Heaven Is for Real

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A stomach bug that almost killed a little boy
2. The drive past the hospital
3. Pop and the sister nobody told him about
4. Why a pastor decided to go public
5. The questions that will not go away
6. Who will love this, who should skip it, and what dragged for me
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up Heaven Is for Real because I kept seeing it in grocery store checkout racks and in church lobbies, and I wanted to know what actually sits inside a book that sold millions. The edition most people read came out from Thomas Nelson in 2010, a short 163 page paperback credited to Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent. Todd is the pastor of Crossroads Wesleyan Church in Imperial, Nebraska. Lynn is a professional writer who helped shape his account. Their subject is Todd's son Colton, who was three going on four when a burst appendix nearly killed him in 2003, and who started talking months later about angels singing to him in the operating room.

That delay is important. This is not a story about a boy waking up from anesthesia and shouting about heaven. It is a story about small comments dropping out over three or four years, while his parents tried to figure out what he meant. I went in expecting something shouting its message. What I found was quieter, stranger, and for long stretches, sadder than the cover suggests.

Todd writes the way a lot of small town pastors talk. Plain sentences. Family first. He installs garage doors on the side, coaches wrestling, preaches on Sundays. Sonja keeps the schedule and holds the family together when money is tight. Their daughter Cassie is a few years older than Colton. They live in Imperial, a town where people know each other's cars.

A stomach bug that almost killed a little boy

The first third of the book is medical, not mystical, and it is the part I believed without trouble.

In late February 2003 the Burpos planned to use a church board meeting in Colorado as an excuse for a family trip. Colton came down with a fever and vomiting right before Sonja and the kids were supposed to drive out. A local doctor called it stomach flu, which was going around. Colton seemed to rally, the family traveled, then he crashed again on the trip. Vomiting that would not stop. Pain in his belly. Listless in a way that scared his mother.

Back home in Imperial, doctors found masses on an X-ray but hesitated on appendicitis. On March 5 they moved Colton to Great Plains Regional Medical Center in North Platte. There the answer came fast. His appendix had burst days earlier. Poison was leaking into his abdomen. He needed emergency surgery that night.

Todd's account of the surgery prep is hard to read. Colton, small and feverish, screaming while nurses tried to place lines. Sonja in the waiting room calling everyone she knew to pray. Todd alone in a little chapel room, shouting at God in a way he admits he is not proud of. The operation cleared out infection, but Colton did not bounce back. A week later, just when discharge seemed close, blood work showed new pockets of infection. He needed a second surgery. After that his bowels shut down. Nothing moved for days. Doctors talked about sending him to Denver Children's Hospital.

Then a spring snowstorm closed the roads around North Platte. The transfer could not happen. Back in Imperial, Todd's congregation prayed specifically for Colton's bowels to start working. Todd is candid that he found the specificity a little embarrassing at the time. Within an hour, he says, things started moving. By evening Colton was improving. He went home March 19, thin and sore, with a belly full of scars.

I linger on this because the medical section gives the rest of the book its weight. Whatever you think about the heaven claims, the Burpos went through a genuine brush with losing a child.

The drive past the hospital

Colton said nothing unusual for about four months. Then on July 3, driving past the North Platte hospital on the way to visit relatives, Sonja asked lightly if he remembered the place. Colton said yes. That was where the angels sang to him.

That stopped the car, more or less. Todd and Sonja pressed him, gently at first, then with more focus. Colton said he had been out of his body during the operation. He had watched the surgeon work. He had seen his mother in one room, on the phone, talking to people and praying. He had seen his father in another room by himself, praying and yelling. Both details matched where Todd and Sonja actually were during that first operation, in separate rooms, doing exactly those things. A four year old would not normally know that.

Over the next weeks Todd started asking careful questions. Who sang to you. Where were you. Who else was there. Colton answered with the confidence of a child describing school. Jesus was there. Angels were there. He sat on Jesus' lap. Jesus held him. He was not scared.

Todd's first reaction, to his credit, was not triumph. It was discomfort. He is a pastor. People bring him strange stories. He knows children repeat things they hear in Sunday school. He worried he might be feeding Colton answers without meaning to. He also worried about what his church board would think if he started talking about his son visiting heaven. So for a long stretch he kept the conversations private, just family, testing and retesting.

One detail stuck with him early. Colton described Jesus in ways that lined up with passages Todd knew Colton had not been taught yet. He talked about Jesus having a cousin who baptized him, meaning John the Baptist, and about bright light everywhere. Skeptics will say a pastor's child absorbs more Bible than his father realizes, through songs and pictures and overheard sermons.

Pop and the sister nobody told him about

The two episodes that convinced the Burpos, and that still carry the book for most readers, came months apart.

The first involved Todd's grandfather. On a drive in August 2003 Colton asked out of nowhere if Todd had a grandfather named Pop. Todd did. Pop was his mother's father, killed in a car accident when Todd was about seven. Colton had never met him. There were no photos on the walls at home. Colton said Pop was very nice. He said he met him in heaven. He said Pop had big wings and was young there, and that nobody wears glasses in heaven.

Todd tested him as best a father could. Later Todd showed Colton an old photograph, and Colton picked Pop out. Todd took this as confirmation. A critic would say the test was loose, done by a hopeful father rather than a careful interviewer. Both thoughts can sit side by side.

The second episode hit harder, and it belongs mostly to Sonja. One evening while Todd was working on a sermon, Colton told Sonja he had two sisters. Sonja corrected him. You have one sister, Cassie. Colton insisted. He had two sisters. One died in your tummy. Sonja had miscarried a baby before Colton was born, early in the pregnancy, and she and Todd had never told Cassie or Colton. They had grieved privately. Colton said the girl in heaven told him she died in Sonja's tummy, that God adopted her, that she looks a little like Cassie but smaller with dark hair, that she is happy and waiting. He said she hugged him.

Sonja wept. For her this changed everything. She had carried quiet guilt for years about the miscarriage. The idea that the child was safe, named by God if not by her, gave her a peace she had not found in church answers. Todd writes about this with restraint, which I appreciated. He does not turn it into a doctrinal proof. He presents it as a mother hearing something she needed to hear from a son who should not have known it.

Other details accumulated. Colton talked about angels carrying swords, about God's throne room, about animals in heaven, about Jesus holding children. He said he was only gone for three minutes, though no one recorded him dying on the table. He recognized a painting of Jesus by a young artist named Akiane Kramarik as close to what he saw, after rejecting many others. Todd includes a short bibliography of Scripture passages he found relevant, pages 159 to 160 in this edition.

Why a pastor decided to go public

A lot of the middle of the book is Todd arguing with himself.

He knew how this would sound. Imperial is small. Pastors depend on trust. If he stood up and said his son went to heaven, some people would call it beautiful and others would call it attention seeking. His church board did grow uneasy as rumors spread. Giving got tight. Todd wondered if he was risking his job.

He also knew his theology. He had been taught, like most evangelical pastors, that the Bible is enough, that private experiences do not add to it. He worried he was putting a child's memories above Scripture. His solution was to treat Colton's stories as illustrations of what the Bible already says, not additions to it. When Colton said something that sounded odd, like people having wings in heaven, Todd went looking for verses about angels and robes and brightness to see if there was any fit. Lynn Vincent, the co writer, later said she worried that detail about wings would make Christians dismiss the whole book as a hoax. They left it in anyway, which tells you something about their approach. They reported what Colton said and let readers sort it.

The decision to publish came through ordinary channels. Thomas Nelson, a large Christian publisher in Nashville, bought the manuscript. The book came out in November 2010 and sat quietly for a few weeks. Then word of mouth took over. It hit number one on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list in early 2011. By the time a film version arrived in 2014, with Greg Kinnear as Todd, the story was known far beyond church circles.

I found this publishing backstory more interesting than Todd perhaps intended. Heaven Is for Real arrived alongside other books about trips to the afterlife and helped turn personal heaven accounts into a whole shelf in Christian bookstores.

The questions that will not go away

It would be dishonest to summarize this book without giving the objections their full weight, because they are serious and they changed how even sympathetic churches treat the book.

The first is medical. Colton was never documented as clinically dead. His operative report does not show a flatline or a resuscitation. Todd admits this. Colton himself said he never stopped breathing in the way adults mean it, only that he left his body for a little while. From a medical point of view, that puts the case outside the usual near death literature, where researchers at least start with a cardiac arrest. What is left is a child's report of seeing things from above the table while under anesthesia, plus knowledge of where his parents were. That is striking, but it is not the same as returning from death.

The second is psychological. Four year olds are suggestible. Memory at that age is fluid. Conversations spread over years, with a father asking repeated questions, can shape answers without anyone lying. Todd tried to be careful, but he was not a neutral researcher. He was a frightened father who wanted his son's suffering to mean something. Readers should know that developmental psychologists who reviewed cases like this generally point to a mix of overheard adult talk, Sunday school images, dreams, and parental encouragement. Colton may have believed every word he said. Belief and accuracy are different things.

The third is theological, and it came from inside the church. In 2014 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution saying accounts of heaven trips cannot be corroborated and that Christians should rely on Scripture rather than personal experiences for what they believe about the afterlife. The resolution did not name Todd's book, but everyone in the room knew which books were meant. Pastors like John MacArthur and David Platt publicly called the book unbiblical, pointing out that the apostle Paul described being caught up to heaven as hearing things no one is permitted to repeat, very unlike a detailed travel report. In 2015 LifeWay Christian Resources, the Southern Baptist bookstore chain, stopped selling books based on claimed trips to heaven, including Heaven Is for Real. The book that had once been a staple in those stores was pulled from those shelves.

The fourth is the shadow of a neighboring case. Also in 2015, Alex Malarkey, the boy behind another bestseller called The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, publicly said his story was made up and that publishers should not profit from such claims. He did not accuse the Burpos of lying. But his retraction made many readers look back at all heaven books with harder eyes. Colton Burpo, by then a teenager, said through family channels that people could doubt if they wanted, but that his account stood. That exchange left the genre cracked. Sales continued, but trust thinned.

Where does that leave a fair reader. I think Todd was sincere. I also think sincerity does not settle the facts. The Pop identification and the miscarried sister story are the strongest cards in the book, and both depend on family memory about who told what to whom and when.

Heaven is for real.

That single sentence, which Colton repeated and which became the title, shows why the book endures and why it divides. For believers it sounds like a child stating plain fact. For doubters it sounds like a slogan built from a wish.

Who will love this, who should skip it, and what dragged for me

For all that, I understand why millions kept this book. Grief makes philosophers of us. A woman who miscarried, a man who buried his grandfather, parents sitting in a hospital, they do not open this book for arguments. They open it for comfort. The picture Colton gives is gentle. Nobody is old. Lost babies are held. If you take it as a father's hope rather than a map, it can soften a hard night.

That said, plenty of readers should skip it. If you want careful theology, this 163 page memoir will frustrate you. It is thin on Scripture and silent on judgment and hell. If you want literary memoir, the prose will feel flat. Short scenes. Simple lessons. Conversations reconstructed years later.

What dragged for me was repetition. Colton drops a hint, Todd puzzles, Scripture check, confirmation, tears, and the cycle repeats. Midway through I started skimming the transitions. Cassie barely appears. Sonja's grief gets one strong chapter and then recedes.

I also wanted Todd to sit longer with his own anger at God during the hospital weeks. He admits he raged in that chapel room. He admits his faith thinned. Then the heaven material arrives and that thread mostly drops. For a pastor to say, I shouted at God and I am still working through what that means, would have given the later comfort more weight. Instead the book moves quickly to assurance.

Still, I closed the last pages thinking about Imperial on a Sunday morning, a small sanctuary, a father preaching while his son draws in a pew. Todd says he wrote the book because grieving strangers kept writing. I believe him. Whether Colton visited heaven is something none of us can settle from a paperback.

If you read it, read it for that human story first. Notice the hospital details. Notice Sonja's quiet line about finally naming her grief. Notice the grandfather's old desk and rifle and bowling ball that Todd kept, small objects that anchor a large claim. Then weigh the heaven details as you will, with your own Bible or your own doubts close at hand. The book invites belief. It does not earn certainty. For some readers that gap will feel like a flaw. For others it will feel like room to breathe.

FAQ

When was Heaven Is for Real published?

Thomas Nelson published it in November 2010. The original paperback runs 163 pages and the ISBN is 9780849946158.

What did Colton say he saw in heaven?

Colton described sitting with Jesus, meeting his great-grandfather Pop, and meeting a sister lost to miscarriage whom his parents had never told him about.

Did Colton die during surgery?

No. He was seriously ill and had emergency surgery for a burst appendix, but there is no record of clinical death, which fuels much of the skepticism.