EPILOGUE
Just over seven years have passed since an ordinary family trip turned into
a heavenly trip that changed all our lives. People have often asked us why
we waited so long to tell Colton’s story. Well, there are a couple of
reasons. First, though it’s been seven years since the hospital ordeal, our
emergency dash from Greeley to the doctor in Imperial turned out to be
only the beginning of the story. As you’ve read in these pages, we received
the details of Colton’s extraordinary journey in bits and pieces over a
period of months and years. So though it’s been some time since his brush
with death, the rest of the story took a while to unfold.
Then, when we began to share with others what had happened, many
people told us, “You should write a book!” to which Sonja and I responded,
“Us? Write a book? Yeah, right.”
For one thing, we couldn’t get our head around the idea that anyone
would want to read about us. Then there was the whole writing-a-book
thing itself. That sounded to us about a notch lower on the huge-
undertaking scale than flying to the moon. Sure, I edited my college
newspaper, and Sonja wrote a lot in pursuit of her master’s degree. But we
both had jobs we loved, young children to raise, and a church to care for.
And you have to sleep sometime. It was only after Phil McCallum, a pastor
friend, offered to make some introductions and get the right publishing
people around us that we thought we might actually be able to make a
book happen. Even that, though, was a matter of timing.
See, as parents we were concerned about Colton. A lot of people love
his story because of all the details about heaven. We like that too. But then
there’s that hospital part when we all walked through terror and misery for
what seemed an eternity. That was still tender territory and we weren’t sure
how reliving it all would affect Colton. Also, how would he handle the
attention? We were concerned about that. We’re still concerned. We’re
from small towns, small schools, small churches. “Small” is something
Colton knows, but the spotlight? We’re not so sure.
But now, of course, the book is written. Sonja said to me the other day,
laughing, “Well, I guess we’ll have to write ‘become author’ on our bucket
lists just so we can cross it off.”