Heaven Is For Real

So I'm still in the giddy phase with my brand new Kindle--downloading and reading books left and right--and last night I downloaded a copy of a book that I have to say I am a little embarrassed to admit that I read. The day I got my Kindle as a graduation gift, I downloaded all kinds of sample books from Amazon (a great feature of the device; you  usually get the first chapter of a book).  One I downloaded at the recommendation of a family member was this book entitled Heaven Is For Real.  I'll confess that I downloaded the sample just to be respectful, not because I seriously thought I'd read it.  That is until last night...

I picked up the Kindle to read a bit of G.K. Chesterton last night, and after reading about a chapter of Orthodoxy, browsed through some of my samples.  I read through the sample chapter of this book.  Here's the DL: A Wesleyan pastor out of a small town (2,000 people) in Nebraska tells the story of his four-year-old son who, after undergoing an emergency appendectomy on his ruptured appendix, began telling his parents of seeing and experiencing heaven during his surgery.

I know, I know.  If you're like me you exit out of this blog right now and go about the rest of your day, thinking a little bit less of me than you did before you checked out this blog.  That's OK by me; I'm still processing what I think about this book, too, but I wanted to get it out there for conversation.

I'm not sure why I bought the book (although it was pretty cheap through the Kindle): maybe it was the fact that the preface included praises from both a General Superintendent and a District Superintendent of the Wesleyan Church, and I was a little curious as to whether or not this sister denomination was falling into some pseudo-Christian fantasy; maybe it was something else--but in any case I downloaded the book, intending to skim through the first few chapters and then head to bed.

At 2AM I finished the book, and only then did I head to bed.  I couldn't put it down.

Now, I've only ever read one other book on a near-death experience and it was awful.  I hesitate to give the title because it was a book given to me by a dear Christian friend.  But the fact of the matter was that it was the most gnostic and truly anti-Christian thing I'd ever read: stories about being a floating spirit, floating throughout the universe, soaking in all knowledge (Greek = gnosis), being happy about being free from the evil body (denial of the resurrection), talking about the transmigration of souls from heaven to earth and then back to heaven again...it was just awful.  I couldn't finish it all.

This book wasn't anything like that.  I kept waiting for it to turn into that, but it didn't.  It was a rather simple account, by the pastor dad, of the kinds of things his 4-year-old son revealed to him over the course of months and years about his experience while on the operating table.  Things like: seeing Jesus, who is the only one in heaven who wears purple, and who has "markers" in his hands and feet; getting a hug from his sister, who was a miscarriage his parents never told him about; meeting his great-grandfather, Pop, who had passed away 30 years before Colton's birth, while "sitting" next to the Holy Spirit; giving his parents a detailed picture of where they were and what they were doing while he was undergoing his operation, saying he could look down on them and see them.

As the dad processed what his son was telling him (in little spurts, here and there, over the course of many months), he kept going back to the scriptures and trying to reconcile what he said with what he found there.  Perhaps more than any other aspect of the book, this kept my attention.  The dad, who as I mentioned is a pastor, did not take his son's experience and then interpret the scriptures in light of it; he kept going back to the scriptures and trying to interpret his son's experience in light of them.  At times I thought, Well if he just had a more sophisticated knowledge of that passage in Revelation, he would realize that this imagery is not to be taken literally--Jesus does not necessarily wear a crown in his exalted state, for instance.  I was checked (I think by the Spirit), though, every time these thoughts would arise.

The question kept coming back to me, and I continue to wrestle with it today: Why is it so hard to believe that this little boy had an experience or vision of what he understood as 'heaven' (and what might be more accurately referred to, as Paul referred to it, as 'Paradise,' the place where believers await the resurrection of the dead?)  Do I really believe that Paul had such an experience? (See 2 Cor. 12:1-13, where Paul is most likely using a rhetorical function ["I know  man..."] to describe an experience he himself had.)  What about John the Revelator?  Was his Apocalypse simply a literary production, or did he really see through a "door" in heaven that stood open? (Rev 4)  Why am I so quick to dismiss the possibility?

The boy's story never undermined the doctrine of the resurrection; he described distinct visions of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; after the experience, his dad describes how deeply concerned he was that people "have Jesus in their heart," because, he said, they couldn't go to heaven without having Jesus in their heart.  This was no unitarian, universalistic, gnostic portrait of the afterlife; it was something, at least in my judgment, fairly agreeable to the visions of Paul and John in the scriptures.

So, I don't know....  Now I'm just starting to ramble.  As you can probably tell (if you've even read this far), I'm just kind of processing all of this "out loud" as it were.  But I'm curious: Have you read the book or heard this boy's story in the news?  If so, what do you think?  How much credence should we give to it?  Is there something I missed that really undermines its congeniality with the scriptures?  I would truly welcome feedback as I continue to process all of this.

All I know right now is that it is as if I didn't realize I was thirsty for something like this until I had been refreshed by reading it.  Now I realize that my sensitivity to such stories--even the ones we find in the scriptures--was...well, how to put it... dry.  I read them, accepted them intellectually, but never truly considered them.  And maybe that's a good thing--not to put too much credence in these obscure passages and experiences.  But maybe I've neglected these things too much?  Maybe....

Your thoughts?