My Uncle Scott gave me a copy of this book when Clara and I visited him in Arizona a couple of months ago. I had heard of it, but had not planned on reading it. I imagined it would be too cheesy for my refined tastes. I promised I would read it, though, when the semester ended and I was able to engage in that pleasure of leisure reading again. Clara read it on the plane ride home from Phoenix and told me it would be well worth the two hours it would take me to read so I put it in the back of my mind.
And, indeed it was. I read the book this morning from cover to cover (not saying too much here, it literally did take less than two hours), but I slowly felt my defenses draining as I read on.
I will not give away too much in the way of storyline or detail here, but the book is about a toddler named Colton Burpo who suffered a burst appendix and who a few months after a life-saving operation and prolonged hospitalization began dropping hints to his mom and dad that he had an out-of-body, heavenly experience. He overcomes his parent’s skepticism by providing details about, for example, the nature of the Trinity and his mother’s earlier miscarriage that there is no way he could have known otherwise. The story is told by the boy’s father, a Wesleyan pastor from a small town in Nebraska named Todd Burpo.
As I read on, my incredulity faded. I won’t go so far as to say that I believe the story wholesale, but I do believe that something happened to that little boy. I get nervous when people talk about heaven. Too often it degenerates into hallmark-esque platitudes that have less to do with scripture than with wish-fulfillment. But this book never did that. Some of the boy’s ideas about Jesus are classical Sunday school images, but others digress in interesting and possible ways. Colton’s father, and the stories narrator, Todd, seems skeptical at first about what his son is telling him and doesn’t seem to be the type of person who would imagine outlandish spiritual experiences as a routine part of a believer’s life. He believes something unique happened with his son, but he believes it happened nonetheless.
It is difficult to know exactly how to analyze this book. Getting an advanced degree in English teaches you to critique a certain type of book, namely high literature or literature written for an audience of very few. This book is not high literature. It avoids, therefore, the type of analysis that I am able to give to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, a book I am reading at the same time as Heaven is for Real. And this is intentional. This is a story designed for everyone, for children and adults to read with wonder, amazement, and perhaps a bit of doubt or reasoned apprehension. A child psychologist or a pop culture historian could dissect this book through their own convoluted lens and come up with some explanation for Colton’s visions and frame them nicely within a strict materialist framework. But my Christian faith prevents me from doing this myself. I believe in the reality of a future with God the Father and his Son and my Savior, Jesus Christ. And, therefore, I also believe that Colton Burpo just may have seen what he claims to have seen. The door is open to that possibility.
One of the more refreshing things about this book, and one which had little to do with the precise nature of Colton’s experience/vision, was the emphasis his father put on having faith like a child. And, moreover, how important this is to Jesus, how delighted he was to have little children brought into his presence and how much he loved them. Indeed, this seems Colton’s own overriding lesson from all of this—“Jesus really, really loves the children,” he keeps telling his father. Sometimes it is easy to forget, in this grownup world of theology and church planting and determining God’s will for our lives that what he really wants from us is faith like a child. Faith in stories, faith in his bigness, faith in his conquering love for us. For to such as these, belongs the kingdom of God (Mark 10:14).
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