Heaven Is For Real by Burpo Todd Burpo & Vincent Lynn

Author:Burpo, Todd Burpo & Vincent, Lynn
Language: eng
Format: epub

FOURTEEN

ON HEAVEN TIME

Three minutes?

As Colton began to set up for an epic plastic-sword fight with an unseen villain, I marveled at his answer.

He had already authenticated his experience by telling me things he could not otherwise have known. But now I had to square his answer, “three minutes,” with all the rest. I stared down at my Bible, lying open on the kitchen table, and turned over the possibilities in my mind.

Three minutes. It wasn’t possible that Colton could have seen and done everything he’d described so far in just three minutes. Of course, he wasn’t old enough to tell time yet, so maybe his sense of three actual minutes wasn’t the same as an adult’s. Like most parents, I was pretty sure Sonja and I weren’t helping that issue, promising to be off the phone, for example, or finished talking in the yard with a neighbor, or done in the garage in “five more minutes,” then wrapping it up twenty minutes later.

It was also possible that time in heaven doesn’t track with time on earth. The Bible says that with the Lord, “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.”1 Some interpret that as a literal exchange, as in, two days equals two thousand years. I’ve always taken it to mean that God operates outside of our understanding of time. Time on earth is keyed to a celestial clock, governed by the solar system. But the Bible says there is no sun in heaven because God is the light there. Maybe there is no time in heaven. At least not as we understand it.

On the other hand, Colton’s “three minutes” answer was as straight up and matter-of-fact as if he’d told me he’d had Lucky Charms for breakfast. As far as our clock goes, he could’ve been right. For him to leave his body and return to it, he couldn’t have been gone long. Especially since we’d never received any kind of report saying Colton had ever been clinically dead. In fact, the postoperative report was clear that even though our son’s prognosis had been grim, the surgery had gone just fine:

OPERATIVE REPORT

OPERATIVE DATE: 3/5/2003

PREOPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Acute appendicitis

POSTOPERATIVE DIAGNOSIS: Perforated appendicitis and abscess

OPERATION: Appendectomy and drainage of abscess

SURGEON: Timothy O’Holleran, M.D.

DESCRIPTION OF THE OPERATION: The patient was placed in a supine position on the Operating Table. Under general anesthesia the abdomen was prepped and draped in a sterile fashion. A transverse incision was made in the right lower quadrant and carried down through all layers in the peritoneal cavity. . . . The patient had a perforated appendix with an abscess. The appendix was delivered up in the operative field.

A thought hit me like a brick: Colton didn’t die.

How could he have gone to heaven if he didn’t die?

A couple of days passed as I chewed on that. It had only been a week or so since Colton first told us about the angels, so I didn’t want to keep pushing the heaven issue.

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