Sonja held up a sheaf of papers a little thicker than the others. “The medical bills are starting to come in. One of them is $34,000.”
“How much will the insurance cover?”
“There’s a $3,200 deductible.”
“We can’t even pay that right now,” I said.
“Do you still want me to write the tithe check?” Sonja asked, referring to our regular weekly donation to the church.
“Absolutely,” I said. God had just given us our son back; there was no way we were not going to give back to God.
At just that moment, Colton came around the corner from the living room and surprised us with a strange proclamation that I can still hear to this day.
He stood at the end of the counter with his hands on his hips. “Dad, Jesus used Dr. O’Holleran to help fix me,” he said, standing at the end of the counter with his hands on his hips. “You need to pay him.”
Then he turned around and marched out. Around the corner and gone.
Sonja and I looked at each other. What?
We were both a little taken aback, since Colton had seen the surgeon as the source of all the poking, cutting, prodding, draining, and pain. Now here we were, just a week out of the hospital, and he seemed to have changed his mind.
“Well, I guess he likes Dr. O’Holleran now,” Sonja said.
Even if Colton had found it in his heart to forgive the good doctor, though, his little proclamation in the kitchen was weird. How many not-quite-four-year-olds analyze the family financial woes and demand payment for a creditor? Especially one he never particularly liked?
And the way he put it too: “Dad, Jesus used Dr. O’Holleran to help fix me.” Weird.
Even weirder, though, was what happened next. With $23,000 in bills due and payable immediately, we didn’t know what we were going to do. Sonja and I discussed asking our bank for a loan, but it turned out we didn’t need to. First, my Grandma Ellen, who lives in Ulysses, Kansas, sent us a check to help with the hospital bills. Then, in a single week, more checks started arriving in the mail. Checks for $50, $100, $200, and all with cards and notes that said things like, “We heard about your troubles and we’re praying for you,” or “God put it on my heart to send you this. I hope it helps.”
By the end of the week, our mailbox was full again—but with gifts, not bills. Church members, close friends, and even people who only knew us from a distance responded to our need without our even asking. The checks added up to thousands of dollars, and we were astonished when we found that, combined with what my grandmother sent, the total was what we needed to meet that first wave of bills, almost to the dollar.
Not long after Colton became a pint-size collection agent, he got in a little bit of trouble. Nothing huge, just an incident at a friend’s house where he got into a tug-of-war over some toys. That evening, I called him to the kitchen table. I was sitting in a straight-back chair, and he climbed up in the chair beside me and knelt in it. Colton leaned on his elbows and regarded me with sky blue eyes that seemed a little bit sheepish.
If you have a preschooler, you know it can sometimes be hard to look past their cuteness and be serious about discipline. But I managed to put a serious look on my face. “Colton,” I began, “do you know why you’re in trouble?”
“Yeah. Because I didn’t share,” he said, casting his eyes down at the table.
“That’s right. You can’t do that, Colton. You’ve got to treat people better than that.”
Colton raised his eyes and looked at me. “Yeah, I know, Dad. Jesus told me I had to be nice.”
His words caught me a little by surprise. It was the way he said it: Jesus told me . . .
But I brushed it aside. His Sunday school teachers must be doing a good job, I thought.
“Well then, Jesus was right, wasn’t he?” I said, and that was the end of it. I don’t even think I gave Colton any consequences for not sharing. After all, with Jesus in the picture, I’d pretty much been outranked.
A couple of weeks later, I began preparing to preside over a funeral at church. The man who had passed away wasn’t a member of our congregation, but people in town who don’t attend services regularly often want a church funeral for a loved one. Sometimes the deceased is a friend or relative of a church member.
Colton must have heard Sonja and me discussing the upcoming service because he walked into the front room one morning and tugged on my shirttail. “Daddy, what’s a funeral?”
I had done several funerals at church since Colton was born, but he was at that age where he was starting to become more interested in how and why things work.
“Well, buddy, a funeral happens when someone dies. A man here in town died, and his family is coming to the church to say good-bye to him.”
Instantly, Colton’s demeanor changed. His face fell into serious lines, and he stared fiercely into my eyes. “Did the man have Jesus in his heart?”
My son was asking me whether the man who had died was a Christian who had accepted Christ as his Savior. But his intensity caught me off guard. “I’m not sure, Colton,” I said. “I didn’t know him very well.”
Colton’s face bunched up in a terrible twist of worry. “He had to have Jesus in his heart! He had to know Jesus or he can’t get into heaven!”
Again, his intensity surprised me, especially since he didn’t even know this man. I tried to comfort him as best I could. “I’ve talked to some of the family members, and they told me he did,” I said.
Colton didn’t seem entirely convinced, but his face relaxed a bit. “Well . . . okay,” he said and walked away.
For the second time in a couple of weeks, I thought, Man, those Sunday school teachers sure are doing a good job!
That weekend, Sonja dressed Cassie and Colton in their Sunday best, and we headed the half block down to the church to get ready for the funeral. As we pulled up in the SUV, I saw the Liewer Funeral Home hearse parked outside. Inside, we found the burnished oak casket standing off to one side of the foyer.
Two sets of open doorways led from the foyer into the sanctuary where the family was gathering for the “flower service.” Before moving to Imperial, I’d never heard of a flower service, but now I think it’s a really nice idea. The family gathers before the funeral service, and the funeral director points out each plant, wreath, and flower arrangement, explains who sent it, and reads aloud any message of sympathy attached. (“These beautiful purple azaleas come to you in loving memory from the Smith family.”)
The pastor is supposed to be in the flower service. I peeked into the sanctuary and caught the funeral director’s eye. He nodded, indicating they were ready to begin. I turned to gather Colton and Cassie, when Colton pointed to the casket. “What’s that, Daddy?”
I tried to keep it simple. “That’s the casket. The man who died is inside it.”
Suddenly, Colton’s face gathered into that same knot of intense concern. He slammed his fists on his thighs, then pointed one finger at the casket and said in a near shout, “Did that man have Jesus?!”
Sonja’s eyes popped wide, and we both glanced at the sanctuary doorway, terrified the family inside could hear our son.
“He had to! He had to!” Colton went on. “He can’t get into heaven if he didn’t have Jesus in his heart!”
Sonja grabbed Colton by the shoulders and tried to shush him. But he was not shushable. Now nearly in tears, Colton twisted in her arms and yelled at me, “He had to know Jesus, Dad!”
Sonja steered him away from the sanctuary, hustling him toward the front doors of the church, with Cassie following. Through the glass doors, I could see Sonja bent down talking to Cassie and Colton outside. Then Cassie took her still-struggling brother by the hand and started walking the half block toward home.
I didn’t know what to think. Where was this sudden concern over whether a stranger was saved, whether he “had Jesus in his heart,” as Colton put it, coming from?
I did know this much: Colton was at that age where if s
omething popped into his head, he’d just blurt it out. Like the time I took him to a restaurant in Madrid, Nebraska, and a guy with really long, straight hair walked in, and Colton asked loudly whether that was a boy or a girl. So we kept Colton away from funerals for a while if we didn’t know for sure the deceased was a Christian. We just didn’t know what he would say or do.
TWELVE
EYEWITNESS TO HEAVEN
It wasn’t until four months after Colton’s surgery, during our Fourth of July trip to meet our new nephew, that Sonja and I finally got a clue that something extraordinary had happened to our son. Sure, there had been a string of quirky things Colton had said and done since the hospital. Colton’s insisting we pay Dr. O’Holleran because Jesus used the doctor to help “fix” him. His statement that Jesus “told” him he had to be good. And his strenuous, almost vehement funeral performance. But rushing by as brief scenes in the busyness of family life, those things just seemed . . . well, kind of cute. Except for the funeral thing, which was just plain weird.
But not supernatural weird. It wasn’t until we were driving through North Platte on the way to South Dakota that the lights came on. You’ll remember I was teasing Colton a little as we drove through town.
“Hey, Colton, if we turn here, we can go back to the hospital,” I said. “Do you wanna go back to the hospital?”
It was that conversation in which Colton said that he “went up out of” his body, that he had spoken with angels, and had sat in Jesus’ lap. And the way we knew he wasn’t making it up was that he was able to tell us what we were doing in another part of the hospital: “You were in a little room by yourself praying, and Mommy was in a different room and she was praying and talking on the phone.”
Not even Sonja had seen me in that little room, having my meltdown with God.
Suddenly, there in the Expedition on our holiday trip, the incidents of the past few months clicked into place like the last few quick twists in a Rubik’s Cube solution: Sonja and I realized that this was not the first time Colton had let us know something amazing had happened to him; it was only the most clear-cut.
By the time we got to Sioux Falls, we were so busy getting to know our cute baby nephew, catching up on family news, and visiting the waterfall that we didn’t have a lot of time to discuss Colton’s strange revelations. But during the quiet moments before sleep, a flood of images tumbled through my mind—especially those horrible moments I’d spent in that tiny room at the hospital, raging against God. I thought I had been alone, pouring out my anger and grief in private. Staying strong for Sonja. But my son said he had seen me . . .
Our mini-vacation passed without any new disasters, and we returned to Imperial in time for me to preach on Sunday. The following week, Sonja and her friend Sherri Schoenholz headed to Colorado Springs for the Pike’s Peak Worship Festival, a conference on church music ministry. That left just me and the kids at home.
Like any prudent tornado-belt family, we have a basement below our one-story home. Ours is semifinished, with a small office and a bathroom that lead off a large, multipurpose, rumpus room area. Colton and I were down there one evening, as I worked on a sermon against the comforting background of my preschooler’s action-figure war.
Colton was three years and ten months old at the time of his surgery, but in May we had celebrated his birthday, so he was now officially four. A big boy. The little party we had thrown was all the more special since we’d nearly lost him.
I don’t remember exactly what day of the week it was when Colton and I were hanging out in the basement. But I do remember that it was evening and that Cassie wasn’t there, so she must’ve been spending the night with a friend. As Colton played nearby, my attention drifted to our Arby’s conversation about Jesus and the angels. I wanted to probe deeper, get him talking again. At that age, little boys don’t exactly come up and offer you long, detailed histories. But they will answer direct questions, usually with direct answers. If Colton really had a supernatural encounter, I certainly didn’t want to ask him leading questions. We had taught Colton about our faith all his life. But if he had really seen Jesus and the angels, I wanted to become the student, not the teacher!
Sitting at my makeshift desk, I looked over at my son as he brought Spider-Man pouncing down on some nasty-looking creature from Star Wars. “Hey, Colton,” I said. “Remember when we were in the car and you talked about sitting on Jesus’ lap?”
Still on his knees, he looked up at me. “Yeah.”
“Well, did anything else happen?”
He nodded, eyes bright. “Did you know that Jesus has a cousin? Jesus told me his cousin baptized him.”
“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “The Bible says Jesus’ cousin’s name is John.”
Mentally, I scolded myself: Don’t offer information. Just let him talk . . .
“I don’t remember his name,” Colton said happily, “but he was really nice.”
John the Baptist is “nice”?!
Just as I was processing the implications of my son’s statement—that he had met John the Baptist—Colton spied a plastic horse among his toys and held it up for me to look at. “Hey, Dad, did you know Jesus has a horse?”
“A horse?”
“Yeah, a rainbow horse. I got to pet him. There’s lots of colors.”
Lots of colors? What was he talking about?
“Where are there lots of colors, Colton?”
“In heaven, Dad. That’s where all the rainbow colors are.”
That set my head spinning. Suddenly I realized that up until that point, I’d been toying with the idea that maybe Colton had had some sort of divine visitation. Maybe Jesus and the angels had appeared to him in the hospital. I’d heard of similar phenomena many times when people were as near death as Colton had been. Now it was dawning on me that not only was my son saying he had left his body; he was saying he had left the hospital!
“You were in heaven?” I managed to ask.
“Well, yeah, Dad,” he said, as if that fact should have been perfectly obvious.
I had to take a break. I stood and bounded up the stairs, picked up the phone, and dialed Sonja’s cell. She picked up and I could hear music and singing in the background. “Do you know what your son just said to me?!”
“What?” she shouted over the noise.
“He told me he met John the Baptist!”
“What?”
I summarized the rest for her and could hear the amazement in her voice on the other end of the line.
She tried to press me for details, but the worship conference hall was too loud. Finally we had to give up. “Call me tonight after dinner, okay?” Sonja said. “I want to know everything!”
I hung up and leaned against the kitchen counter, processing. Slowly, I began to wrap my mind around the possibility that this was real. Had our son died and come back? The medical staff never gave any indication of that. But clearly, something had happened to Colton. He had authenticated that by telling us things he couldn’t have known. It dawned on me that maybe we’d been given a gift and that our job now was to unwrap it, slowly, carefully, and see what was inside.
Back downstairs, Colton was still on his knees, bombing aliens. I sat down beside him.
“Hey, Colton, can I ask you something else about Jesus?”
He nodded but didn’t look up from his devastating attack on a little pile of X-Men.
“What did Jesus look like?” I said.
Abruptly, Colton put down his toys and looked up at me. “Jesus has markers.”
“What?”
“Markers, Daddy . . . Jesus has markers. And he has brown hair and he has hair on his face,” he said, running his tiny palm around on his chin. I guessed that he didn’t yet know the word beard. “And his eyes . . . oh, Dad, his eyes are so pretty!”
As he said this, Colton’s face grew dreamy and far away, as if enjoying a particularly sweet memory.
“What about his clothes?”
Colton snapped back
into the room and smiled at me. “He had purple on.” As he said this, Colton put his hand on his left shoulder, moved it across his body down to his right hip then repeated the motion. “His clothes were white, but it was purple from here to here.”
Another word he didn’t know: sash.
“Jesus was the only one in heaven who had purple on, Dad. Did you know that?”
In Scripture, purple is the color of kings. A verse from the gospel of Mark flashed through my mind: “His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them.”1
“And he had this gold thing on his head . . .” Colton chirped on enthusiastically. He put both hands on top of his head in the shape of a circle.
“Like a crown?”
“Yeah, a crown, and it had this . . . this diamond thing in the middle of it and it was kind of pink. And he has markers, Dad.”
My mind reeled. Here I’d thought I was leading my child gently down this conversational path but instead, he’d grabbed the reins and galloped away. Images from Scripture tumbled through my mind. The Christophany, or manifestation of Christ, in the book of Daniel, the appearance of the King of kings in Revelation. I was amazed that my son was describing Jesus in pretty much human terms—then amazed that I was amazed, since our whole faith revolves around the idea that man is made in God’s image and Jesus both came to earth and returned to heaven as a man.
I knew by heart all the Bible stories we’d read him over the years, many from the Arch series, Bible storybooks I’d had as a child. And I knew our church’s Sunday school lessons and how simplified they are in the preschool years: Jesus loves you. Be kind to others. God is good. If you could get a preschooler to take away just one three- or four-word concept on Sunday mornings, that was a huge accomplishment.
Now here was my kid, in his matter-of-fact, preschooler voice, telling 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?”
Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Page 6