Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back Read Free Page A

toward the infield.

    Our third-base coach motioned frantically: Slide! Slide!

    Adrenaline pumping, I dropped to the ground and felt the red dirt swooshing underneath my left hip. The other teams third baseman stretched out his glove hand for the ball and

    Crack!

    The sound of my leg breaking was so loud that I imagined the ball had zinged in from the outfield and smacked it. Fire exploded in my shin and ankle. I fell to my back, contracted into a fetal position, and pulled my knee up to my belly. The pain was searing, and I remember the dirt around me transforming into a blur of legs, then concerned faces, as two of our players, both EMTs, ran to my aid.

    I dimly remember Sonja rushing over to take a look. I could tell by her expression that my leg was bent in ways that didnt look natural. She stepped back to let our EMT friends get to work. A twenty-mile ride later, hospital Xrays revealed a pair of nasty breaks. The tibia, the larger bone in my lower leg, had sustained what doctors call a spiral break, meaning that each end of the break looked like the barber-pole pattern on a drill bit. Also, my ankle had snapped completely in half. That was probably the break I had heard. I later learned that the cracking sound was so loud that people sitting in the stands at first base heard it.

    That sound replayed in my head as Sonja and I watched Cassie and Colton scamper ahead of us in the Butterfly Pavilion atrium. The kids stopped on a small bridge and peered down into a koi pond, chattering and pointing. Clouds of butterflies floated around us, and I glanced at the brochure Id bought at the front desk to see if I could tell their names. There were blue morphos with wings a deep aquamarine, black-and-white paper kites that flew slowly and gently like snippets of newsprint floating down through the air, and the cloudless sulfur, a tropical butterfly with wings the color of fresh mango.

    At this point, I was just happy to finally be able to walk without a limp. Besides the hacksaw pain of the spiral break, the most immediate effect of my accident was financial. Its pretty tough to climb up and down ladders to install garage doors while dragging a ten-pound cast and a knee that wont bend. Our bank balance took a sudden and rapid nosedive. On a blue-collar pastors salary, what little reserve we had evaporated within weeks. Meanwhile, the amount we had coming in was chopped in half.

    The pain of that went beyond money, though. I served as both a volunteer firefighter and high school wrestling coach, commitments that suffered because of my bum leg. Sundays became a challenge too. Im one of those pastors who walks back and forth during the sermon. Not a holy-rolling, fire-and-brimstone guy by any stretch, but not a soft-spoken minister in vestments, performing liturgical readings either. Im a storyteller, and to tell stories I need to move around some. But now I had to preach sitting down with my leg propped in a second chair, sticking out like the jib on a sail. Asking me to sit down while I delivered the Sunday message was like asking an Italian to talk without using his hands. But as much as I struggled with the inconvenience of my injury, I didnt know then that it would be only the first domino to fall.

    One morning that October, right about the time Id gotten used to hobbling everywhere on crutches, I awoke to a dull throbbing in my lower back. I knew instantly what the problem was: kidney stones.

    The first time I had a kidney stone, it measured six millimeters and required surgery. This time after a round of tests, doctors thought the stones were small enough to pass. I dont know whether that was a good thing, though: I passed them for three days. I had once slammed my middle finger in a tailgate and cut the tip off. That was like baking cookies compared to this. Even breaking my leg into four pieces hadnt hurt as bad.

    Still, I survived. By November, Id been hobbling around on crutches for three months, and I went in for