by Todd Burpo
As Colton began to set up for an epic plastic-sword fight with an unseen
vil ain, I marveled at his answer.
He had already authenticated his experience by tel ing me things he
could not otherwise have known. But now I had to square his answer, “three
minutes,” with al the rest. I stared down at my Bible, lying open on the
kitchen table, and turned over the possibilities in my mind.
Three minutes. It wasn’t possible that Colton could have seen and done
everything he’d described so far in just three minutes. Of course, he wasn’t
old enough to tel time yet, so maybe his sense of three actual minutes
wasn’t the same as an adult’s. Like most parents, I was pretty sure Sonja
and I weren’t helping that issue, promising to be off the phone, for example,
or finished talking in the yard with a neighbor, or done in the garage in “five
more minutes,” then wrapping it up twenty minutes later.
It was also possible that time in heaven doesn’t track with time on earth.
The Bible says that with the Lord, “a day is like a thousand years, and a
thousand years are like a day.”1 Some interpret that as a literal exchange,
as in, two days equals two thousand years. I’ve always taken it to mean
that God operates outside of our understanding of time. Time on earth is
keyed to a celestial clock, governed by the solar system. But the Bible
says there is no sun in heaven because God is the light there. Maybe there
is no time in heaven. At least not as we understand it.
On the other hand, Colton’s “three minutes” answer was as straight up
and matter-of-fact as if he’d told me he’d had Lucky Charms for breakfast.
As far as our clock goes, he could’ve been right. For him to leave his body
and return to it, he couldn’t have been gone long. Especial y since we’d
never received any kind of report saying Colton had ever been clinical y
dead. In fact, the postoperative report was clear that even though our son’s
prognosis had been grim, the surgery had gone just fine:
OPERATIVE REPORT
OPERATIVE DATE: 3/5/2003
PREOPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Acute appendicitis
POSTOPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Perforated appendicitis and abscess
OPERATION: Appendectomy and drainage of abscess
SURGEON: Timothy O’Hol eran, M.D.
DESCRIPTION OF THE OPERATION: The patient was placed in a
supine position on the Operating Table. Under general anesthesia the
abdomen was prepped and draped in a sterile fashion. A transverse
incision was made in the right lower quadrant and carried down
through al layers in the peritoneal cavity. . . . The patient had a
perforated appendix with an abscess. The appendix was delivered up
in the operative field.
A thought hit me like a brick: Colton didn’t die.
How could he have gone to heaven if he didn’t die?
A couple of days passed as I chewed on that. It had only been a week or
so since Colton first told us about the angels, so I didn’t want to keep
pushing the heaven issue. But final y, I couldn’t stand it anymore and hunted
the house for Colton until I found him, down on his knees in the bedroom
we’d converted to a playroom, building a tower of LEGOs. I leaned in the
door frame and got his attention.
“Hey, Colton, I don’t understand,” I began.
He looked up at me, and I noticed for the first time that al the roundness
had returned to his face, his cheeks fil ed out and rosy again after his
il ness had drained them thin and sal ow. “What?”
“You said you went to heaven. People have to die to go to heaven.”
Colton’s gaze didn’t waver. “Wel , okay then, I died. But just for a little
bit.”
My heart skipped a beat. If you haven’t heard your preschooler tel you
he was dead, I don’t recommend it. But Colton hadn’t died. I knew what the
medical record said. Colton had never ceased breathing. His heart had
never stopped.
I stood in the doorway and mul ed over this new tidbit as Colton returned
his attention to his toys. Then I remembered that the Bible talks in several
places about people who had seen heaven without dying. The apostle Paul
wrote to the church at Corinth about a Christian he knew personal y who
was taken to heaven, “Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not
know—God knows. And I know that this man . . . was caught up to
paradise. He heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted
to tel .”2
Then, of course, there was John the apostle, who described heaven in
great detail in the book of Revelation. John had been exiled to the island of
Patmos, where an angel visited him and commanded him to write down a
series of prophecies to various churches. John wrote:
After this I looked, and there before me was a door standing open in heaven. And the
voice I had first heard speaking to me like a trumpet said, “Come up here, and I will
show you what must take place after this.” At once I was in the Spirit, and there
before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat
there had the appearance of jasper and carnelian. A rainbow, resembling an
emerald, encircled the throne.3
Rainbows . . . now where had I heard that recently?
As I stood there and thought through a scriptural basis for experiencing
heaven without dying, I realized that Colton, in tel ing me he had died “for a
little bit,” had only been trying to match up his pastor-dad’s assertion with
what he knew to be the facts of his own experience. Kind of like walking
outside and finding that the street is wet, and concluding, wel , okay, it must
have rained.
See, I had this tidy little box that said, “People have to die to go to
heaven,” and Colton, trusting me, concluded, “Wel , I must have died then,
because I was there.”
Suddenly, he piped up again. “Daddy, remember when I yel ed for you in
the hospital when I waked up?”
How could I forget? It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. “Of
course I do,” I said.
“Wel , the reason I was yel ing was that Jesus came to get me. He said I
had to go back because he was answering your prayer. That’s how come I
was yel ing for you.”
Suddenly, my knees felt weak underneath me. I flashed back to my
prayers alone, raging at God, and my prayers in the waiting room, quiet
and desperate. I remembered how scared I was, agonizing over whether
Colton would hang on through the surgery, whether he’d live long enough
for me to see his precious face again. Those were the longest, darkest
ninety minutes of my life.
And Jesus answered my prayer? Personal y? After I had yel ed at God,
chastising him, questioning his wisdom and his faithfulness?
Why would God even answer a prayer like that? And how did I deserve
his mercy?
FIFTEEN
CONFESSION
The first weeks of July burned into the plains, nurturing the cornfields with
al the heat of a giant greenhouse. Wedgewood blue skies arced over
Imperial almost every day, the air buzzing with mosquitoes in the sunshine
> and singing with crickets by starlight. Around the middle of July, I drove
over to Greeley, Colorado, for the church district conference. The gathering
of about 150 pastors, pastors’ wives, and delegates from Nebraska and
Colorado was meeting at the church pastored by Steve Wilson—the same
church I’d visited back in March while Sonja stayed back at the Harrises’
home, nursing Colton when we al thought he had a stomach flu.
Roman Catholics practice confession as a sacrament, sharing their sins
and shortcomings with a priest. Protestants practice confession, too,
though a little less formal y, often confiding in God without an intermediary.
But Colton’s recent revelation that my raging prayers had ascended
directly to heaven—and had received an equal y direct response—made
me feel like I had some additional confessing to do.
I didn’t feel good about having been so angry with God. When I was so
upset, burning with righteous anger that he was about to take my child,
guess who was holding my child? Guess who was loving my child, unseen?
As a pastor, I felt accountable to other pastors for my own lack of faith. So
at Greeley Wesleyan during the conference, I asked Phil Harris, our district
superintendent, if I could have a few minutes to share.
He agreed, and when the time came, I stood up before my peers in the
sanctuary that on Sunday mornings held around a thousand people in its
pews. After delivering a brief update on Colton’s health, I thanked these
men and women for their prayers on behalf of our family. Then I began my
confession.
“Most of you know that before everything happened with Colton, I had
broken my leg and gone through the kidney stone operation, then the
mastectomy. I had had such a bad year that some people had started
cal ing me Pastor Job.”
The sanctuary echoed with gentle laughter.
“But none of that stuff hurt like watching what Colton was going through,
and I got real y mad at God,” I continued. “I’m a guy. Guys d o something.
And al I felt like I could do was yel at God.”
I described briefly my attitude in that little room in the hospital, blasting
God, blaming him for Colton’s condition, whining about how he had chosen
to treat one of his pastors, as though I should somehow be exempt from
troubles because I was doing “his” work.
“At that time, when I was so upset and so outraged, can you believe that
God chose to answer that prayer?” I said. “Can you believe that I could
pray a prayer like that, and God would stil answer it ‘yes’?”
What had I learned? I was reminded yet again that I could be real with
God, I told my fel ow pastors. I learned that I didn’t have to offer some kind
of churchy, holy-sounding prayer in order to be heard in heaven. “You might
as wel tel God what you think,” I said. “He already knows it anyway.”
Most importantly of al , I learned that I am heard. We al are. I had been a
Christian since childhood and a pastor for half my life, so I believed that
before. But now I knew it. How? As the nurses wheeled my son away
screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, don’t let them take me!” . . . when I was angry
at God because I couldn’t go to my son, hold him, and comfort him, God’s
son was holding my son in his lap.
SIXTEEN
POP
On a sun-drenched day in August, four-year-old Colton hopped into the
passenger seat of my red pickup, and the two of us headed off to
Benkelman. I had to drive out there to bid a job and decided to take Colton
with me. He wasn’t particularly interested in the instal ation of industrial-
sized garage doors. But he loved riding in my little Chevy diesel because,
unlike the Expedition where he had a limited view from the backseat, his
car seat rode high in the Chevy, and he could see everything.
Benkelman is a smal farming town thirty-eight miles due south of
Imperial. Incorporated in 1887, it’s fraying a bit at the edges like a lot of
communities in rural Nebraska, its population declining as technology eats
up agricultural jobs and people move to bigger cities in search of work. I
steered past the familiar fertilizer and potato plants that rise at the east end
of Imperial, then turned south toward Enders Lake. We drove by the cedar-
dotted municipal golf course on our left, and then, as we passed over a
concrete dam, the lake sparkled below on our right. Colton looked down at
a speedboat towing a skier in its foamy wake. We crossed the dam,
dipped down in a val ey, and motored up onto the stretch of two-lane
highway that points straight south. Now acres of farmland fanned out
around us, cornstalks six feet high bright green against the sky, and the
asphalt cutting through it like a blade.
Suddenly Colton spoke up. “Dad, you had a grandpa named Pop, didn’t
you?”
“Yep, sure did,” I said.
“Was he your mommy’s daddy or your daddy’s daddy?”
“Pop was my mom’s dad. He passed away when I was not much older
than you.”
Colton smiled. “He’s real y nice.”
I almost drove off the road into the corn. It’s a crazy moment when your
son uses the present tense to refer to someone who died a quarter century
before he was even born. But I tried to stay cool. “So you saw Pop?” I said.
“Yeah, I got to stay with him in heaven. You were real y close to him, huh,
Dad?”
“Yes, I was,” was al I could manage. My head spun. Colton had just
introduced a whole new topic: people you’ve lost, and meeting them in
heaven. Crazily enough, with al the talk of Jesus and angels and horses, I
had never even thought to ask him if he’d met anyone I might know. But
then, why would I? We hadn’t lost any family or friends since Colton was
born, so who would there have been for him to meet?
Now this. I probably drove another ten miles toward Benkelman,
thoughts charging through my mind. Soon, the cornfields were broken by
neat squares of bronzed stubble, wheat fields past the harvest.
I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made when I’d put ideas in
his head—that people had to die, for example, before being admitted to
heaven. I didn’t want him just feeding me back stuff to please me. I wanted
to know the truth.
On the left, a quarter mile off the road, a white church steeple seemed to
rise from the corn. St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, built in 1918. I wondered
what the people of this longstanding local fixture would think of the things
our little boy had been tel ing us.
Final y, as we crossed into Dundy County, I was ready to start asking
some open-ended questions. “Hey, Colton,” I said.
He turned from the window where he’d been watching a pheasant
pacing us amid the corn rows. “What?”
“Colton, what did Pop look like?”
He broke into a big grin. “Oh, Dad, Pop has real y big wings!”
Again with the present tense. It was weird.
Colton went on. “My wings were real y little, but Pop’s were big!”
“What did his clothes look like?”
“He had white on, but blue
here,” he said, making the sash motion again.
I edged the truck over to avoid a ladder someone had dropped in the
road then steered back to the center of the lane. “And you got to stay with
Pop?”
Colton nodded, and his eyes seemed to light up.