by Todd Burpo
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