Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back (2 page)

Cassie straightened and smiled at Sonja. Ill hold her, Mommy. Can I hold Rosie?

Okay, but youll have to wait your turn, Sonja said.

Cassie got in line behind a couple of other kids. Coltons eyes never left Rosie as first a boy then a girl held the enormous spider and the zookeeper awarded the coveted stickers. In no time at all, Cassies moment of truth arrived. Colton braced himself against my legs, close enough to see his sister, but trying to bolt at the same time, pushing back against my knees. Cassie held out her palm and we all watched as Rosie, an old hand with small, curious humans, lifted one furry leg at a time and scurried across the bridge from the keepers hand into Cassies, then back into the keepers.

You did it! the keeper said as Sonja and I clapped and cheered. Good job! Then the zookeeper stood, peeled a white-and-yellow sticker off a big roll, and gave it to Cassie.

This, of course, made it even worse for Colton, who had not only been upstaged by his sister but was now also the only stickerless Burpo kid. He gazed longingly at Cassies prize, then back at Rosie, and I could see him trying to wrestle down his fear. Finally, he pursed his lips, dragged his gaze away from Rosie, and looked back up at me. I dont want to hold her.

Okay, I said.

But can I have a sticker?

Nope, the only way to get one is to hold her. Cassie did it. You can do it if you want to. Do you want to try? Just for a second?

Colton looked back at the spider, then at his sister, and I could see wheels turning behind his eyes: Cassie did it. She didnt get bit.

Then he shook his head firmly: No. But I still want a sticker! he insisted. At the time, Colton was two months shy of four years oldand he was very good at standing his ground.

The only way you can get a sticker is if you hold Rosie, Sonja said. Are you sure you dont want to hold her?

Colton answered by grabbing Sonjas hand and trying to tug her away from the keeper. No. I wanna to go see the starfish.

Are you sure? Sonja said.

With a vigorous nod, Colton marched toward the Crawl-A-See-Um door.

TWO PASTOR JOB

In the next room, we found rows of aquariums and indoor tide pools. We wandered around the exhibits, taking in starfish and mollusks and sea anemones that looked like underwater blossoms. Cassie and Colton oohed and aahed as they dipped their hands in man-made tide pools and touched creatures that they had never seen.

Next, we stepped into a massive atrium, bursting with jungle leaves, vines tumbling down, branches climbing toward the sky. I took in the palm trees and exotic flowers that looked as if theyd come from one of Coltons storybooks. And all around us, clouds of butterflies flitted and swirled.

As the kids explored, I let my mind drift back to the summer before, when Sonja and I played in a coed softball league, like we do every year. We usually finished in the top five, even though we played on the old folks teamtranslation: people in their thirtiesbattling teams made up of college kids. Now it struck me as ironic that our familys seven-month trial began with an injury that occurred in the last game of our last tournament of the 2002 season. I played center field, and Sonja played outfield rover. By then, Sonja had earned her masters degree in library science and to me was even more beautiful than when shed first caught my eye as a freshman strolling across the quad at Bartlesville Wesleyan College.

Summer was winding down, but the dog days of the season were in full force with a penetrating heat, thirsty for rain. We had traveled from Imperial about twenty miles down the road to the village of Wauneta for a double-elimination tournament. At nearly midnight, we were battling our way up through the bracket, playing under the blue-white glow of the field lights.

I sensed the ball winging toward the infield.

Our third-base coach motioned frantically: Slide! Slide!

Adrenaline pumping, I dropped to the ground and felt the red dirt swooshing underneath my left hip. The other teams third baseman stretched out his glove hand for the ball and

Crack!

The sound of my leg breaking was so loud that I imagined the ball had zinged in from the outfield and smacked it. Fire exploded in my shin and ankle. I fell to my back, contracted into a fetal position, and pulled my knee up to my belly. The pain was searing, and I remember the dirt around me transforming into a blur of legs, then concerned faces, as two of our players, both EMTs, ran to my aid.

I dimly remember Sonja rushing over to take a look. I could tell by her expression that my leg was bent in ways that didnt look natural. She stepped back to let our EMT friends get to work. A twenty-mile ride later, hospital Xrays revealed a pair of nasty breaks. The tibia, the larger bone in my lower leg, had sustained what doctors call a spiral break, meaning that each end of the break looked like the barber-pole pattern on a drill bit. Also, my ankle had snapped completely in half. That was probably the break I had heard. I later learned that the cracking sound was so loud that people sitting in the stands at first base heard it.

That sound replayed in my head as Sonja and I watched Cassie and Colton scamper ahead of us in the Butterfly Pavilion atrium. The kids stopped on a small bridge and peered down into a koi pond, chattering and pointing. Clouds of butterflies floated around us, and I glanced at the brochure Id bought at the front desk to see if I could tell their names. There were blue morphos with wings a deep aquamarine, black-and-white paper kites that flew slowly and gently like snippets of newsprint floating down through the air, and the cloudless sulfur, a tropical butterfly with wings the color of fresh mango.

At this point, I was just happy to finally be able to walk without a limp. Besides the hacksaw pain of the spiral break, the most immediate effect of my accident was financial. Its pretty tough to climb up and down ladders to install garage doors while dragging a ten-pound cast and a knee that wont bend. Our bank balance took a sudden and rapid nosedive. On a blue-collar pastors salary, what little reserve we had evaporated within weeks. Meanwhile, the amount we had coming in was chopped in half.

The pain of that went beyond money, though. I served as both a volunteer firefighter and high school wrestling coach, commitments that suffered because of my bum leg. Sundays became a challenge too. Im one of those pastors who walks back and forth during the sermon. Not a holy-rolling, fire-and-brimstone guy by any stretch, but not a soft-spoken minister in vestments, performing liturgical readings either. Im a storyteller, and to tell stories I need to move around some. But now I had to preach sitting down with my leg propped in a second chair, sticking out like the jib on a sail. Asking me to sit down while I delivered the Sunday message was like asking an Italian to talk without using his hands. But as much as I struggled with the inconvenience of my injury, I didnt know then that it would be only the first domino to fall.

One morning that October, right about the time Id gotten used to hobbling everywhere on crutches, I awoke to a dull throbbing in my lower back. I knew instantly what the problem was: kidney stones.

The first time I had a kidney stone, it measured six millimeters and required surgery. This time after a round of tests, doctors thought the stones were small enough to pass. I dont know whether that was a good thing, though: I passed them for three days. I had once slammed my middle finger in a tailgate and cut the tip off. That was like baking cookies compared to this. Even breaking my leg into four pieces hadnt hurt as bad.

Still, I survived. By November, Id been hobbling around on crutches for three months, and I went in for a checkup.

The legs healing correctly, but we still need to keep it casted, the orthopedist said. Anything else bothering you?

Actually, there was. I felt a little weird bringing it up, but the left side of my chest had developed a knot right beneath the surface of the nipple. Im right-handed and had been leaning on my left crutch a lot while writing, so I thought maybe the underarm pad on that crutch had rubbed against my chest over a period of weeks, creating some kind of irritation beneath the skin, a callus of some kind.

The doctor immediately ruled that out. Crutches dont do that, he said. I need to call a surgeon.

The surgeon, Dr. Timothy OHolleran, performed a needle biopsy. The results that came back a few days later shocked me: hyperplasia. Translation: the precursor to breast cancer.

Breast cancer! A man with a broken leg, kidney stones, andcome on, really?breast cancer?

Later, when other pastors in my district got wind of it, they started calling me Pastor Job, after the man in the biblical book of the same name who was struck with a series of increasingly bizarre symptoms. For now, though, the surgeon ordered the same thing he wouldve if a womans biopsy had come back with the same results: a mastectomy.

Strong, Midwestern woman that she is, Sonja took a practical approach to the news. If surgery was what the doctor ordered, thats the path we would walk. Wed get through it, as a family.

Instead of feeling grateful as I should have, I indulged myself with resentment: So I have to be a cripple and be on the verge of a cancer diagnosis to get a little help around here?

My pity party really got rolling one afternoon. I was down on the first floor of the church property, a finished basement, really, where we had a kitchen, a classroom, and a large fellowship area. I had just finished up some paperwork and began working my way upstairs on my crutches. Down at the bottom, on the first step, I started getting mad at God.

This isnt fair, I grumbled aloud, as I struggled up the stairs, one crutch at a time, one step at a time. I have to suffer and be in this pathetic state for them to give me the help Ive needed all along.

Feeling pretty smug in my martyrdom, I had just reached the top landing when a still, small voice arose in my heart: And what did my Son do for you?

Humbled and ashamed of my selfishness, I remembered what Jesus said to the disciples: A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master.1 Sure, Id had a rough few months, but they were nothing compared with what a lot of people in the world were going through, even at that very minute. God had blessed me with a small group of believers whom I was charged to shepherd and serve, and here I was griping at God because those believers werent serving me.

Lord, forgive me, I said, and swung forward with renewed strength, as if my crutches were eagles wings.

The truth was, my church was serving meloving me through a special time of prayer theyd set aside. One morning in the beginning of December, Dr. OHolleran called me at home with strange news: not only was the tissue benign; it was entirely normal. Normal breast tissue. I cant explain why, he said. The biopsy definitely showed hyperplasia, so we would expect to see the same thing in the breast tissue removed during the mastectomy. But the tissue was completely normal. I dont know what to say. I dont know how that happened.

I knew: God had loved me with a little miracle.

THREE COLTON TOUGHS IT OUT

That next month, the cast came off. With the cancer scare and kidney stones behind us, I spent a couple of months learning to walk again, first with a walking cast, then with a pretty nasty limp, slowly working my atrophied muscles back to health again. By February, I finally achieved some independencejust in time for a district board meeting of our church denomination in Greeley, Colorado, set for the first week in March.

You need to get away, Sonja told me a couple of weeks before the board meeting. Just get away and have a little fun.

Now, here we were at the Butterfly Pavilion. A monarch butterfly fluttered past, its bright orange wings segmented in black like stained glass. I breathed a prayer of thanks that our trip had happened at all.

Two days before, on Thursday, Colton had begun telling Sonja that his stomach hurt. I was already in Greeley, and at the time, Sonja was teaching a Title 1 class at Imperial High School. Not wanting to put the school to the expense of a substitute, she asked our good friend Norma Dannatt if she could watch Colton at her home so that Sonja could go to work. Norma, who was like a favorite aunt to our kids, immediately said yes. But at midday, Sonjas cell phone rang. It was Norma: Coltons condition had taken a nosedive. He had a fever with chills and for most of the morning had lain nearly motionless on Normas couch, wrapped in a blanket.

He says hes freezing, but hes sweating like crazy, Norma said, clearly concerned. She said Coltons forehead was covered in beads of sweat as big as teardrops.

Normas husband, Bryan, had come home, taken one look, and decided Colton was sick enough that he should go to the emergency room. Sonja called me in Greeley with the news, and just like that, I saw our trip to celebrate the end of a string of injury and illness being cancelled by . . . illness.

Sonja checked out of work early, scooped up Colton from Normas house, and took him to the doctor, who revealed that a stomach flu was working its way around town. Through that night, our trip remained up in the air. Separately, in Greeley and Imperial, Sonja and I prayed that Colton would feel well enough to make the trip and by morning, we got our answer: yes!

During the night, Coltons fever broke and by afternoon on Friday, he was his old self again. Sonja called to tell me: Were on our way!

Now, at the Butterfly Pavilion, Sonja checked her watch. We were scheduled to meet Steve Wilson, the pastor of Greeley Wesleyan Church, and his wife, Rebecca, for dinner that evening, and the kids still wanted to get in a swim at the hotel pool. There was zero chance of them swimming in Imperial in March, so this was a rare opportunity. Okay, we should probably head back to the hotel, Sonja said.

I looked at her and then at Colton. Hey, bud, its time to go. Are you still sure you dont want to hold Rosie? I said. Last chance to get a sticker. What do you think?