ministry in our church. Sonja had always been torn between singing on the
worship team during Sunday morning services and going downstairs to
teach Sunday school for the kids. And while she knew that statistics show
most people who profess faith in Christ do so at a young age, it was
Colton’s passionate insistence on Christ’s love for children that gave Sonja
fresh energy for our kids’ ministry.
I also became bolder about asking church members to serve in our
children’s ministry. Over the years, I’d had to fight to get people to sign up
to teach Sunday school. They would give me the verbal stiff-arm, saying, “I
did my turn last year,” or “I’m too old for that.”
Now, when I ran into those same excuses, I lovingly reminded people
that Jesus clearly viewed children as precious—and that if he loved kids
enough to say that adults should be more like them, we should spend more
time loving them too.
During that time, Colton had also become obsessed with rainbows. All his
talk about the magnificent colors in heaven reminded Sonja and me of the
book of Revelation, where the apostle John wrote specifically about the
rainbow surrounding God’s throne,^1 and where he describes heaven as a
gleaming city of gold:
The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, clear as glass. The
foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was
jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the
sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth
chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst.^2Some of those precious stones are of colors that are familiar to us: the
rich violet of amethyst, the brilliant green of emerald, the translucent gold of
topaz, the depthless black of onyx. Others are less common: chrysolite,
which is light to olive green; jacinth, a transparent red. Beryl occurs in many
colors, from light pink to deep green to aquamarine.
With its unfamiliar gemstones, John’s description is so exotic to us that
we have to look up the minerals to find out what colors he was talking