Colton was insistent. And

  there was another thing about the markers that nagged at me. When I

  asked Colton what Jesus looked like, that was the first detail he popped

  out with. Not the purple sash, the crown, or even Jesus’ eyes, with which

  Colton was clearly enchanted. He’d said, right off the bat, “Jesus has

  markers.”

  I’d once heard a spiritual “riddle” that went like this: “What’s the only thing

  in heaven that’s the same as it was on earth?”

  The answer: the wounds in Jesus’ hands and feet.

  Maybe it was true.

  THIRTEEN

  LIGHTS AND WINGS

  Sonja drove in from Colorado Springs on Saturday evening, and as we

  huddled in the living room over glasses of Pepsi, I fil ed her in on the rest of

  what Colton had said.

  “What have we been missing?” I wondered aloud.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like he just pops out with new information al

  of a sudden.”

  “I want to know more, but I don’t 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 fil 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 careful y that Colton didn’t 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 actual y did battle, I got Colton’s 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 tel ing 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 real y 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 al was in the box.

  “Wel , what did you do in heaven?” I ventured.

  “Homework.”

  Homework? That wasn’t 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 doesn’t

&
nbsp; remember their names now, though, and neither do Sonja nor I.

  This was also the first time Colton had mentioned other people in

  heaven. I mean, other than Bible figures like John the Baptist, but I have to

  admit that I sort of thought of him as . . . wel , a “character” more than a

  regular person like you and me. It sounds kind of dumb since Christians

  talk al the time about going to heaven when we die. Why wouldn’t I expect

  that Colton would’ve seen ordinary people?

  But al I could think to ask was: “So what did the kids look like? What do

  people look like in heaven?”

  “Everybody’s got wings,” Colton said.

  Wings, huh?

  “Did you have wings?” I asked.

  “Yeah, but mine weren’t very big.” He looked a little glum when he said

  this.

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

  “We flew. Wel , al except for Jesus. He was the only one in heaven who

  didn’t 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 tel people al 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, wil come back in

  the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’”1

  Jesus went up. And wil 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?”

  “Al 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, they’re 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 rol ed 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 angel’s.”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 angel’s face “shone like the sun.”4

  I couldn’t remember angels having lights over their heads specifical y—

  or halos, as some would cal them—but I also knew that Colton’s

  experience of angels in storybooks and Scripture did not include lights

  over angels’ heads. And he didn’t even know the word halo. I don’t know

  that he’d ever even seen one, since our bedtime Bible stories and the

  Sunday school lessons at church are closely aligned with Scripture.

  Stil , 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 mom’s

  skirt and asked, “Mommy, why do some people in church have lights over

  their heads and some don’t?”

  At the time, I remember thinking two things: First, I would’ve 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.

  When the disciples asked Jesus who is the greatest in the kingdom of

  heaven, Jesus cal ed a little boy from the crowd and had him stand among

  them as an example. “I tel you the truth,” Jesus said, “unless you change

  and become like little children, you wil never enter the kingdom of heaven.

  Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the

  kingdom of heaven.”5

  Whoever humbles himself like this child . . .

  What is childlike humility? It’s not the lack of intel igence, but the lack of

  guile. The lack of an agenda. It’s 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 joyful y 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 ignorance—it is

  intel ectual honesty: to be wil ing to accept reality and to cal things what

  they are even when it is hard.

  Al this flashed through my mind in an instant, but I remained

  noncommittal.

  “A light, huh?” was al I said.

  “Yeah, and they have yel ow 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 real y had been to heaven and real y

  had seen al these things—Jesus, horses, angels, other children—and 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 stil tied

  around his neck. “Colton, you said you were in heaven and you did al

  these things . . . a lot of things. How long were you gone?”

  My little boy looked me right in the eye and didn’t hesitate. “Three

  minutes,” he said. Then he hopped down from the chair and skipped off to

  play.

  FOURTEEN

  ON HEAVEN TIME

  Three minutes?