by Todd Burpo
around you instead of being a straight edge like an ordinary desk. When I
was a teenager and knee-deep in wood shop at school, I spent many
hours in my parents’ garage, refinishing Pop’s desk. Then I moved it into
my room, a sweet reminder of a salt-of-the-earth man.
From the time I put the desk into service, I kept a photo of Pop in the top
left drawer and pul ed it out every now and then to reminisce. It was the last
picture ever taken of my grandfather; it showed him at age sixty-one, with
white hair and glasses. When Sonja and I married, the desk and the photo
became part of our household.
After Colton started talking about having met Pop in heaven, I noticed
that he gave specific physical details about what Jesus looked like, and he
also described his unborn sister as “a little smal er than Cassie, with dark
hair.” But when I asked him what Pop looked like, Colton would talk mainly
about his clothes and the size of his wings. When I asked him about facial
features, though, he got kind of vague. I have to admit, it was kind of
bugging me.
One day not long after our drive to Benkelman, I cal ed Colton down to
the basement and pul ed my treasured photo of Pop out of the drawer.
“This is how I remember Pop,” I said.
Colton took the frame, held it in both hands, and gazed at the photo for a
minute or so. I waited for his face to light up in recognition, but it didn’t. In
fact, a frown crinkled the space between his eyes and he shook his head.
“Dad, nobody’s old in heaven,” Colton said. “And nobody wears glasses.”
Then he turned around and marched up the stairs.
Nobody’s old in heaven . . .
That statement got me thinking. Sometime later, I cal ed my mom in
Ulysses. “Hey, do you have pictures of Pop when he was a young man?”
“I’m sure I do,” she said. “I’l have to hunt them down, though. Do you
want me to mail them to you?”
“No, I wouldn’t want them to get lost. Just make a copy of one and mail
that.”
Several weeks passed. Then one day, I opened the mailbox to find an
envelope from Mom containing a Xerox copy of an old black-and-white
photograph. I learned later that Mom had dug it out of a box that she’d
stored in a back bedroom closet since the time Cassie was a baby, a box
that hadn’t seen daylight since two years before Colton was born.
There were four people in the picture, and Mom had written an
accompanying note explaining who they were: My Grandma El en, in her
twenties in the photo, but now in her eighties and stil living in Ulysses. My
family had last seen her just a couple of months before. The photo also
showed my mom as a baby girl, about eighteen months old; my Uncle Bil ,
who was about six; and Pop, a handsome fel ow, twenty-nine years young
when the photo was snapped in 1943.
Of course, I’d never told Colton that it was bugging me that he didn’t
seem to recognize Pop from my old keepsake photo. That evening, Sonja
and I were sitting in the front room when I cal ed Colton to come upstairs. It
took him a while to make his appearance, and when he did, I pul ed out the
photocopied picture Mom had sent.
“Hey, come here and take a look at this, Colton,” I said, holding the
paper out for him. “What do you think?”
He took the picture from my hand, looked down, and then looked back at
me, eyes ful of surprise. “Hey!” he said happily. “How did you get a picture
of Pop?”
Sonja and I looked at each other, astonished.
“Colton, don’t you recognize anyone else in the picture?” I said.
He shook his head slowly. “No . . .”
I leaned over and pointed to my grandma. “Who do you think that is?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s Grandma El en.”
Colton’s eyes turned skeptical. “That doesn’t look like Grandma El en.”
I glanced at Sonja and chuckled. “Wel , she used to look like that.”
“Can I go play?” Colton said, handing me the picture.
After he left the room, Sonja and I talked about how interesting it was
that Colton recognized Pop from a photo taken more than half a century
before he was born—a photo he’d never seen before—but didn’t
recognize his great-grandma whom he had just seen a couple of months
back.
After we thought about it, though, the fact that the Pop Colton said he
spent time with was no longer sixty-one but somewhere in his prime,
seemed to us a good news/bad news scenario: The bad news is that in
heaven, we’l stil look like ourselves. The good news is, it’l be the younger
version.
TWENTY-THREE
POWER FROM ABOVE
On October 4, 2004, Colby Lawrence Burpo entered the world. From the
moment he was born, he looked like a carbon copy of Colton. But as with
al kids, God had also made him unique. If Cassie was our sensitive child
and Colton was our serious one, Colby was our clown. From an early age,
Colby’s goofiness added a fresh dose of laughter to our home.
One evening later that fal , Sonja had settled in with Colton to read him a
Bible story.
She sat on the edge of his bed and read him the story as Colton lay
under his blanket, head nestled in his pil ow. Then it was time for prayer.
One of the great blessings of our lives as parents has been listening to
our kids pray. When they are smal , children pray without the showiness
that sometimes creeps into our prayers as grown-ups, without that sort of
“prayer-ese,” a language meant to appeal more to anyone listening than to
God. And when Colton and Cassie offered prayers in their plain, earnest
way, it seemed that God answered.
Early on, we developed the practice of giving the kids specific things to
pray for, not only to build their faith, but also because praying for others is a
way to develop a heart for needs outside your own.
“You know how Daddy preaches every week?” Sonja said now as she
sat beside Colton. “I think we should pray for him, that he would get a lot of
good study time in this week so that he can give a good message in
church on Sunday morning.”
Colton looked at her and said the strangest thing: “I’ve seen power shot
down to Daddy.”
Sonja later told me that she took a moment to turn these words over in
her mind. Power shot down?
“What do you mean, Colton?”
“Jesus shoots down power for Daddy when he’s talking.”
Sonja shifted on the bed so that she could look directly into Colton’s
eyes. “Okay . . . when? Like when Daddy talks at church?”
Colton nodded. “Yeah, at church. When he’s tel ing Bible stories to
people.”
Sonja didn’t know what to say to that, a situation we’d grown used to
over the past year and a half. So she and Colton prayed together, sending
up flares to heaven that Daddy would give a good message on Sunday.
Then Sonja slipped down the hal to the living room to share their
conversation with me. “But don’t you dare wake him up to ask him about
it!” she said.
So I had to wait un
til the next morning over breakfast.
“Hey, buddy,” I said, pouring milk into Colton’s usual bowl of cereal.
”Mommy said you were talking last night during Bible story time. Can you
tel me what you were tel ing Mommy about . . . about Jesus shooting down
power? What’s the power like?”
“It’s the Holy Spirit,” Colton said simply. “I watched him. He showed me.”
“The Holy Spirit?”
“Yeah, he shoots down power for you when you’re talking in church.”
If there were comic-strip thought-bubbles over people’s heads, mine
would’ve been fil ed with question marks and exclamation points right then.
Every Sunday morning before I give the sermon, I pray a similar prayer:
“God, if you don’t help this morning, this message is going to fail.” In light of
Colton’s words, I realized I had been praying without real y knowing what I
was praying for. And to imagine God answering it by “shooting down
power” . . . wel , it was just incredible.
TWENTY-FOUR
ALI'S MOMENT
After Colby was born, Sonja and I had found that the dynamics of taking the
kids with us everywhere had changed. Now we were outnumbered three to
two. We decided the time had come for a regular babysitter, so we hired a
very mature, responsible eighth grader named Ali Titus to watch the kids
for us. On Monday nights, Sonja and I stil played coed softbal on our “old
people’s” team, though my sliding days were over.
One Monday evening in 2005, Ali came over to babysit Cassie, Colton,
and Colby so we could go to our game. It was around 10 p.m. when we
pul ed back into the driveway. Sonja got out and went inside to check on
Ali and the kids while I shut the garage down for the night, so I didn’t hear
what happened inside until a few minutes after the fact.
The interior garage door leads into our kitchen, and when she walked in,
Sonja later told me, she found Ali at the sink, washing up the supper
dishes . . . and crying.
“Ali, what’s wrong?” Sonja said. Was it something with Ali, or something
that had happened with the kids?
Ali pul ed her hands from the dishwater and dried them on a towel.
“Um . . . I real y don’t know how to say this, Mrs. Burpo,” she began. She
looked down at the floor, hesitating.
“It’s okay, Ali,” Sonja said. “What is it?”
Ali looked up, eyes ful of tears. “Wel , I’m sorry to ask you this, but . . .
did you have a miscarriage?”
“Yes, I did,” Sonja said, surprised. “How did you know that?”
“Um . . . Colton and I had a little talk.”
Sonja invited Ali to sit on the couch with her and tel her what happened.
“It started after I put Colby and Colton to bed,” Ali began. Cassie had
gone downstairs to her room, and Ali had given Colby a bottle and then put
him down in his crib upstairs. Then she headed down the hal , tucked
Colton into his bed, and came out to the kitchen to clean up from the
evening meal she’d fed the kids. “I had just turned the water off in the sink
when I heard Colton crying.”
Ali told Sonja that she went to check on Colton and found him sitting up
in his bed, tears streaming down his face. “What’s wrong, Colton?” she
asked him.
Colton sniffled and wiped his eyes. “I miss my sister,” he said.
Ali said she smiled, relieved that the problem seemed to have a simple
solution. “Okay, sweetie, you want me to go downstairs and get her for
you?”
Colton shook his head. “No, I miss my other sister.”
Now Ali was confused. “Your other sister? You only have one sister and
one brother, Colton. Cassie and Colby, right?”
“No, I have another sister,” Colton said. “I saw her. In heaven.” Then he
started to cry again. “I miss her so much.”
As Ali told Sonja this part of the story, her eyes wel ed with fresh tears. “I
didn’t know what to say, Mrs. Burpo. He was so upset. So I asked him
when he saw this other sister.”
Colton told Ali, “When I was little, I had surgery and I went up to heaven
and saw my sister.”
Then, Ali told Sonja, Colton began crying again, only harder. “I don’t
understand why my sister is dead,” he said. “I don’t know why she’s in
heaven and not here.”
Ali sat on the bed beside Colton, as she put it, “in shock.” This situation
definitely wasn’t on the normal “in case of emergency” babysitting list, as
in: (1) who to cal in case of fire; (2) who to cal in case of il ness; (3) who to
cal in case child reports supernatural experience.
Ali knew Colton had been extremely il a couple of years before and that
he’d spent time in the hospital. But she hadn’t known about what had
happened in the operating room. Now she had no idea what to say, even
as Colton shrugged off his covers and crawled up in her lap. So as he
cried, she cried with him.
“I miss my sister,” he said again, snuffling and laying his head on Ali’s
shoulder.
“Shh . . . it’s okay, Colton,” Ali said. “There’s a reason for everything.”
And they stayed that way, with Ali rocking Colton until he cried himself to
sleep in her arms.
Ali finished her story, and Sonja gave her a hug. Later, Ali told us that for
the next two weeks, she couldn’t stop thinking about what Colton had told
her, and how Sonja had confirmed that before his surgery, Colton hadn’t
known anything about Sonja’s miscarriage.
Ali had grown up in a Christian home but had entertained the same
doubts as so many of us do: for example, how did we know any one
religion is different from any other? But Colton’s story about his sister
strengthened her Christian faith, Ali said. “Hearing him describe the girl’s
face . . . it wasn’t something that a six-year-old boy could just make up,”
she told us. “Now, whenever I am having doubts, I picture Colton’s face,
tears running down his cheeks, as he told me how much he missed his
sister.”
TWENTY-FIVE
SWORDS OF THE ANGELS
From a kid’s perspective, maybe the best thing that happened in 2005
was the release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. During the
Christmas season, we took the kids to see the movie on the big screen.
Sonja and I were excited to see the first high-quality dramatization of C. S.
Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series, books we had both enjoyed as kids.
Colton was more excited about a movie that featured good guys fighting
bad guys with swords.
In early 2006, we rented the DVD and settled into the living room for a
family movie night. Instead of sitting on the furniture, we al sat on the
carpet, Sonja, Cassie, and I leaning against the sofa. Colton and Colby
perched on their knees in front of us, rooting for Aslan, the warrior lion, and
the Pevensie kids: Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan. The house even
smel ed like a theater, with bowls of Act I buttered popcorn, hot out of the
microwave, sitting on the floor within easy reach.
In case you haven’t seen The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it is