To Heaven and back

The Easter message and the resurrection of Jesus are taking the spotlight this weekend, but lately that’s not the only story of a celestial trip to hook people’s faith.

They’re fixated on a more recent depiction of life and afterlife, as painted by an 11-year-old boy.

North Idaho has caught on with the national obsession with “Heaven is For Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of his Trip to Heaven and Back,” the biography of an Imperial, Neb., boy who insists he visited the hereafter during an operation years before.

“It’s an enormously popular book,” said Kathy Whidden, book department manager at Hastings in Coeur d’Alene, adding that the first shipment sold out. “It’s been a trend in the book business for a long time, Christian true to life books, and that this is a little boy, there’s a lot of appeal.”

Staff at Sower Bible Bookstore on Appleway said some buy 10 or 12 at a time as gifts.

The story is comforting, said employee Marie Barber.

“Some people who buy copies want to give them to friends to feel peace about dying. What it will be like in heaven,” she said.

The book recaps Colton Burpo’s near-death experience, in which he said he met Jesus and deceased relatives. Later experiences have seemed to verify his story.

Written by Colton’s father, Pastor Todd Burpo, and Sarah Palin’s biographer, Lynn Vincent, the book has sold 2 million copies, and ranks No. 2 on USA Today’s national best seller’s list, just behind “Water For Elephants.”

That doctors say the child didn’t actually die during the surgery hasn’t thwarted strong belief of the story. Nor that the child was only 4 years old when his journey happened.

It’s about faith, folks say.

This book validates it.

“I could not put it down. I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning finishing it,” said Nancy Silva.

There are too many coincidences in the book to deny Colton crossed over, the Coeur d’Alene mother and grandmother said.

Like the boy recognizing Jesus in a painting by another girl who had had a near-death experience.

“It just gives you goosebumps from head to toe,” she said. “It answers so many questions we have as Christians.”

The lifelong Christian already had faith in heaven and God, she said. But knowing for sure makes her confident that everyone’s life has meaning, she said.

“To know what the end reward is, that’s pretty special,” Silva said.

Since finishing the book, Karen Moglia has bought 20 copies to hand out to friends, family, her doctor, and coworkers at her family’s auto repair business.

Moglia believes the book is a true depiction of heaven, pointing out that the boy stated scripture-true recollections.

“There’s no way a 4-year-old boy could have know the stuff he knows. He couldn’t have learned that in Sunday school,” she said.

She distributes the book because she hopes it will prompt folks to believe, she said, and guide themselves on a track to heaven.

Moglia has adapted her own daily decisions to be kinder and more cognizant of an eternal reward, she added. She felt a sense of calm when a newborn relative experienced a medical emergency.

“I had just read this book and thought, ‘Whether she survives or she doesn’t, it’s a win either way,’ if that makes sense,” the Dalton Gardens resident said. “There’s really not a fear of death anymore.”

Maren Snyders said she and her husband and four children read the book out loud together.

They feel it gave them a glimpse, Snyders said, of what might be experienced right now by Emmett Snyders, the couple’s 19-month-old son who died of cancer in January.

“We didn’t have any doubt our little boy went to heaven,” Snyders said. “It just allowed us to be able to relate to what he’s probably experiencing.”

Tears are still shed for Emmett every day, she added, but now she tries to picture him in the context portrayed in the book: Climbing trees, playing with other children.

The void will never be filled, she said, but this has eased her grief.

“Really for the whole family, I think it gave an increased desire to that’s where we want to go,” she said. “Once you have a child that’s gone, every day you think of when you get to go and be reunited with them.”

Colton’s descriptions have brought the same comfort to Kathi Broughton, who has coped with the loss of three children in miscarriages and a still birth.

It lifted her spirits, the Rathdrum woman said, to read that Colton said in heaven he met his sister, who died in a miscarriage.

“You always wonder what the Lord does with these kids,” said Broughton, who works at Sower.

The story seems believable coming from an innocent boy, she said, and has given her fresh hope that her children are managing without her for now.

“You read the book and think, ‘Yes! I can’t wait to meet ’em!’” she said.

Pastor Dick Hege of Coeur d’Alene Bible Church said he has spoken with individuals who had near-death experiences. He has books listing the last words of individuals who apparently caught glimpses of the afterlife before checking out permanently.

“I sit up and listen closely to what somebody is saying when they say they’ve left the body or had a vision or seen something they haven’t seen before,” he said. “If you put it all together, you get quite an impact.”

He measures such stories by a rigid yardstick: How closely they conform to scripture.

He doesn’t see glaring contradictions in Colton’s story, he said. And it is convincing that the boy said he met a miscarried sister he had never been told about.

“There are certain things that would lead to some credibility, such as something like that,” Hege said.

Hege doesn’t take the book as gospel.

But no harm in folks putting stock in it, he said.

“People are trying to understand what heaven might be like,” the pastor said. “The Bible doesn’t major on that. It just points out we’re to be ready when death comes, whenever that might be.”

Pastor Ron Hunter of Coeur d’Alene Church of the Nazarene hasn’t read the book. But if he had, regardless of how impressive the story, he could not trust it to be anything more than that.

“The problem is, we want to take it as fact and say, ‘He got this information from the experience,’ but how do we know he didn’t get the experience from something someone said, that is residual in memory?” Hunter said. “It is a person’s view or story. None of the rest of us can go back and look at it or testify in any way.”

Hunter also pointed to the biblical quote, “It is appointed to men once to die, but after this, the judgment.”

There’s no final judgment if you come back, he said.

In other words, a round trip isn’t the real deal.

“They didn’t go through the finality,” he said.

Don’t take his message to be depressing, though.

If someone has faith, Hunter said, that should be proof enough.

“If you have a relationship with the Creator, you should trust his word, rather than everyone else’s,” he said. “Get together with him now, you’ll not only have a good life with him now, but also in the eternal life. That’s the Easter message.”