TWELVE
EYEWITNESS TO HEAVEN
It wasn’t until four months after Colton’s surgery, during our Fourth of July
trip to meet our new nephew, that Sonja and I finally got a clue that
something extraordinary had happened to our son. Sure, there had been a
string of quirky things Colton had said and done since the hospital.
Colton’s insisting we pay Dr. O’Holleran because Jesus used the doctor to
help “fix” him. His statement that Jesus “told” him he had to be good. And
his strenuous, almost vehement funeral performance. But rushing by as
brief scenes in the busyness of family life, those things just seemed...
well, kind of cute. Except for the funeral thing, which was just plain weird.
But not supernatural weird. It wasn’t until we were driving through North
Platte on the way to South Dakota that the lights came on. You’ll remember
I was teasing Colton a little as we drove through town.
“Hey, Colton, if we turn here, we can go back to the hospital,” I said. “Do
you wanna go back to the hospital?”
It was that conversation in which Colton said that he “went up out of” his
body, that he had spoken with angels, and had sat in Jesus’ lap. And the
way we knew he wasn’t making it up was that he was able to tell us what
we were doing in another part of the hospital: “You were in a little room by
yourself praying, and Mommy was in a different room and she was praying
and talking on the phone.”
Not even Sonja had seen me in that little room, having my meltdown with
God.
Suddenly, there in the Expedition on our holiday trip, the incidents of the
past few months clicked into place like the last few quick twists in a
Rubik’s Cube solution: Sonja and I realized that this was not the first time
Colton had let us know something amazing had happened to him; it was
only the most clear-cut.
By the time we got to Sioux Falls, we were so busy getting to know our
cute baby nephew, catching up on family news, and visiting the waterfall
that we didn’t have a lot of time to discuss Colton’s strange revelations. But