Heaven Is for Real
set during World War I when the Pevensie kids are deported from London
to the home of an eccentric professor. Lucy, Edmund, Peter, and Susan
are bored to death, until Lucy stumbles on an enchanted wardrobe that
leads into a magical kingdom cal ed Narnia. In Narnia, not only can al the
animals talk, but the place is also inhabited by other creatures, like
dwarves, hobgoblins, and centaurs. The land is ruled by the lion Aslan, who
is a good and wise king, but his archenemy, the White Witch, has cast a
spel on Narnia so that it wil always be winter, but never Christmas. Back
in the real world, the Pevensies are just kids, but in Narnia, they are
princes and princesses who also become warriors fighting on the side of
Aslan.
That night, as we were watching the final, fantasy/medieval battle scene,
Colton, then six, was real y getting into it as winged creatures dropped
boulders from the sky and the battle-dressed Pevensie kids clashed
swords with the White Witch’s evil army. During the fight, Aslan sacrificed
himself to save Edmund. But later, when he came back to life and kil ed the
White Witch, Colton leaped to his feet and pumped his fist. He likes it
when the good guys win.
As the credits rol ed up the television screen and Colby picked at the
dregs of the popcorn, Sonja said offhandedly to Colton, “Wel , I guess
that’s one thing you didn’t like about heaven—no swords up there.”
Colton’s giddy excitement vanished as quickly as if an invisible hand
had wiped his smile off with an eraser. He drew himself up to his ful height
and looked down at Sonja, who was stil sitting on the floor.
“There are too swords in heaven!” he said.
Surprised at his intensity, Sonja shot me a sideways glance, then kind of
drew her head back and smiled at Colton. “Um . . . okay. Why do they need
swords in heaven?”
“Mom, Satan’s not in hel yet,” Colton said, almost scolding. “The angels
carry swords so they can keep Satan out of heaven!”
Again, Scripture leaped to my mind, this time from the book of Luke
where Jesus tel s the disciples, “I saw Satan fal like lightning from
heaven.”1
And I remembered a passage from Daniel in which an angel visits
Daniel in answer to prayer, but says he was delayed for twenty-one days
because he was engaged in a battle with the “king of Persia.”2
Theologians general y take this to mean some kind of spiritual battle, with
Gabriel fighting dark forces.
But how did a six-year-old know that? Yes, Colton had had two more
years of Sunday school by then, but I knew for a fact that our curriculum
didn’t include lessons on Satan’s living arrangements.
As these thoughts flashed through my head, I could see that Sonja didn’t
know what to say to Colton, who was stil scowling. His face reminded me
of his irritation when I’d suggested that it got dark in heaven. I decided to
lighten the mood. “Hey Colton, I bet you asked if you could have a sword,
didn’t you?” I said.
At that, Colton’s scowl melted into a dejected frown, and his shoulders
slumped toward the floor. “Yeah, I did. But Jesus wouldn’t let me have one.
He said I’d be too dangerous.”
I chuckled a little, wondering if Jesus meant Colton would be a danger to
himself or others.
In al our discussions of heaven, Colton had never mentioned Satan, and
neither Sonja nor I had thought to ask him. When you’re thinking “heaven,”
you’re thinking crystal streams and streets of gold, not angels and demons
crossing swords.
But now that he’d brought it up, I decided to press a little further.
“Hey, Colton,” I said. “Did you see Satan?”
“Yeah, I did,” he said solemnly.
“What did he look like?”
At this, Colton’s body went rigid, he grimaced, and his eyes narrowed to
a squint. He stopped talking. I mean, he absolutely shut down, and that was
it for the night.
We asked Colton about Satan a couple of times after that, but then gave
up because whenever we did, his reaction was a little disconcerting: it was
as if he changed instantly from a sunny little kid to someone who ran to a
safe room, bolted the door, locked the windows, and pul ed down the
blinds. It became clear that in addition to rainbows, horses, and golden
streets, he had seen something unpleasant. And he didn’t want to talk
about it.
TWENTY-SIX
THE COMING WAR
A few months later, I had some business in McCook, a town about sixty
miles from Imperial and the site of the nearest Wal-Mart. For many
Americans, an hour is an awful y long way to drive to get to Wal-Mart, but
out here in farm country, you get used to it. I had taken Colton with me, and
I’l never forget the conversation we had on the way back, because while
our son had spoken to me about heaven and even about my own past, he
had never before hinted that he knew my future.
We had driven back through Culbertson, the first town west of McCook,
and were passing a cemetery. Colton, by now out of a car seat, gazed out
the passenger-side window as the rows of headstones filed past.
“Dad, where’s Pop buried?” he asked
“Wel , his body is buried in a cemetery down in Ulysses, Kansas, where
Grandma Kay lives,” I said. “Next time we’re down there, I can take you to
see where it is if you want. But you know that’s not where Pop is.”
Colton kept peering out the window. “I know. He’s in heaven. He’s got a
new body. Jesus told me if you don’t go to heaven, you don’t get a new
body.”
Hang on, I thought. New information ahead.
“Real y?” was al I said.
“Yeah,” he said, then added, “Dad, did you know there’s going to be a
war?”
“What do you mean?” Were we stil on the heaven topic? I wasn’t sure.
“There’s going to be a war, and it’s going to destroy this world. Jesus
and the angels and the good people are going to fight against Satan and
the monsters and the bad people. I saw it.”
I thought of the battle described in the book of Revelation, and my
heartbeat stepped up a notch. “How did you see that?”
“In heaven, the women and the children got to stand back and watch. So
I stood back and watched.” Strangely, his voice was sort of cheerful, as
though he were talking about a good movie he’d seen. “But the men, they
had to fight. And Dad, I watched you. You have to fight too.”
Try hearing that and staying on the road. Suddenly, the sound of the tires
whirring on asphalt seemed unnatural y loud, a high whine.
And here was this issue of “heaven time” again. Before, Colton had
talked about my past, and he had seen “dead” people in the present. Now
he was saying that in the midst of al that, he had also been shown the
future. I wondered if those concepts—past, present, and future—were for
earth only. Maybe, in heaven, time isn’t linear.
But I had another, more pressing concern. “You said we’re fighting
monsters?”
“Yeah,” Colton said
happily. “Like dragons and stuff.”
I’m not one of those preachers who camps out on end-times prophecy,
but now I remembered a particularly vivid section of Revelation:
In those days men will seek death and will not find it; they will desire to die, and
death will flee from them. The shape of the locusts was like horses prepared for
battle. On their heads were crowns of something like gold, and their faces were like
the faces of men. They had hair like women’s hair, and their teeth were like lions’
teeth. And they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their
wings was like the sound of chariots with many horses running into battle. They had
tails like scorpions, and there were stings in their tails. Their power was to hurt men
five months.1
For centuries, theologians have mined these kinds of passages for
symbolism: maybe the combination of al those different body parts stood
for some kind of country, or each one stood for a kingdom of some sort.
Others have suggested that “breastplates of iron” indicate some kind of
modern military machine that John had no reference point to describe.
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 fel . “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 hel . 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. “Wel ,
son, I guess if Jesus wants me to fight, I’l 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 wil .”
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 tel ing 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 wel 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 cel o. A male
voice-over said: “A sel
f-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 cel o played, the video showed painting after