'Heaven' book signing Saturday

IMPERIAL, Nebraska -- It's a scene right off the silver screen -- a Hollywood production at its finest.

A tow-headed 4-year-old boy, sporting a crew cut, accompanies his pastor father to a nursing home visitation. He's been there before and knows the drill. Holding fast to his father's hand he quietly takes in the scene.

A man, full of years, is approaching the doorway to eternity with more than a little trepidation. The lad listens to his father's prayer and turns with him to rejoin the family. Without warning, he turns loose of his father's hand and returns to the bedside, grasps the dying man's hand, and says, "It's going to be all right. The first person you're going to see is Jesus."

Unlike a Hollywood production, however, there was no camera man, no lighting crew, no director yelling, "Cut! Print!" Although it played out to an audience of less than a half-dozen people in a nursing home in Imperial, Nebraska, the impact cannot be measured.

This is only one of several dramatic scenes found in the 2010 book "Heaven is for Real" by Todd Burpo, with Lynn Vincent. Todd, Colton and the rest of the Burpo family, will be in McCook at New Life Christian Books & Gifts, 212 Norris Ave., Saturday 11 a.m.-2 p.m., to sign the book. Refreshments will be served.

At age three, Burpo's son, Colton, becomes deathly ill and undergoes two emergency surgeries. The doctors don't come right out with the dire prognosis. They don' t have to. It's written all over their faces.

At one point during the initial surgery, Colton's parents, Todd and Sonja, were in separate rooms, involved in separate tasks, both involving prayer. Sonja was on the telephone. Todd was railing at God, tucked away in little more than a closet, the first private place he could find, where a "pastor, who is never supposed to lose it, could lose it," after completing the hospital paperwork. Colton could see them both.

"'I went up out of my body and I was looking down and I could see the doctor working on my body. And I saw you and Mommy. You were in a little room by yourself, praying; and Mommy was in a different room, and she was praying and talking on her phone.'"

Colton's experience, however, is not a typical near-death experience. Todd knew, having read the medical reports, that Colton, as dire as his physical condition was, never experienced "clinical death" or anything approaching that phenomena.

Nevertheless, Colton, with the winsomeness unique to his age, answers critical questions about heaven that have plagued adults for generations, from first hand experience. Offhand comments from Colton about what he learned in heaven are delivered matter-of-factly, with no pretension or guile. Colton reveals that no one in heaven wears glasses and that there are no old people there, although he met his great-grandfather, who died in 1975, there. He also met his never-born sister, "a little smaller than Cassie, with dark hair." Sonja lost a baby between Cassie's birth and Colton's. Colton had never heard the story.

Todd Burpo is pastor of Crossroads Wesleyan in Imperial, a wrestling coach and a volunteer fireman. He and his wife, Sonja, also operate a garage door company. Colton, now an active 11-year-old, has an older sister, Cassie and a younger brother, Colby.

Lynn Vincent is the New York Times bestselling writer of "Same Kind of Different As Me" and "Going Rogue: An American Life." She is the author or co-author of nine books, and is a senior writer for "World" Magazine and lectures in writing at King's College in New York City. She lives in San Diego, California.