Heaven Is for Real

In 2003, not-quite-four-year-old Colton Burpo nearly died from a misdiagnosed burst appendix. Even after emergency surgery, doctors didn’t expect him to live. . . but he did. Several months passed. One day his parents asked him if he remembered the hospital.

Yes, Colton remembered the hospital. “That’s where the angels sang to me,” he stated, matter-of-factly. Time seemed to stop for his parents as they took this in. More questions. More matter-of-fact answers. “Jesus had the angels sing to me because I was so scared. They made me feel better.”

“You mean Jesus was there?”

“Yeah. I was sitting in Jesus’ lap.”   

Colton went on to describe what his parents had been doing in separate parts of the hospital while he was under anesthesia during the surgery. . . things he had no way of knowing. Over the next year or so, Colton dropped many such bombshells, which his father wrote down in the simple words of his little boy, astonishing things that matched Scripture in the smallest detail; things that Colton could not have known unless he’d actually experienced them.

Colton also had met Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist, and the angel Gabriel, who stands in God’s presence. He spent time with “Pop,” the great-grandfather who died thirty years before he was born. He recognized Pop as a young man in a photograph he’d never seen, and announced, “No one wears glasses in heaven,” because no one is old there. Most precious of all to his parents was his meeting with his sister, who was waiting for her parents to get to heaven to name her. She told him she died while still in Mommy’s tummy, and God adopted her. They had never told him about the miscarriage; they had never known the sex of the lost child. There were lots of kids in heaven, Colton told them, and Jesus wants people to know that he really, really loves the children.

Since I read Heaven Is for Real, what awaits us there has come to life for me. I, too, have a child without a name awaiting my arrival. My parents, young again, are there, along with dozens of friends, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and other loved ones.

Colton said that the first one we’ll meet there is Jesus, the one who died so we can go to heaven. I can’t wait to see Him face-to-face.

For a look at the book, or more about the Burpo family, go to http://heavenisforreal.net.