about; grown-up theologians want to be precise. But if a kid saw all those
colors, he might sum them up in one simple word: rainbow.
So when, in the spring of 2004, the most brilliant rainbow we’d ever seen
appeared over Imperial, we called him outside to take a look.
Sonja was the first to see it. By then, she was just a few weeks pregnant
with the baby we now considered definitively as our fourth child. It was a
warm, sunny day, and she’d gone to open the front door and let the
freshness into the house. “Hey, you guys, come see this!” she called.
From the kitchen, I crossed the dining room to the front door and was
astonished to see a rainbow so bright, so vivid, that it looked like an
artist’s painting of the Perfect Rainbow. Or a kid with a brand-new box of
crayons illustrating his science lesson: ROY G BIV. Every color sharply
divided from the next, and the whole arc blazing against a perfectly blue
sky.
“Did it rain and I missed it?” I asked Sonja.
She laughed. “I don’t think so.”
Colton was down the hall in the playroom. “Hey, Colton,” I called. “Come
out and take a look at this.”
He emerged from the playroom and joined us on the front stoop.
“Look at that rainbow, Colton,” Sonja said. “There definitely should be a
big pot of gold at the end of that thing.”
Colton squinted, peering up at colors pouring across the sky.
“Cool,” he said with a nonchalant smile. “I prayed for that yesterday.”
Then he turned on his heel and went back to play.
Sonja and I looked at each other like, What just happened? And later
we talked again about the pure-faith prayers of a child. “Ask and it will be
given to you,” Jesus said. He put that instruction in the context of a child
asking a father for a blessing.
“Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone?” Jesus
told the multitudes that gathered to hear his teaching in the low hills of
Galilee. “Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though
you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more
will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”^3
Colton Burpo hadn’t seen a rainbow in a while, so he asked his heavenly