But maybe we sophisticated grown-ups have tried to make things more complicated than they are. Maybe we are too educated, too “smart,” to name these creatures in the simple language of a child: monsters.
“Um, Colton . . . what am I fighting the monsters with?” I was hoping for a tank, maybe, or a missile launcher . . . I didn’t know, but something I could use to fight from a distance.
Colton looked at me and smiled. “You either get a sword or a bow and arrow, but I don’t remember which.”
My face fell. “You mean I have to fight monsters with a sword?”
“Yeah, Dad, but it’s okay,” he said reassuringly. “Jesus wins. He throws Satan into hell. I saw it.”
And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season. . . . And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.2
Colton was describing the battle of Armageddon and saying I was going to fight in it. For the umpteenth time in the nearly two years since Colton first told us the angels sang to him at the hospital, my head was spinning. I drove on, speechless, for several miles as I kicked around these new images in my head. Also, Colton’s nonchalance struck me. His attitude was kind of like, “What’s the problem, Dad? I’ve told you: I’ve skipped to the last chapter, and the good guys win.”
That was some comfort at least. We were just crossing the outskirts of Imperial when I decided to adopt his attitude toward the whole thing. “Well, son, I guess if Jesus wants me to fight, I’ll fight,” I said.
Colton turned away from the window, and I saw that the look on his face had turned serious. “Yeah, I know, Dad,” he said. “You will.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
SOMEDAY WE'LL SEE
I remember the first time we spoke publicly about Colton’s experience. It was during the evening service on January 28, 2007, at Mountain View Wesleyan Church in Colorado Springs. During the morning service, I preached the sermon, a message about Thomas, the disciple who was angry because the other disciples, and even Mary Magdalene, had gotten to see the risen Christ and he hadn’t. The story is told in the gospel of John:
Now Thomas (called Didymus), one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, “We have seen the Lord!”
But he said to them, “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it.”
A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them. Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”1
This story is where we get the familiar term “doubting Thomas,” someone who refuses to believe something without physical evidence or direct personal experience. In other words, a person without faith.
In my sermon that morning, I talked about my own anger and lack of faith, about the stormy moments I spent in that little room in the hospital, raging against God, and about how God came back to me, through my son, saying, “Here I am.”
People who attended the service that morning went out and told their friends that a preacher and his wife whose son had been to heaven would be telling more of the story during the evening service. That night, the church was packed. Colton, by now seven years old, sat in the second pew along with his brother and sister while Sonja and I told the story of his experience as well as we could in the space of forty-five minutes. We shared about Pop, and Colton’s meeting his unborn sister; then we answered questions for a good forty-five minutes after that.
About a week after we got back to Imperial, I was down in my basement office at home, checking e-mail, when I saw one from the family at whose home Sonja and I and the kids had stayed during our visit to Mountain View Wesleyan. Our hosts had friends who had been at the church the evening of our talk and had heard the descriptions of heaven Colton had shared. Via our hosts, those friends had forwarded us an e-mail about a report CNN had run just two months earlier, in December 2006. The story was about a young Lithuanian-American girl named Akiane Kramarik, who lived in Idaho. Twelve years old at the time of the CNN segment, Akiane (pronounced AH-KEE-AHNA) had begun having “visions” of heaven at the age of four, the e-mail said. Her descriptions of heaven sounded remarkably like Colton’s, and our host’s friends thought we’d be interested in the report.
Sitting at the computer, I clicked on the link to the three-minute segment that began with background music, a slow classical piece on cello. A male voice-over said: “A self-taught artist who says her inspiration comes ‘from above.’ Paintings that are spiritual, emotional . . . and created by a twelve-year-old prodigy.”2
Prodigy was right. As the cello played, the video showed painting after painting of angelic-looking figures, idyllic landscapes, and a profile view of a man who was clearly meant to be Christ. Then a shot of a young girl filling a canvas with color. But these didn’t seem to be paintings by a young girl, or even of an adult learning to paint portraits. This was sophisticated artwork that could hang in any gallery.
Akiane began painting at the age of six, the voice-over said, but at age four she “began to describe to her mother her visits to heaven.”
Then Akiane spoke for the first time: “All the colors were out of this world,” she said, describing heaven. “There are hundreds of millions of more colors we don’t know yet.”
The narrator went on to say that Akiane’s mother was an atheist and that the concept of God was never discussed in their home. The family did not watch television, and Akiane didn’t attend any kind of preschool. So as the little girl began to tell her stories of heaven, then depict them first in drawings, then paintings, her mother knew she couldn’t have heard these things from another person. Slowly, her mom began to accept that Akiane’s visions were real and that therefore, God must be real.
“I think that God knows where he puts our children, in each family,” Mrs. Kramarik said.
I remembered what Jesus told his disciples one day when they were trying to keep some kids from “bothering” him: “Let the little children come to me.”3
I made a mental note for future sermons: Akiane’s story showed that God can reach anyone, anywhere, at any age— even a preschool girl in a home where his name had never been spoken.
But that was not the lesson God had for me that day.
As I watched a montage of Akiane’s artwork play across my computer screen, the narrator said, “Akiane describes God as vividly as she paints him.”
At that point, a close-up portrait of the face of Christ filled the screen. It was the same likeness I’d seen before, but this time with Jesus looking directly “into the camera,” so to speak.
“He’s pure,” Akiane was saying. “He’s very masculine, really strong and big. And his eyes are just beautiful.”
Wow. Nearly three years had passed since Colton’s
surgery, and about two and a half years since he first described Jesus to me that night in the basement. I was struck by the similarities between his and Akiane’s recollections: all the colors in heaven . . . and especially their descriptions of Jesus’ eyes.
“And his eyes,” Colton had said. “Oh, Dad, his eyes are so pretty!”
What an interesting detail for two four-year-olds to key in on. After the CNN report concluded, I rewound it to that second portrait of Jesus, a startlingly realistic picture that Akiane painted when she was eight. The eyes were indeed striking—a clear, greenish blue under bold, dark brows— with half the face in shadow. And I noticed that his hair was shorter than most artists paint it. The beard was also different, fuller somehow, more . . . I don’t know . . . casual.
Still, of the literally dozens of portraits of Jesus we’d seen since 2003, Colton had still never seen one he thought was right.
Well, I thought, may as well see what he thinks of Akiane’s attempt.
I got up from the desk and hollered up the stairs for Colton to come down to the basement.
“Coming!” came the reply.
Colton bounded down the stairs and popped into the office. “Yeah, Dad?”
“Take a look at this,” I said, nodding toward the computer monitor. “What’s wrong with this one?”
He turned to the screen and for a long moment said nothing.
“Colton?”
But he just stood there, studying. I couldn’t read his expression.
“What’s wrong with this one, Colton?” I said again.
Utter silence.
I nudged him in the arm. “Colton?”
My seven-year-old turned to look at me and said, “Dad, that one’s right.”
Knowing how many pictures Colton had rejected, Sonja and I finally felt that in Akiane’s portrait, we’d seen the face of Jesus. Or at least a startling likeness.
We were pretty sure no painting could ever capture the majesty of the person of the risen Christ. But after three years of examining Jesus pictures, we did know that Akiane’s rendering was not only a departure from typical paintings of Jesus; it was also the only one that had ever stopped Colton in his tracks. Sonja and I thought it was interesting that when Colton said, “This one’s right,” he hadn’t known the portrait, called Prince of Peace: The Resurrection, was painted by another child—a child who had also claimed to visit heaven.
Finally getting an idea of what Jesus looks like wasn’t the only interesting thing that came out of our visit to Mountain View Wesleyan. It was also the first time we realized how Colton’s encounter with his sister in heaven would impact people on earth.
After the service that evening in January 2007, a young mother came up to me, her eyes brimming with tears.
“I lost a baby,” she said. “She was stillborn. Would your son know if my baby’s in heaven?”
The woman’s voice trembled, and I saw that she was physically shaking. I thought, Oh, Lord, who am I to answer this question?
Colton had said there were many, many children in heaven. But it wasn’t like I could go and ask him if he’d seen this woman’s particular child. Still, I didn’t want to just leave her hanging in her grief either.
Just then, a little boy of about six or seven came and stood beside the woman, clinging to her skirt. And an answer came to me.
“Ma’am, do you believe God loves me?” I said.
She blinked away her tears. “Well . . . yes.”
“Do you believe he loves you as much as he loves me?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
Then I nodded at her young son beside her. “Do you believe God loves your son here as much as he loves Colton?”
She paused to process that question, then answered, “Yes, of course.”
“Well, if you believe God loves you as much as he loves me, and you believe he loves your living son as much as he loves my living son, don’t you believe he loves your unborn child as much as he loves mine?”
Suddenly, the woman stopped trembling and smiled. “I never thought about it that way.”
I breathed a prayer of thanks to the Holy Spirit, who had clearly “shot down power,” giving me an answer for this grieving woman, because I can tell you right now, I’m not smart enough to have thought of it myself.
That wouldn’t be the last time Colton’s story put me or Sonja in the position of trying to answer some monumental questions. But sometimes, people who walked through the experience with us have had some questions answered for themselves.
As I mentioned earlier, before we were released from the hospital in North Platte, nurses kept filing in and out of Colton’s room. Before, when nurses visited our room, they’d check Colton’s vitals and write stuff on charts. Now they came with no medical business whatsoever—just stole glances at this little guy who, only two days before, was beyond their medical capabilities but who now was up in his bed, chattering and playing with his new stuffed lion. During that time, one of the nurses pulled me aside. “Mr. Burpo, can I speak with you for a moment?”
“Sure,” I said.
She indicated a room across the hall from Colton’s room. “Let’s step in here.”
Wondering what was up, I followed her into what appeared to be a small break room. She closed the door behind us and turned to face me. Her eyes held a deep sparkle, as though something new had just blossomed inside her.
“Mr. Burpo, I’ve worked as a nurse here for many years,” she said. “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but we were told not to give your family any encouragement. They didn’t think Colton was going to make it. And when they tell us people aren’t going to make it, they don’t.”
She seemed to hesitate for a moment; then she plunged on. “But seeing your boy the way he is today, this is a miracle. There has to be a God, because this is a miracle.”
I thanked her for sharing with me, then said, “I want you to know that we believe this was God. Our church got together and prayed for Colton last night, and we believe God answered our prayers.”
The nurse looked at the floor for a moment, then back up at me again and smiled. “Well, I just wanted to tell you that.”
Then she left. I think maybe she didn’t want to hear a sermon from a pastor. But the truth was, she didn’t need a sermon—she’d already seen one.
Speaking of Colton’s experience in heaven, people have said to us, “Your family is so blessed!”
In the sense that we’ve had a glimpse through the veil that separates earth from eternity, they’re right.
But I also think, Blessed? We watched our son almost die.
It’s fun to talk about heaven, about the throne of God and Jesus and Pop and the daughter we thought we had lost but will meet again someday. But it’s not fun to talk about how we got there. Recalling those terrifying days when we watched Colton cling to life still brings tears for Sonja and me. To this day, the miraculous story of his visit to heaven and the story of almost losing our son are one and the same event to us.
When I was a kid, I always wondered why the cross, Jesus’ crucifixion, was such a big deal. If God the Father knew he was going to raise his Son from the dead, how was that a sacrifice? But now I understand why God doesn’t view Easter as just the endgame, just the empty tomb. I understand completely. I would’ve done anything, anything, to stop Colton’s suffering, including trading places with him.
The Scripture says that as Jesus gave up his spirit, as he sagged there, lifeless on that Roman cross, God the Father turned his back. I am convinced that he did that because if he had kept on watching, he couldn’t have gone through with it.
Sometimes people ask, “Why Colton? Why do you think this happened to your family?” I’ve had to say on more than one occasion, “Hey, we’re just ordinary people from a one-horse town in Nebraska. The best we can do is tell you what happened to us, and hope that you find it encouraging, like the nurse in North Platte who maybe needed to see a miracle to believe there is Someone greater than ou
rselves. Or the woman at Mountain View Wesleyan who needed a glimmer of hope to help her cope with her grief. Or Sonja, who needed salve on her own maternal wounds. Or like my mother, Kay, who after twenty-eight years of wondering, finally knows she will one day meet her father again.”
When you look at the book of Revelation and other biblical teachings about heaven, it’s kind of fragmented. As a pastor, I’ve always been very conscious about what I share about heaven from the pulpit, and I still am. I teach what I find in Scripture.
Because I had a lot of questions that I didn’t have answers for, I didn’t spend much time thinking about heaven on a personal level. But I do now. Sonja and I both do, and we’ve heard from a lot of people that Colton’s story has them thinking more about heaven too. We still don’t have all the answers—not even close. But now we have a picture in our minds, a picture we can look at and say, “Wow.”
I love the way my mom sums it up: “Ever since this happened,” she told me, “I think more about what it might really be like in heaven. I accepted the idea of heaven before, but now I visualize it. Before, I’d heard, but now I know that someday I’m going to see.”
EPILOGUE
Just over seven years have passed since an ordinary family trip turned into a heavenly trip that changed all our lives. People have often asked us why we waited so long to tell Colton’s story. Well, there are a couple of reasons. First, though it’s been seven years since the hospital ordeal, our emergency dash from Greeley to the doctor in Imperial turned out to be only the beginning of the story. As you’ve read in these pages, we received the details of Colton’s extraordinary journey in bits and pieces over a period of months and years. So though it’s been some time since his brush with death, the rest of the story took a while to unfold.
Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Page 12