Upstairs, in the kitchen, I leaned against the counter and sipped from a
water bottle. How could my little boy know this stuff?
I knew he wasn’t making it up. I was pretty sure neither Sonja nor I had
ever talked to Colton about what Jesus wore at all, much less what he
might be wearing in heaven. Could he have picked up such a detail from
the Bible stories we read to the kids? More of Colton’s knowledge about
our faith came from that than from a month of Sundays. But again, the
stories in the Bible storybooks we read to him were very narrative-
oriented, and just a couple of hundred words each. Not at all heavy on
details, like Jesus wearing white (yet Scripture says he did). And no
details on what heaven might be like.
I took another sip of water and racked my brain about the cousin thing
and the “markers.” He didn’t get that stuff from us. But even on the details I
didn’t understand at first, like the “markers,” Colton was insistent. And
there was another thing about the markers that nagged at me. When I
asked Colton what Jesus looked like, that was the first detail he popped
out with. Not the purple sash, the crown, or even Jesus’ eyes, with which
Colton was clearly enchanted. He’d said, right off the bat, “Jesus has
markers.”
I’d once heard a spiritual “riddle” that went like this: “What’s the only thing
in heaven that’s the same as it was on earth?”
The answer: the wounds in Jesus’ hands and feet.
Maybe it was true.