A bit nervously, Colton slunk back around the couch and faced his mom again, this time much more warily. “It’s okay, Mommy,” he said. “She’s okay. God adopted her.”
Sonja slid off the couch and knelt down in front of Colton so that she could look him in the eyes. “Don’t you mean Jesus adopted her?” she said.
“No, Mommy. His Dad did!”
Sonja turned and looked at me. In that moment, she later told me, she was trying to stay calm, but she was overwhelmed. Our baby . . . was—is!—a girl, she thought.
Sonja focused on Colton, and I could hear the effort it took to steady her voice. “So what did she look like?”
“She looked a lot like Cassie,” Colton said. “She is just a little bit smaller, and she has dark hair.”
Sonja’s dark hair.
As I watched, a blend of pain and joy played across my wife’s face. Cassie and Colton have my blond hair. She had even jokingly complained to me before, “I carry these kids for nine months, and they both come out looking like you!” Now there was a child who looked like her. A daughter. I saw the first hint of moisture glint in my wife’s eyes.
Now Colton went on without prompting. “In heaven, this little girl ran up to me, and she wouldn’t stop hugging me,” he said in a tone that clearly indicated he didn’t enjoy all this hugging from a girl.
“Maybe she was just happy that someone from her family was there,” Sonja offered. “Girls hug. When we’re happy, we hug.”
Colton didn’t seem convinced.
Sonja’s eyes lit up and she asked, “What was her name? What was the little girl’s name?”
Colton seemed to forget about all the yucky girl hugs for a moment. “She doesn’t have a name. You guys didn’t name her.”
How did he know that?
“You’re right, Colton,” Sonja said. “We didn’t even know she was a she.”
Then Colton said something that still rings in my ears: “Yeah, she said she just can’t wait for you and Daddy to get to heaven.”
From the kitchen table, I could see that Sonja was barely holding it together. She gave Colton a kiss and told him he could go play. And when he left the room, tears spilled over her cheeks.
“Our baby is okay,” she whispered. “Our baby is okay.”
From that moment on, the wound from one of the most painful episodes in our lives, losing a child we had wanted very much, began to heal. For me, losing the baby was a terrible blow. But Sonja had told me that to her, the miscarriage not only seared her heart with grief, but it also felt like a personal failure.
“You do all the right things, eat all the right things, and you pray for the baby’s health, but still this tiny baby dies inside you,” she had once told me. “I feel guilty. I know in my mind that it wasn’t my fault, but there’s still this guilt.”
We had wanted to believe that our unborn child had gone to heaven. Even though the Bible is largely silent on this point, we had accepted it on faith. But now, we had an eyewitness: a daughter we had never met was waiting eagerly for us in eternity. From then on, Sonja and I began to joke about who would get to heaven first. There were several reasons she had always wanted to outlive me. For one thing, a pastor’s wife has to put up with being used as a sermon illustration a lot. If I died first, she’s always told me, she’d finally get to tell the congregation all her stories about me.
But now Sonja had a reason for wanting to reach heaven first. When she was pregnant with the child we lost, we had picked out a boy’s name—Colton—but we never could agree on a name for a little girl. I liked Kelsey, she liked Caitlin, and neither of us would budge.
But now that we know our little girl doesn’t have a name yet, we constantly tell each other, “I’m going to beat you to heaven and name her first!”
EIGHTEEN
THE THRONE ROOM OF GOD
One night near Christmas 2003, I followed Colton into his room at bedtime. According to our usual routine, he picked a Bible story for me to read to him, and that night it was The Wise King and the Baby. The story was based on the one in the book of 1 Kings in which two women live together, and each one has an infant son. During the night, one of the babies dies. Overcome with grief, the mother of the dead child tries to claim the other boy as her own. The real mother of the living boy tries to convince the grieving mother of the truth but can’t persuade her to give up the surviving baby. Desperate to get her child back, the mother of the living boy suggests that King Solomon, widely known for his wisdom, could settle the matter and determine who the real mother was of the living infant. In the biblical story, King Solomon devises a way to find out what is in each woman’s heart.
“Cut the child in half!” the king decrees. “Give half to one and half to the other.”
The grieving mother agrees to the solution, but the real mother reveals her love, crying out, “No! Let her have the child!” And that’s how the wise king figured out which mother was telling the truth, and it’s where we get the common phrase, “a Solomonic solution.”
I came to the end of the story, and Colton and I had our usual good-natured argument over reading it again (and again and again). This time, I won. As we knelt on the floor to pray, I laid the book aside on the carpet, and it fell open to an illustration that pictured King Solomon sitting on his throne. It dawned on me that the Bible talks about God’s throne in several places. For example, the author of the book of Hebrews urges believers to “approach the throne of grace with confidence,”1 and says that after Jesus had completed his work on earth, he “sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”2 And there’s that glorious chapter in the book of Revelation that describes God’s throne:
I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” . . .
I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.3
“Hey, Colton,” I said, kneeling next to him, “when you were in heaven, did you ever see God’s throne?”
Colton looked at me quizzically. “What’s a throne, Daddy?”
I picked up the Bible storybook and pointed to the picture of Solomon seated in his court. “A throne is like the king’s chair. It’s the chair that only the king can sit in.”
“Oh, yeah! I saw that a bunch of times!” Colton said.
My heart sped up a little. Was I really going to get a glimpse into the throne room of heaven? “Well, what did God’s throne look like?”
“It was big, Dad . . . really, really big, because God is the biggest one there is. And he really, really loves us, Dad. You can’t belieeeeve how much he loves us!”
When he said this, a contrast struck me: Colton, a little guy, was talking about a being so big—but in the next breath, he was talking about love. For one thing, God’s size clearly wasn’t scary to Colton, but it was also interesting to me that as eager as Colton was to tell about what God looked like, he was just as eager to tell me what God felt like toward us.
“And do you know that Jesus sits right next to God?” Colton went on excitedly. “Jesus’ chair is right next to his Dad’s!”
That blew me away. There’s no way a four-year-old knows that. It was another one of those moments when I thought, He had to have seen this.
I was pretty sure he had never even heard of the book of Hebrews, but there was one way to find out.
“Colton, which side of God’s throne was Jesus sitting on?” I asked.
Colto
n climbed up on the bed and faced me on his knees. “Well, pretend like you’re in God’s throne. Jesus sat right there,” he said, pointing to my right side.
The Hebrews passage flashed into my mind: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”4
Wow. Here was a rare case where I had tested Colton’s memories against what the Bible says, and he passed without batting an eye. But now I had another question, one I didn’t know the answer to, at least not an answer from the Bible.
“Well, who sits on the other side of God’s throne?” I said.
“Oh, that’s easy, Dad. That’s where the angel Gabriel is. He’s really nice.”
Gabriel. That makes sense. I remembered the story of John the Baptist and the moment when Gabriel arrived to deliver the news of John the Baptist’s coming birth.
But the angel said to him: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John. He will be a joy and delight to you, and many will rejoice because of his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. . . .”
Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife is well along in years.”
The angel answered, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news.”5
“I stand in the presence of God,” Gabriel told Zechariah. And now, more than two thousand years later, my little boy was telling me the same thing.
So I’d had my glimpse into God’s throne room, but Colton’s descriptions had me wondering: if God the Father was seated on his throne with Jesus on his right and Gabriel on his left, where was Colton?
Colton had already crawled underneath his blanket, his blond head nestled against a Spider-Man pillowcase. “Where did you sit, Colton?” I asked.
“They brought in a little chair for me,” he said, smiling. “I sat by God the Holy Spirit. Did you know that God is three persons, Dad?”
“Yeah, I think I know that one,” I said and smiled.
“I was sitting by God the Holy Spirit because I was praying for you. You needed the Holy Spirit, so I prayed for you.”
This took my breath away. Colton saying that he was praying for me in heaven reminded me of the letter to the Hebrews, where the writer says: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses . . . let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”6
“What does God look like?” I said. “God the Holy Spirit?”
Colton furrowed his brow. “Hmm, that’s kind of a hard one . . . he’s kind of blue.”
Just as I was trying to picture that, Colton shifted course again. “You know, that’s where I met Pop.”
“You met Pop sitting by the Holy Spirit?”
Colton nodded vigorously, smiling at what seemed a pleasant memory. “Yep. Pop came up to me and said, ‘Is Todd your dad?’ And I said yes. And Pop said, ‘He’s my grandson.’”
How many times, when I presided over a funeral, had mourners delivered the usual well-meaning platitudes: “Well, she’s in a better place,” or “We know he’s looking down on us, smiling,” or “You’ll see him again.” Of course, I believed those things in theory, but to be honest, I couldn’t picture them. Now, with what Colton had said about Pop and about his sister, I began to think about heaven in a different way. Not just a place with jeweled gates, shining rivers, and streets of gold, but a realm of joy and fellowship, both for those who are with us in eternity and those still on earth, whose arrival we eagerly anticipated. A place where I would one day walk and talk with my grandfather who had meant so much to me, and with the daughter I had never met.
With all my heart, I wanted to believe. At that moment, the details of our conversations began to pile up in my mind like a stack of Polaroids—pictures of heaven that seemed uncannily accurate from the descriptions we all have available to us in the Bible—all of us who can read, that is. But these details were obscure to most adults, much less a kid of Colton’s young age. The nature of the Trinity, the role of the Holy Spirit, Jesus sitting at the right hand of God.
I believed. But how could I be sure?
I smoothed Colton’s blanket across his chest and tucked him in snug the way he liked—and for the first time since he started talking about heaven, I intentionally tried to trip him up. “I remember you saying you stayed with Pop,” I said. “So when it got dark and you went home with Pop, what did you two do?”
Suddenly serious, Colton scowled at me. “It doesn’t get dark in heaven, Dad! Who told you that?”
I held my ground. “What do you mean it doesn’t get dark?”
“God and Jesus light up heaven. It never gets dark. It’s always bright.”
The joke was on me. Not only had Colton not fallen for the “when it gets dark in heaven” trick, but he could tell me why it didn’t get dark: “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp.”7
NINETEEN
JESUS REALLY LOVES THE CHILDREN
For months in late 2003 and early 2004, there was a certain set of things that Colton seemed to fixate on. He talked about death and dying more weird—really weird—for a kid his age. He also shared more about what heaven looks like. These details came out in bits and pieces over dinner, while he ran errands with Sonja and me, and during the general flow of life.
He saw the gates of heaven, he said: “They were made of gold and there were pearls on them.” The heavenly city itself was made of something shiny, “like gold or silver.” The flowers and trees in heaven were “beautiful,” and there were animals of every kind.
No matter what new tidbits he revealed, though, Colton had one consistent theme: he talked constantly about how much Jesus loves the children. I mean that: constantly.
He would wake up in the morning and tell me: “Hey Dad, Jesus told me to tell you, He really loves the children.”
Over dinner at night: “Remember, Jesus really loves the children.”
Before bed, as I helped him brush his teeth, “Hey, Daddy don’t forget,” he’d say, garbling the words through a mouthful of toothpaste foam, “Jesus said he really, really loves the children!”
Sonja got the same treatment. She had begun working part-time again by then, and on the days she stayed home with Colton, he chirped all day long about Jesus loving the children. It got so that it didn’t matter what Bible story she or I read to our tiny evangelist at night, whether from the Old Testament, the New Testament, about Moses or Noah or King Solomon, Colton wrapped up the night with the same message: “Jesus loves the children!”
Finally I had to tell him, “Colton, we get it. You can stop. When I get to heaven, you are exonerated. I will tell Jesus you did your job.”
We might have grown weary of Colton’s nonstop message about Jesus’ love for kids, but it did transform the way we approached children’s ministry in our church. Sonja had always been torn between singing on the worship team during Sunday morning services and going downstairs to teach Sunday school for the kids. And while she knew that statistics show most people who profess faith in Christ do so at a young age, it was Colton’s passionate insistence on Christ’s love for children that gave Sonja fresh energy for our kids’ ministry.
I also became bolder about asking church members to serve in our children’s ministry. Over the years, I’d had to fight to get people to sign up to teach Sunday school. They would give me the verbal stiff-arm, saying, “I did my turn last year,” or “I’m too old for that.”
Now, when I ran into those same excuses, I lovingly reminded people that Jesus clearly viewed children as precious—and that if he loved kids enough to say that adults should be more like them, we should spend more time loving them too.
During that time, Colton had also
become obsessed with rainbows. All his talk about the magnificent colors in heaven reminded Sonja and me of the book of Revelation, where the apostle John wrote specifically about the rainbow surrounding God’s throne,1 and where he describes heaven as a gleaming city of gold:
The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst.2
Some of those precious stones are of colors that are familiar to us: the rich violet of amethyst, the brilliant green of emerald, the translucent gold of topaz, the depthless black of onyx. Others are less common: chrysolite, which is light to olive green; jacinth, a transparent red. Beryl occurs in many colors, from light pink to deep green to aquamarine.
With its unfamiliar gemstones, John’s description is so exotic to us that we have to look up the minerals to find out what colors he was talking about; grown-up theologians want to be precise. But if a kid saw all those colors, he might sum them up in one simple word: rainbow.
So when, in the spring of 2004, the most brilliant rainbow we’d ever seen appeared over Imperial, we called him outside to take a look.
Sonja was the first to see it. By then, she was just a few weeks pregnant with the baby we now considered definitively as our fourth child. It was a warm, sunny day, and she’d gone to open the front door and let the freshness into the house. “Hey, you guys, come see this!” she called.
Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Page 9
