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 all 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.”
“Well, 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, carefully, 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. Finally, 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, especially 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, really 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 all, 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 all 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 filled 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 all 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 fill 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 carefully 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 actually 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 telling 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 really 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 all was in the box.
“Well, 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 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 . . . well, a “character” more than a regular person like you and me. It sounds kind of dumb since Christians talk all the time about going to heaven when we die. Why wouldn’t I expect that Colton would’ve seen ordinary people?
But all 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. Well, all 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 tell people all 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, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’”1
Colton broke into my thoughts. “Everyone kind of looks like angels in heaven, Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“All 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 rolled 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 specifically—or halos, as some would call 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.
Still, 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 called a little boy from the crowd and had him stand among them as an example. “I tell you the truth,” Jesus said, “unless you change and become like little children, you will 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 intelligence, 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 joyfully 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 intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard.
All this flashed through my mind in an instant, but I remained noncommittal.
“A light, huh?” was all I said.
“Yeah, and they have yellow 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 really had been to heaven and really had seen all 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 still tied around his neck. “Colton, you said you were in heaven and you did all 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?
As Colton began to set up for an epic plastic-sword fight with an unseen villain, I marveled at his answer.
He had already authenticated his experience by telling me things he could not otherwise have known. But now I had to square his answer, “three minutes,” with all 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 tell 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. Especially since we’d never received any kind of report saying Colton had ever been clinically 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’Holleran, 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 all 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 finally, 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 all the roundness had returned to his face, his cheeks filled out and rosy again after his illness had drained them thin and sallow. “What?”
“You said you went to heaven. People have to die to go to heaven.”
Colton’s gaze didn’t waver. “Well, okay then, I died. But just for a little bit.”
My heart skipped a beat. If you haven’t heard your preschooler tell 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 mulled 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 personally 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 tell.”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 telling 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, well, okay, it must have rained.
Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Page 7