by Todd Burpo
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?