See, I had this tidy little box that said, “People have to die to go to heaven,” and Colton, trusting me, concluded, “Well, I must have died then, because I was there.”
Suddenly, he piped up again. “Daddy, remember when I yelled for you in the hospital when I waked up?”
How could I forget? It was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. “Of course I do,” I said.
“Well, the reason I was yelling was that Jesus came to get me. He said I had to go back because he was answering your prayer. That’s how come I was yelling for you.”
Suddenly, my knees felt weak underneath me. I flashed back to my prayers alone, raging at God, and my prayers in the waiting room, quiet and desperate. I remembered how scared I was, agonizing over whether Colton would hang on through the surgery, whether he’d live long enough for me to see his precious face again. Those were the longest, darkest ninety minutes of my life.
And Jesus answered my prayer? Personally? After I had yelled at God, chastising him, questioning his wisdom and his faithfulness?
Why would God even answer a prayer like that? And how did I deserve his mercy?
FIFTEEN
CONFESSION
The first weeks of July burned into the plains, nurturing the cornfields with all the heat of a giant greenhouse. Wedgewood blue skies arced over Imperial almost every day, the air buzzing with mosquitoes in the sunshine and singing with crickets by starlight. Around the middle of July, I drove over to Greeley, Colorado, for the church district conference. The gathering of about 150 pastors, pastors’ wives, and delegates from Nebraska and Colorado was meeting at the church pastored by Steve Wilson—the same church I’d visited back in March while Sonja stayed back at the Harrises’ home, nursing Colton when we all thought he had a stomach flu.
Roman Catholics practice confession as a sacrament, sharing their sins and shortcomings with a priest. Protestants practice confession, too, though a little less formally, often confiding in God without an intermediary. But Colton’s recent revelation that my raging prayers had ascended directly to heaven—and had received an equally direct response—made me feel like I had some additional confessing to do.
I didn’t feel good about having been so angry with God. When I was so upset, burning with righteous anger that he was about to take my child, guess who was holding my child? Guess who was loving my child, unseen? As a pastor, I felt accountable to other pastors for my own lack of faith. So at Greeley Wesleyan during the conference, I asked Phil Harris, our district superintendent, if I could have a few minutes to share.
He agreed, and when the time came, I stood up before my peers in the sanctuary that on Sunday mornings held around a thousand people in its pews. After delivering a brief update on Colton’s health, I thanked these men and women for their prayers on behalf of our family. Then I began my confession.
“Most of you know that before everything happened with Colton, I had broken my leg and gone through the kidney stone operation, then the mastectomy. I had had such a bad year that some people had started calling me Pastor Job.”
The sanctuary echoed with gentle laughter.
“But none of that stuff hurt like watching what Colton was going through, and I got really mad at God,” I continued. “I’m a guy. Guys do something. And all I felt like I could do was yell at God.”
I described briefly my attitude in that little room in the hospital, blasting God, blaming him for Colton’s condition, whining about how he had chosen to treat one of his pastors, as though I should somehow be exempt from troubles because I was doing “his” work.
“At that time, when I was so upset and so outraged, can you believe that God chose to answer that prayer?” I said. “Can you believe that I could pray a prayer like that, and God would still answer it ‘yes’?”
What had I learned? I was reminded yet again that I could be real with God, I told my fellow pastors. I learned that I didn’t have to offer some kind of churchy, holy-sounding prayer in order to be heard in heaven. “You might as well tell God what you think,” I said. “He already knows it anyway.”
Most importantly of all, I learned that I am heard. We all are. I had been a Christian since childhood and a pastor for half my life, so I believed that before. But now I knew it. How? As the nurses wheeled my son away screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, don’t let them take me!” . . . when I was angry at God because I couldn’t go to my son, hold him, and comfort him, God’s son was holding my son in his lap.
SIXTEEN
POP
On a sun-drenched day in August, four-year-old Colton hopped into the passenger seat of my red pickup, and the two of us headed off to Benkelman. I had to drive out there to bid a job and decided to take Colton with me. He wasn’t particularly interested in the installation of industrial-sized garage doors. But he loved riding in my little Chevy diesel because, unlike the Expedition where he had a limited view from the backseat, his car seat rode high in the Chevy, and he could see everything.
Benkelman is a small farming town thirty-eight miles due south of Imperial. Incorporated in 1887, it’s fraying a bit at the edges like a lot of communities in rural Nebraska, its population declining as technology eats up agricultural jobs and people move to bigger cities in search of work. I steered past the familiar fertilizer and potato plants that rise at the east end of Imperial, then turned south toward Enders Lake. We drove by the cedar-dotted municipal golf course on our left, and then, as we passed over a concrete dam, the lake sparkled below on our right. Colton looked down at a speedboat towing a skier in its foamy wake. We crossed the dam, dipped down in a valley, and motored up onto the stretch of two-lane highway that points straight south. Now acres of farmland fanned out around us, cornstalks six feet high bright green against the sky, and the asphalt cutting through it like a blade.
Suddenly Colton spoke up. “Dad, you had a grandpa named Pop, didn’t you?”
“Yep, sure did,” I said.
“Was he your mommy’s daddy or your daddy’s daddy?”
“Pop was my mom’s dad. He passed away when I was not much older than you.”
Colton smiled. “He’s really nice.”
I almost drove off the road into the corn. It’s a crazy moment when your son uses the present tense to refer to someone who died a quarter century before he was even born. But I tried to stay cool. “So you saw Pop?” I said.
“Yeah, I got to stay with him in heaven. You were really close to him, huh, Dad?”
“Yes, I was,” was all I could manage. My head spun. Colton had just introduced a whole new topic: people you’ve lost, and meeting them in heaven. Crazily enough, with all the talk of Jesus and angels and horses, I had never even thought to ask him if he’d met anyone I might know. But then, why would I? We hadn’t lost any family or friends since Colton was born, so who would there have been for him to meet?
Now this. I probably drove another ten miles toward Benkelman, thoughts charging through my mind. Soon, the cornfields were broken by neat squares of bronzed stubble, wheat fields past the harvest.
I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made when I’d put ideas in his head—that people had to die, for example, before being admitted to heaven. I didn’t want him just feeding me back stuff to please me. I wanted to know the truth.
On the left, a quarter mile off the road, a white church steeple seemed to rise from the corn. St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, built in 1918. I wondered what the people of this longstanding local fixture would think of the things our little boy had been telling us.
Finally, as we crossed into Dundy County, I was ready to start asking some open-ended questions. “Hey, Colton,” I said.
He turned from the window where he’d been watching a pheasant pacing us amid the corn rows. “What?”
“Colton, what did Pop look like?”
He broke into a big grin. “Oh, Dad, Pop has really big wings!”
Again with the present tense. It was weird.
Colton went on. “My wings wer
e really little, but Pop’s were big!”
“What did his clothes look like?”
“He had white on, but blue here,” he said, making the sash motion again.
I edged the truck over to avoid a ladder someone had dropped in the road then steered back to the center of the lane. “And you got to stay with Pop?”
Colton nodded, and his eyes seemed to light up.
“When I was a little boy,” I said, “I had a lot of fun with Pop.”
I didn’t tell Colton why I spent so much time with Pop and my Grandma Ellen on their farm in Ulysses, Kansas. The sad truth was that my dad, a chemist who worked for Kerr-McGee Petroleum, suffered from bipolar disorder. Sometimes, when his episodes got bad enough, my mom, Kay, an elementary school teacher, had to put Dad in the hospital. She sent me to Pop’s to shield me from that. I didn’t know I was being “shipped away”—I just knew I loved roaming the farm, chasing chickens, and hunting rabbits.
“I spent a lot of time with Pop at their place out in the country,” I said to Colton. “I rode on the combine and the tractor with him. He had a dog, and we’d take him out and hunt rabbits.”
Colton nodded again: “Yeah, I know! Pop told me.”
Well, I didn’t know what to say to that, so I said, “The dog’s name was Charlie Brown, and he had one blue eye and one brown one.”
“Cool!” Colton said. “Can we get a dog like that?”
I chuckled. “We’ll see.”
My grandfather, Lawrence Barber, was a farmer and one of those people who knew everyone and whom everyone considered a friend. He started most of his days before dawn, beating it from his farmhouse in Ulysses, Kansas, down to the local doughnut shop to swap stories. He was a big guy; he played fullback in the days before the pass. His wife, my Grandma Ellen (the same grandma who sent money to help with Colton’s hospital bills), used to say it would take four or five tacklers to bring Lawrence Barber down.
Pop was a guy who went to church only once in a while. He was kind of private about spiritual things, the way a lot of men tend to be. I was about six years old when he died after driving off the road late one night. Pop’s Crown Victoria hit a power pole, cracking it in half. The top half of the pole keeled over and smashed into the Crown Victoria’s roof, but the car’s momentum carried Pop another half mile into a field. The accident knocked out the power at a feed yard a little way back in the direction Pop had come from, prompting a worker there to investigate. Pop was apparently alive and breathing right after the accident, because rescue workers found him stretched across the passenger seat, reaching for the door handle to try to escape from the car. But when he arrived by ambulance at the hospital, doctors pronounced him dead. He was only sixty-one years old.
I remember seeing my mother in anguish at the funeral, but her grief didn’t end there. As I got older, I’d sometimes catch her in prayer, with tears gently sliding down her cheeks. When I asked her what was wrong, she would share with me, “I’m worried about whether Pop went to heaven.”
We didn’t find out until much later, in 2006, from my Aunt Connie, about a special service Pop had attended only two days before his death—a service that might hold answers to my grandfather’s eternal destiny.
The date was July 13, 1975, and the place was Johnson, Kansas. Mom and Aunt Connie had an uncle named Hubert Caldwell. I liked Uncle Hubert. Not only was Hubert a simple country preacher, but he loved to talk and was the type who was easy to talk to. (I also enjoyed Hubert because he was short, shorter than me. Looking down to visit with anyone happens so rarely for me that even the opportunity feels like a privilege.)
Uncle Hubert had invited Pop, Connie, and many others to revival services he was leading in his little country church. From behind his pulpit at the Church of God of Apostolic Faith, Hubert closed his message by asking if anyone wanted to give his life to Christ. Uncle Hubert saw Pop raise his hand. But somehow, that story never made it back to my mom, and she worried about it off and on for the next twenty-eight years.
After we got home from Benkelman, I called my mom and told her what Colton had said. That was on a Friday. The next morning, she pulled into our driveway, having made the trip all the way from Ulysses to hear what her grandson had to say about her dad. It surprised us how quickly she arrived.
“Boy, she beelined it up here!” Sonja said.
Around the dinner table that evening, Sonja and I listened as Colton told his grandma about Jesus’ rainbow horse and spending time with Pop. The thing that surprised Mom most was the way Colton told the story: Pop had recognized his great-grandson even though Colton was born decades after Pop died. That got Mom wondering whether those who have gone ahead of us know what’s happening on earth. Or is it that in heaven, we’ll know our loved ones—even those we didn’t get to meet in life—by some next-life way of knowing we don’t enjoy on earth?
Then Mom asked Colton an odd question. “Did Jesus say anything about your dad becoming a pastor?”
Just as I was wondering privately why in the world something like my vocation would even come up, Colton surprised me when he nodded enthusiastically. “Oh, yes! Jesus said he went to Daddy and told him he wanted Daddy to be a pastor and Daddy said yes, and Jesus was really happy.”
I just about fell out of my chair. That was true, and I vividly remember the night it happened. I was thirteen years old and attending a summer youth camp at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas. At one of the evening meetings, Rev. Orville Butcher delivered a message about how God calls people to ministry and uses them to do his work all over the world.
Pastor Butcher was a short, bald, lively preacher—energetic and engaging, not dull and dry the way kids sometimes expect an older pastor to be. He challenged the group of 150 teenagers that night: “There are some of you here tonight whom God could use as pastors and missionaries.”
The memory of that moment of my life is one of those crystal-clear ones, distilled and distinct, like the moment you graduate from high school or your first child is born. I remember that the crowd of kids faded away and the reverend’s voice receded into the background. I felt a pressure in my heart, almost a whisper: That’s you, Todd. That’s what I want you to do.
There was no doubt in my mind that I had just heard from God. I was determined to obey. I tuned back in to Pastor Butcher just in time to hear him say that if any of us had heard from God that night, if any of us had made a commitment to serve him in ministry, we should tell someone about it when we got home so that at least one other person would know. So when I got home from camp, I walked into the kitchen.
“Mom,” I said, “when I grow up, I’m going to be a pastor.”
Since that day decades before, Mom and I had revisited that conversation a couple of times. But we had never told Colton about it.
SEVENTEEN
TWO SISTERS
As the green days of summer gave way to a fiery fall, we talked with Colton about heaven every now and then. But one running conversation did emerge: when Colton saw Jesus in heaven, what did he look like? The reason for the frequency of this particular topic was that as a pastor, I wound up spending a lot of time at hospitals, in Christian bookstores, and at other churches—all places where there are lots of drawings and paintings of Christ. Often, Sonja and the kids were with me, so it became sort of a game. When we came across a picture of Jesus, we’d ask Colton, “What about this one? Is that what Jesus looks like?”
Invariably, Colton would peer for a moment at the picture and shake his tiny head. “No, the hair’s not right,” he would say. Or, “The clothes aren’t right.”
This would happen dozens of times over the next three years. Whether it was a poster in a Sunday school room, a rendering of Christ on a book cover, or a reprint of an old master’s painting hanging on the wall of an old folks’ home, Colton’s reaction was always the same: He was too young to articulate exactly what was wrong with every picture; he just knew they weren’t right.
One evening in Octobe
r, I was sitting at the kitchen table, working on a sermon. Sonja was around the corner in the living room, working on the business books, processing job tickets, and sorting through payables. Cassie played Barbie dolls at her feet. I heard Colton’s footsteps padding up the hallway and caught a glimpse of him circling the couch, where he then planted himself directly in front of Sonja.
“Mommy, I have two sisters,” Colton said.
I put down my pen. Sonja didn’t. She kept on working.
Colton repeated himself. “Mommy, I have two sisters.”
Sonja looked up from her paperwork and shook her head slightly. “No, you have your sister, Cassie, and . . . do you mean your cousin, Traci?”
“No.” Colton clipped off the word adamantly. “I have two sisters. You had a baby die in your tummy, didn’t you?”
At that moment, time stopped in the Burpo household, and Sonja’s eyes grew wide. Just a few seconds before, Colton had been trying unsuccessfully to get his mom to listen to him. Now, even from the kitchen table, I could see that he had her undivided attention.
“Who told you I had a baby die in my tummy?” Sonja said, her tone serious.
“She did, Mommy. She said she died in your tummy.”
Then Colton turned and started to walk away. He had said what he had to say and was ready to move on. But after the bomb he’d just dropped, Sonja was just getting started. Before our son could get around the couch, Sonja’s voice rang out in an all-hands-on-deck red alert. “Colton Todd Burpo, you get back here right now!”
Colton spun around and caught my eye. His face said, What did I just do?
I knew what my wife had to be feeling. Losing that baby was the most painful event of her life. We had explained it to Cassie; she was older. But we hadn’t told Colton, judging the topic a bit beyond a four-year-old’s capacity to understand. From the table, I watched quietly as emotions rioted across Sonja’s face.
Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Page 8
