“Well, did anything else happen?”
He nodded, eyes bright. “Did you know that Jesus has a cousin? Jesus
told me his cousin baptized him.”
“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “The Bible says Jesus’ cousin’s name is John.”
Mentally, I scolded myself: Don’t offer information. Just let him talk...
“I don’t remember his name,” Colton said happily, “but he was really
nice.”
John the Baptist is “nice”?!
Just as I was processing the implications of my son’s statement—that he
had met John the Baptist—Colton spied a plastic horse among his toys
and held it up for me to look at. “Hey, Dad, did you know Jesus has a
horse?”
“A horse?”
“Yeah, a rainbow horse. I got to pet him. There’s lots of colors.”
Lots of colors? What was he talking about?
“Where are there lots of colors, Colton?”
“In heaven, Dad. That’s where all the rainbow colors are.”
That set my head spinning. Suddenly I realized that up until that point, I’d
been toying with the idea that maybe Colton had had some sort of divine
visitation. Maybe Jesus and the angels had appeared to him in the
hospital. I’d heard of similar phenomena many times when people were as
near death as Colton had been. Now it was dawning on me that not only
was my son saying he had left his body; he was saying he had left the
hospital!
“You were in heaven?” I managed to ask.
“Well, yeah, Dad,” he said, as if that fact should have been perfectly
obvious.
I had to take a break. I stood and bounded up the stairs, picked up the
phone, and dialed Sonja’s cell. She picked up and I could hear music and
singing in the background. “Do you know what your son just said to me?!”
“What?” she shouted over the noise.
“He told me he met John the Baptist!”
“What?”