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    Ple-e-ease! Please dont make me drink it, Daddy!

    We tried everything. We played good cop/bad cop, Sonja coaxing while I threatened. But the firmer I got, the more Colton clamped his teeth together and refused the sticky liquid.

    I tried reasoning: Colton, if you can just get this down, the doctors can do this test and we can get you feeling better. Dont you want to feel better?

    Sniffles. Yeah.

    Well, here then, take a drink.

    Noooooo! Dont make meeee!

    We were desperate. If he didnt drink the fluid, they couldnt do the CT scan. Without the CT scan, they couldnt diagnose. Without a diagnosis, they couldnt treat our son. The battle raged for nearly an hour until, finally, a technician came out and had mercy on us. Lets go ahead and take him in. Well just do the best we can.

    Inside the imaging room, Sonja stood with the tech behind the radiation shield while I stood beside a listless Colton as the moving table slid him into a big, scary tube. Showing tenderness and compassion, the tech stopped the table before it slid Colton fully into the machine, allowing him to keep his head out so that he could see me. The machine whirred to life, and Colton stared at me through eyes pinched with pain.

    Just like that, the test was over. The technician scanned the pictures, then escorted us out of the lab. He did not take us back to the main waiting room, but to an isolated hallway where a few chairs lined the wall.

    The technician looked at me somberly. You need to wait here, he said. At the time, I didnt even notice that he had not asked Colton to get dressed.

    The three of us sat in the cold, narrow hallway, Sonja cradling Colton, his head against her shoulder. She was crying pretty steadily now. Looking in her eyes, I could see that her hope had drained away. This wasnt the normal place where you would wait. The tech had separated us out. He had seen the picture and knew it was something bad.

    Sonja looked down at Colton, lying in her arms, and I could see the wheels turning in her head. She and Colton did everything together. This was her little boy, her pal. More than that, this little blond-haired, blue-eyed fireball was a heavenly blessing, a healing gift after the baby we had lost.

    Five years earlier, Sonja had been pregnant with our second child. We were over the moon about it, seeing this new life as the rounding out of our family. When it was just the two of us, we were a couple. When Cassie was born, we became a family. With a second child on the way, we could begin to see the outlines of the futurefamily portraits, a house filled with the joyful noise of childhood, two kids checking their stockings on Christmas morning. Then two months into the pregnancy, Sonja lost the baby, and our misty-edged dreams popped like soap bubbles. Grief consumed Sonja. The reality of a child lost, one we would never know. An empty space where there wasnt one before.

    We were eager to try again, but we worried about whether we would be able to have another child, multiplying our misery. A few months later, Sonja became pregnant again. Her early prenatal checkups revealed a healthy, growing baby. Still, we hung on a bit loosely, a little afraid to fall in love with this new child as we had the one we had lost. But forty weeks later, on May 19, 1999, Colton Todd Burpo arrived and we fell head over heels. For Sonja, this little boy was an even more special gift directly from the hand of a loving, heavenly Father.

Heaven is for real
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    Coltons face appeared pinched and pale, his face a tiny moon in the stark hallway. The shadows around his eyes had deepened into dark, purple hollows. He wasnt screaming anymore, or even crying. He was just . . . still.

    Again it reminded me of those dying patients I had seen hovering on the threshold between earth and eternity. Tears filled my eyes, blurring the image of my son like rain on a windowpane. Sonja looked up at me, her own tears streaming. I think this is it, she