FOURTEEN
ON HEAVEN TIME
Three minutes?
As Colton began to set up for an epic plastic-sword fight with an unseen
villain, I marveled at his answer.
He had already authenticated his experience by telling me things he
could not otherwise have known. But now I had to square his answer, “three
minutes,” with all the rest. I stared down at my Bible, lying open on the
kitchen table, and turned over the possibilities in my mind.
Three minutes. It wasn’t possible that Colton could have seen and done
everything he’d described so far in just three minutes. Of course, he wasn’t
old enough to tell time yet, so maybe his sense of three actual minutes
wasn’t the same as an adult’s. Like most parents, I was pretty sure Sonja
and I weren’t helping that issue, promising to be off the phone, for example,
or finished talking in the yard with a neighbor, or done in the garage in “five
more minutes,” then wrapping it up twenty minutes later.
It was also possible that time in heaven doesn’t track with time on earth.
The Bible says that with the Lord, “a day is like a thousand years, and a
thousand years are like a day.”^1 Some interpret that as a literal exchange,
as in, two days equals two thousand years. I’ve always taken it to mean
that God operates outside of our understanding of time. Time on earth is
keyed to a celestial clock, governed by the solar system. But the Bible
says there is no sun in heaven because God is the light there. Maybe there
is no time in heaven. At least not as we understand it.
On the other hand, Colton’s “three minutes” answer was as straight up
and matter-of-fact as if he’d told me he’d had Lucky Charms for breakfast.
As far as our clock goes, he could’ve been right. For him to leave his body
and return to it, he couldn’t have been gone long. Especially since we’d
never received any kind of report saying Colton had ever been clinically
dead. In fact, the postoperative report was clear that even though our son’s
prognosis had been grim, the surgery had gone just fine: