didn’t have wings. Jesus just went up and down like an elevator.”
The book of Acts flashed into my head, the scene of Jesus’ ascension,
when Jesus told the disciples that they would be his witnesses, that they
would tell people all over the world about him. After he said this, the
Scripture says, Jesus “was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid
him from their sight. They were looking intently up into the sky as he was
going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. ‘Men
of Galilee,’ they said, ‘why do you stand here looking into the sky? This
same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in
the same way you have seen him go into heaven.’”^1
Jesus went up. And will come down. Without wings. To a kid, that could
look like an elevator.
Colton broke into my thoughts. “Everyone kind of looks like angels in
heaven, Dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“All the people have a light above their head.”
I racked my brain for what I knew about angels and light. In the Bible,
when angels show up, they’re sometimes dazzlingly bright, blinding almost.
When Mary Magdalene and the other women showed up outside Jesus’
tomb on the third day after he was buried, the gospels say that an angel
met them, sitting on the tombstone that had somehow been rolled away:
“His appearance was like lightning, and his clothes were white as snow.”^2
I remembered that the book of Acts talks about the disciple Stephen. As
he was being accused of heresy before a Jewish court, they saw that “his
face became as bright as an angel’s.”^3 Not long after, Stephen was stoned
to death.
The apostle John in the book of Revelation, wrote that he saw a “mighty
angel coming down from heaven, surrounded by a cloud, with a rainbow
over his head,” and that the angel’s face “shone like the sun.”^4
I couldn’t remember angels having lights over their heads specifically—
or halos, as some would call them—but I also knew that Colton’s
experience of angels in storybooks and Scripture did not include lights
over angels’ heads. And he didn’t even know the word halo. I don’t know
that he’d ever even seen one, since our bedtime Bible stories and the