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 cello. A male
voice-over said: “A self-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 cello played, the video showed painting after
painting of angelic-looking figures, idyllic landscapes, and a profile view of
a man who was clearly meant to be Christ. Then a shot of a young girl filling
a canvas with color. But these didn’t seem to be paintings by a young girl,
or even of an adult learning to paint portraits. This was sophisticated
artwork that could hang in any gallery.
Akiane began painting at the age of six, the voice-over said, but at age
four she “began to describe to her mother her visits to heaven.”
Then Akiane spoke for the first time: “All the colors were out of this
world,” she said, describing heaven. “There are hundreds of millions of
more colors we don’t know yet.”
The narrator went on to say that Akiane’s mother was an atheist and that
the concept of God was never discussed in their home. The family did not
watch television, and Akiane didn’t attend any kind of preschool. So as the
little girl began to tell her stories of heaven, then depict them first in