Heaven is for Real

I'm a reader and love to dog-ear pages of books with lines or paragraphs that stand out to me or impacted me while I read them.  I always have aspirations of documenting my favorite quotes/segments from books, but have yet to find a "good" way to do it.  I just finished reading Heaven is for Real tonight and had to document a couple things from it.

First, I was taken by the simplicity of the quote below:

What is childlike humility?  It's not the lack of intelligence but the lack of guile.  The lack of an agenda.  It's that precious, fleeting time before we have accumulated enough pride or position to care what other people might think.  The same un-self-conscious honesty that enables a three-year-old to splash joyfully in a rain puddle, or tumble laughing in the grass with a puppy, or point out loudly that you have something hanging out of your nose, is what is required to enter heaven.  It is the opposite of ignorance--it is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it's hard. 

I love it when someone can explain large concepts to me in simple terms, and this one was especially impactful to me because I live with Luke, who still has this childlike humility.  It is easy for me to understand what the author, the father of the boy who experienced heaven during a life threatening surgery, learned from his own son.  Brent and I refer to Luke's childlike humility has being in "Luke's world".   He can literally enter into Luke's world within seconds, even while in the midst of a conversation with someone in the "real" world.  We love to watch him.  He has no idea that we are watching or that we can hear him.  Brent and I try to watch as inconspicuously as possible so as not to interrupt his time in Luke's world.  It is a glorious thing to watch, such a pure, unadulterated joy.  I don't know how capable we are of such joy as adults.  I know that I have a tendency of minimizing joy or hurrying it by moving on from the moment too quickly.  I try to capture it in pictures to remember the moment, but I'm not sure a camera (or at least my photographic skills) can capture it entirely.  It is really more the emotion of the moment than the physical smile on some one's face. 

Overall, Heaven is for Real gives a beautifully simple look at heaven through the eyes of a child.  For that alone, I recommend the book. 

But, the second excerpt really brought the book home for me:

    One evening in October, I (the author) was sitting at the kitchen table working on a sermon.  Sonja (author's wife) was around the corner in the living room, working on the business books...I heard Colton's footsteps padding up the hallway and caught a glimpse of him circling the couch, where he then planted himself directly in front of Sonja. 
    "Mommy, I have two sisters," Colton said. 
    I put down my pen.  Sonja didn't.  She kept on working. 
    Colton repeated himself.  "Mommy, I have two sisters." 
    Sonja looked up from her paperwork and shook her head slightly.  "No, you have your sister, Cassie, and...do you mean your cousin, Traci?" 
    "No." Colton clipped off the word adamantly.  "I have two sisters.  You had a baby die in your tummy, didn't you?" 
    At that moment, time stopped in the Burpo household, and Sonja's eyes grew wide.  Just a few seconds before, Colton had been trying unsuccessfully to get his mom to listen to him.  Now, even from the kitchen table, I could see that he had her undivided attention. 
    "Who told you I had a baby die in my tummy?"  Sonya said, her tone serious. 
    "She did, Mommy.  She said she died in your tummy." 
    Then Colton turned and started to move on.  But after the bomb he'd just dropped, Sonja was just getting started.  Before our son could get around the couch, Sonja's voice rang out in an all-hands-on-deck red alert.  "Colton Todd Burpo, you get back here right now!" 
    Colton spun around and caught my eye.  His face said What did I just do?
    I knew what my wife had to be feeling.  Losing that baby was the most painful event of her life.  We had explained it to Cassie; she was older.  But we hadn't told Colton, judging the topic a bit beyond a four-year-old's capacity to understand.  From the table, I watched quietly as emotions rioted across Sonja's face.
    A bit nervously, Colton slunk back around the couch and faced his mom again, this time much more warily.  "It's okay, Mommy," he said. "She's okay.  God adopted her."
Sonja slid off the couch and knelt down in front of Colton so that she could look him in the eyes.  "Don't you mean Jesus adopted her?" she said.
    "No, Mommy.  His Dad did!"
    Sonya turned and looked at me.  In that moment, she later told me, she was trying to stay calm, but she was overwhelmed.  Our baby...was--is!--a girl, she thought.
Sonja focused on Colton, and I could hear the effort it took to steady her voice. "So what did she look like?"
    "She looked a lot like Cassie,"  Colton said.  "She is just a little bit smaller, and she had dark hair."
    Sonja's dark hair.
    As I watched, a blend of pain and joy played across my wife's face.  Cassie and Colton have my blond hair.  She had even jokingly complained to me before, "I carry these kids for nine months, and they both come out looking like you!"  Now there was a child who looked like her.  A daughter.  I saw the first hint of moisture glint in my wife's eyes.
    Now Colton went on without prompting.  "In heaven, this little girl ran up to me, and she wouldn't stop hugging me," he said in a tone that clearly indicated he didn't enjoy all this hugging from a girl.
    "Maybe she was just happy that someone from her family was there," Sonja offered.  "Girls hug.  When we're happy, we hug."
    Colton didn't seem convinced.
    Sonja's eyes lit up and she asked, "What was her name?  What was the little girls' name?"
    Colton seemed to forget about all the yucky girl hugs for a moment.  "She doesn't have a name.  You guys didn't name her."
    How did he know that?
    You're right, Colton," Sonja said.  "We didn't even know she was a she."
Then Colton said something that still rings in my ears: "Yeah, she said she just can't wait for you and Daddy to get to heaven."
    From the kitchen table, I could see that Sonja was barely holding it together.  She gave Colton a kiss and told him he could go play.  And when he left the room, tears spilled over her cheeks.
    "Our baby is okay," she whispered.  "Our baby is okay."
    From that moment on, the wound from one of the most painful episodes in our lives, losing a child we had wanted very much, began to heal.  For me, losing the baby was a terrible blow.  But Sonja had told me that to her, the miscarriage not only seared her heart with grief, but it also felt like a personal failure.
"You do all the right things, eat all the right things, and you pray for the baby's health, but still this tiny baby dies inside you." she had once told me.  "I feel guilty.  I know in my mind that it wasn't my fault, but there's still this guilt."
    We had wanted to believe that our unborn child had gone to heaven.  Even though the Bible is largely silent on this point, we had accepted it on faith.  But now, we had an eyewitness; a daughter we had never met was waiting eagerly for us in eternity.

The painful loss of miscarriage has been a part of our story as well, which made this excerpt so very real.  The author is right, there is nothing in scripture clearly stating that the souls of those lost prior to birth had a future in eternity.  But, we are certain that each person, born or unborn, is precious to God "For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb." (Psalm 139:13)  The beautiful thought that our babies are in heaven waiting for us was so touching.