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

a checkup.

    The legs healing correctly, but we still need to keep it casted, the orthopedist said. Anything else bothering you?

    Actually, there was. I felt a little weird bringing it up, but the left side of my chest had developed a knot right beneath the surface of the nipple. Im right-handed and had been leaning on my left crutch a lot while writing, so I thought maybe the underarm pad on that crutch had rubbed against my chest over a period of weeks, creating some kind of irritation beneath the skin, a callus of some kind.

    The doctor immediately ruled that out. Crutches dont do that, he said. I need to call a surgeon.

    The surgeon, Dr. Timothy OHolleran, performed a needle biopsy. The results that came back a few days later shocked me: hyperplasia. Translation: the precursor to breast cancer.

    Breast cancer! A man with a broken leg, kidney stones, andcome on, really?breast cancer?

    Later, when other pastors in my district got wind of it, they started calling me Pastor Job, after the man in the biblical book of the same name who was struck with a series of increasingly bizarre symptoms. For now, though, the surgeon ordered the same thing he wouldve if a womans biopsy had come back with the same results: a mastectomy.

    Strong, Midwestern woman that she is, Sonja took a practical approach to the news. If surgery was what the doctor ordered, thats the path we would walk. Wed get through it, as a family.

Heaven is for real
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    Instead of feeling grateful as I should have, I indulged myself with resentment: So I have to be a cripple and be on the verge of a cancer diagnosis to get a little help around here?

    My pity party really got rolling one afternoon. I was down on the first floor of the church property, a finished basement, really, where we had a kitchen, a classroom, and a large fellowship area. I had just finished up some paperwork and began working my way upstairs on my crutches. Down at the bottom, on the first step, I started getting mad at God.

    This isnt fair, I grumbled aloud, as I struggled up the stairs, one crutch at a time, one step at a time. I have to suffer and be in this pathetic state for them to give me the help Ive needed all along.

    Feeling pretty smug in my martyrdom, I had just reached the top landing when a still, small voice arose in my heart: And what did my Son do for you?

    Humbled and ashamed of my selfishness, I remembered what Jesus said to the disciples: A student is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master.1 Sure, Id had a rough few months, but they were nothing compared with what a lot of people in the world were going through, even at that very minute. God had blessed me with a small group of believers whom I was charged to shepherd and serve, and here I was griping at God because those believers werent serving me.

    Lord, forgive me, I said, and swung forward with renewed strength, as if my crutches were eagles wings.

    The truth was, my church was serving meloving me through a special time of prayer theyd set aside. One morning in the beginning of December, Dr. OHolleran called me at home with strange news: not only was the tissue benign; it was entirely normal. Normal breast tissue. I cant explain why, he said. The biopsy definitely showed hyperplasia, so we would expect to see the same thing in the breast tissue removed during the mastectomy. But the tissue was completely normal. I dont know what to say. I dont know how that happened.

    I knew: God had loved me with a little miracle.

    THREE COLTON TOUGHS IT OUT

    That next month, the cast came off. With the cancer scare and kidney stones behind us, I spent a couple of months learning to walk again, first with a walking cast, then with a pretty nasty limp, slowly working my atrophied muscles back to health again. By February, I finally achieved some independencejust in time for a district board meeting of our church denomination in Greeley, Colorado, set for the first week in March.

    You need to get