Heaven is for Real : A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

 Heaven Is for Real

A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven
and Back

Todd Burpo
with Lynn Vincent

©2010 byTodd Burpo

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Prologue: Angels at Arby’s

1. The Crawl-A-See-Um

2. Pastor Job

3. Colton Toughs It Out

4. Smoke Signals

5. Shadow of Death

6. North Platte

7. “I Think This Is It”

8. Raging at God

9. Minutes Like Glaciers

10. Prayers of a Most Unusual Kind

11. Colton Burpo, Collection Agent

12. Eyewitness to Heaven

13. Lights and Wings

14. On Heaven Time

15. Confession

16. Pop

17. Two Sisters

18. The Throne Room of God

19. Jesus Really Loves the Children

20. Dying and Living

21. The First Person You’ll See

22. No One Is Old in Heaven

23. Power from Above

24. Ali’s Moment

25. Swords of the Angels

26. The Coming War

27. Someday We’ll See

Epilogue

Timeline of Events

Notes

About the Burpos

About Lynn Vincent

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In telling Colton’s story, we have been afforded the chance to not just work

with dedicated professionals but with real and caring people. Sure, we

have been impressed with their expertise, but Sonja and I have been more

delighted by their character and their hearts.

Phil McCallum, Joel Kneedler, Lynn Vincent, and Debbie Wickwire have

not just invested their own lives into the making of this book; they have also

enriched our family. Without their enormous efforts and sensitive spirits, Heaven Is For Real would have never developed so wonderfully. We thank God daily for assembling these gifted and talented people to

help us tell Colton’s story. Each one has been a blessing to us.

Sonja and I count it a wonderful privilege to call them our friends.

 Heaven Is for Real A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back

PROLOGUE

Angels at Arby’s

The Fourth of July holiday calls up memories of patriotic parades, the

savory scents of smoky barbecue, sweet corn, and night skies bursting

with showers of light. But for my family, the July Fourth weekend of 2003

was a big deal for other reasons.

My wife, Sonja, and I had planned to take the kids to visit Sonja’s

brother, Steve, and his family in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. It would be our

first chance to meet our nephew, Bennett, born two months earlier. Plus,

our kids, Cassie and Colton, had never been to the falls before. (Yes, there

really is a Sioux Falls in Sioux Falls.) But the biggest deal of all was this:

this trip would be the first time we’d left our hometown of Imperial,

Nebraska, since a family trip to Greeley, Colorado, in March had turned

into the worst nightmare of our lives.

To put it bluntly, the last time we had taken a family trip, one of our

children almost died. Call us crazy, but we were a little apprehensive this

time, almost to the point of not wanting to go. Now, as a pastor, I’m not a

believer in superstition. Still, some weird, unsettled part of me felt that if we

just hunkered down close to home, we’d be safe. Finally, though, reason—

and the lure of meeting little Bennett, whom Steve had told us was the

world’s cutest baby—won out. So we packed up a weekend’s worth of

paraphernalia in our blue Ford Expedition and got our family ready to head

north.

Sonja and I decided the best plan would be to get most of the driving

done at night. That way, even though Colton would be strapped into his car

seat against his four-year-old, I’m-a-big-kid will, at least he’d sleep for most of the trip. So it was a little after 8 p.m. when I backed the Expedition

out of our driveway, steered past Crossroads Wesleyan Church, my

pastorate, and hit Highway 61.

The night spread clear and bright across the plains, a half moon white

against a velvet sky. Imperial is a small farming town tucked just inside the

western border of Nebraska. With only two thousand souls and zero traffic

lights, it’s the kind of town with more churches than banks, where farmers

stream straight off the fields into the family-owned café at lunchtime,

wearing Wolverine work boots, John Deere ball caps, and a pair of pliers

for fence-mending hanging off their hips. So Cassie, age six, and Colton

were excited to be on the road to the “big city” of Sioux Falls to meet their

newborn cousin.

The kids chattered for ninety miles to the city of North Platte, with Colton

fighting action-figure superhero battles and saving the world several times

on the way. It wasn’t quite 10 p.m. when we pulled into the town of about

twenty-four thousand, whose greatest claim to fame is that it was the

hometown of the famous Wild West showman, Buffalo Bill Cody. North

Platte would be about the last civilized stop—or at least the last open stop —we’d pass that night as we headed northeast across vast stretches of

cornfields empty of everything but deer, pheasant, and an occasional

farmhouse. We had planned in advance to stop there to top off both the

gas tank and our bellies.

After a fill-up at a Sinclair gas station, we pulled out onto Jeffers Street,

and I noticed we were passing through the traffic light where, if we turned

left, we’d wind up at the Great Plains Regional Medical Center. That was

where we’d spent fifteen nightmarish days in March, much of it on our

knees, praying for God to spare Colton’s life. God did, but Sonja and I joke

that the experience shaved years off our own lives.

Sometimes laughter is the only way to process tough times, so as we

passed the turnoff, I decided to rib Colton a little.

“Hey, Colton, if we turn here, we can go back to the hospital,” I said. “Do

you wanna go back to the hospital?”

Our preschooler giggled in the dark. “No, Daddy, don’t send me! Send

Cassie . . . Cassie can go to the hospital!”

Sitting next to him, his sister laughed. “Nuh-uh! I don’t wanna go either!”

In the passenger seat, Sonja turned so that she could see our son,

whose car seat was parked behind mine. I pictured his blond crew cut and

his sky-blue eyes shining in the dark. “Do you remember the hospital,

Colton?” Sonja said.

“Yes, Mommy, I remember,” he said. “That’s where the angels sang to me.”

Inside the Expedition, time froze. Sonja and I looked at each other,

passing a silent message: Did he just say what I think he said?

Sonja leaned over and whispered, “Has he talked to you about angels

before?”

I shook my head. “You?”

She shook her head.

I spotted an Arby’s, pulled into the parking lot, and switched off the

engine. White light from a street lamp filtered into the Expedition. Twisting

in my seat, I peered back at Colton. In that moment, I was struck by his

smallness, his little boyness. He was really just a little guy who still spoke

with an endearing (and sometimes embarrassing) call-it-like-you-see-it

innocence. If you’re a parent, you know what I mean: the age where a kid might point to a pregnant woman and ask (very loudly), “Daddy, why is that

lady so fat?” Colton was in that narrow window of life where he hadn’t yet

learned either tact or guile.

All these thoughts flashed through my mind as I tried to figure how to

respond to my four-year-old’s simple proclamation that angels had sung to

him. Finally, I plunged in: “Colton, you said that angels sang to you while

you were at the hospital?”

He nodded his head vigorously.

“What did they sing to you?”

Colton turned his eyes up and to the right, the attitude of remembering.

“Well, they sang ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and ‘Joshua Fought the Battle of

Jericho,’” he said earnestly. “I asked them to sing ‘We Will, We Will Rock

You,’ but they wouldn’t sing that.”

As Cassie giggled softly, I noticed that Colton’s answer had been quick

and matter-of-fact, without a hint of hesitation.

Sonja and I exchanged glances again. What’s going on? Did he have a

dream in the hospital?

And one more unspoken question: What do we say now?

A natural question popped into my head: “Colton, what did the angels

look like?”

He chuckled at what seemed to be a memory. “Well, one of them looked

like Grandpa Dennis, but it wasn’t him, ’cause Grandpa Dennis has

glasses.”

Then he grew serious. “Dad, Jesus had the angels sing to me because I

was so scared. They made me feel better.”

Jesus?

I glanced at Sonja again and saw that her mouth had dropped open. I

turned back to Colton. “You mean Jesus was there?”

My little boy nodded as though reporting nothing more remarkable than

seeing a ladybug in the front yard. “Yeah, Jesus was there.”

“Well, where was Jesus?”

Colton looked me right in the eye. “Iwas sitting in Jesus’ lap.”

If there are Stop buttons on conversations, that was one of them right

there. Astonished into speechlessness, Sonja and I looked at each other

and passed another silent telegram: Okay, we really need to talk about

this. We all piled out of the Expedition and trooped into Arby’s, emerging a

few minutes later with a bag of grub. In between, Sonja and I exchanged

whispers.

“Do you think he really saw angels?”

“And Jesus?!”

“I don’t know.”

“Was it a dream?”

“I don’t know—he seems so sure.”

Back in the SUV, Sonja passed out roast beef sandwiches and potato

cakes, and I ventured another question.

“Colton, where were you when you saw Jesus?”

He looked at me as if to say, Didn’t we just talk about this?

“At the hospital. You know, when Dr. O’Holleran was working on me.”

“Well, Dr. O’Holleran worked on you a couple of times, remember?” I

said. Colton had both an emergency appendectomy and then an

abdominal clean-out in the hospital, and later we had taken Colton to have

some keloid scarring removed, but that was at Dr. O’Holleran’s office. “Are

you sure it was at the hospital?”

Colton nodded. “Yeah, at the hospital. When I was with Jesus, you were

praying, and Mommy was talking on the phone.”

What?

That definitely meant he was talking about the hospital. But how in the

world did he know where we had been?

“But you were in the operating room, Colton,” I said. “How could you

know what we were doing?”

“’Cause I could see you,” Colton said matter-of-factly. “I went up out of my body and I was looking down and I could see the doctor working on my

body. And I saw you and Mommy. 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.”

Colton’s words rocked me to my core. Sonja’s eyes were wider than

ever, but she said nothing, just stared at me and absently bit into her

sandwich.

That was all the information I could handle at that point. I started the

engine, steered the Expedition back onto the street, and pointed us toward

South Dakota. As I hit I-80, pasturelands unrolled on either side, dotted

here and there with duck ponds that glinted in the moonlight. By then, it was

very late, and soon everyone else was snoozing as planned.

As the road hummed underneath me, I marveled at the things I had just

heard. Our little boy had said some pretty incredible stuff—and he had

backed it up with credible information, things there was no way he could

have known. We had not told him what we were doing while he was in

surgery, under anesthesia, apparently unconscious.

Over and over, I kept asking myself, Howcould he have known? But by

the time we rolled across the South Dakota state line, I had another

question: Could this be real?

Heaven is for Real : A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Review

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