I summarized the rest for her and could hear the amazement in her voice
on the other end of the line.
She tried to press me for details, but the worship conference hall was
too loud. Finally we had to give up. “Call me tonight after dinner, okay?”
Sonja said. “I want to know everything!”
I hung up and leaned against the kitchen counter, processing. Slowly, I
began to wrap my mind around the possibility that this was real. Had our
son died and come back? The medical staff never gave any indication of
that. But clearly, something had happened to Colton. He had authenticated
that by telling us things he couldn’t have known. It dawned on me that
maybe we’d been given a gift and that our job now was to unwrap it, slowly,
carefully, and see what was inside.
Back downstairs, Colton was still on his knees, bombing aliens. I sat
down beside him.
“Hey, Colton, can I ask you something else about Jesus?”
He nodded but didn’t look up from his devastating attack on a little pile
of X-Men.
“What did Jesus look like?” I said.
Abruptly, Colton put down his toys and looked up at me. “Jesus has
markers.”
“What?”
“Markers, Daddy... Jesus has markers. And he has brown hair and he
has hair on his face,” he said, running his tiny palm around on his chin. I
guessed that he didn’t yet know the word beard. “And his eyes... oh, Dad,
his eyes are so pretty!”
As he said this, Colton’s face grew dreamy and far away, as if enjoying
a particularly sweet memory.
“What about his clothes?”
Colton snapped back into the room and smiled at me. “He had purple
on.” As he said this, Colton put his hand on his left shoulder, moved it
across his body down to his right hip then repeated the motion. “His
clothes were white, but it was purple from here to here.”
Another word he didn’t know: sash.
“Jesus was the only one in heaven who had purple on, Dad. Did you