Free Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back by Todd Burpo, Sonja Burpo, Lynn Vincent, Colton Burpo

Sonja nor I.

Heaven is for real
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    But all I could think to ask was: So what did the kids look like? What do people look like in heaven?

    Everybodys got wings, Colton said.

    Wings, huh?

    Did you have wings? I asked.

    Yeah, but mine werent very big. He looked a little glum when he said this.

    Okay . . . did you walk places or did you fly?

    We flew. Well, all except for Jesus. He was the only one in heaven who didnt have wings. Jesus just went up and down like an elevator.

    The book of Acts flashed into my head, the scene of Jesus ascension, when Jesus told the disciples that they would be his witnesses, that they would tell people all over the world about him. After he said this, the Scripture says, Jesus was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. Men of Galilee, they said, why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.1

    Jesus went up. And will come down. Without wings. To a kid, that could look like an elevator.

    Colton broke into my thoughts. Everyone kind of looks like angels in heaven, Dad.

    What do you mean?

    All the people have a light above their head.

    I racked my brain for what I knew about angels and light. In the Bible, when angels show up, theyre sometimes dazzlingly bright, blinding almost. When Mary Magdalene and the other women showed up outside Jesus tomb on the third day after he was buried, the gospels say that an angel met them, sitting on the tombstone that had somehow been rolled away: His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow.2

    I remembered that the book of Acts talks about the disciple Stephen. As he was being accused of heresy before a Jewish court, they saw that his face became as bright as an angels.3 Not long after, Stephen was stoned to death.

    The apostle John in the book of Revelation, wrote that he saw a mighty angel coming down from heaven, surrounded by a cloud, with a rainbow over his head, and that the angels face shone like the sun.4

    I couldnt remember angels having lights over their heads specificallyor halos, as some would call thembut I also knew that Coltons experience of angels in storybooks and Scripture did not include lights over angels heads. And he didnt even know the word halo. I dont know that hed ever even seen one, since our bedtime Bible stories and the Sunday school lessons at church are closely aligned with Scripture.

    Still, what he said intrigued me for another reason: A friend of ours, the wife of a pastor at a church in Colorado, had once told me about something her daughter, Hannah, said when she was three years old. After the morning service was over one Sunday, Hannah tugged on her moms skirt and asked, Mommy, why do some people in church have lights over their heads and some dont?

    At the time, I remember thinking two things: First, I wouldve knelt down and asked Hannah, Did I have a light over my head? Please say yes!

    I also wondered what Hannah had seen, and whether she had seen it because, like my son, she had a childlike faith.

Heaven is for real
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    Whoever humbles himself like this child . . .

    What is childlike humility? Its not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of guile. The lack of an agenda. Its that precious, fleeting time before we have accumulated enough pride or position to care what other people might think. The same un-self-conscious honesty that enables a three-year-old to splash joyfully in a rain puddle, or tumble laughing in the grass with a puppy, or point out loudly that you have a booger hanging out of your nose, is what is required to enter heaven. It is the opposite of ignoranceit is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard.

    All this