PROLOGUE
Angels at Arby’s
The Fourth of July holiday cal s up memories of patriotic parades, the
savory scents of smoky barbecue, sweet corn, and night skies bursting
with showers of light. But for my family, the July Fourth weekend of 2003
was a big deal for other reasons.
My wife, Sonja, and I had planned to take the kids to visit Sonja’s
brother, Steve, and his family in Sioux Fal s, South Dakota. It would be our
first chance to meet our nephew, Bennett, born two months earlier. Plus,
our kids, Cassie and Colton, had never been to the fal s before. (Yes, there
real y is a Sioux Fal s in Sioux Fal s.) But the biggest deal of al was this:
this trip would be the first time we’d left our hometown of Imperial,
Nebraska, since a family trip to Greeley, Colorado, in March had turned
into the worst nightmare of our lives.
To put it bluntly, the last time we had taken a family trip, one of our
children almost died. Cal us crazy, but we were a little apprehensive this
time, almost to the point of not wanting to go. Now, as a pastor, I’m not a
believer in superstition. Stil , some weird, unsettled part of me felt that if we
just hunkered down close to home, we’d be safe. Final y, though, reason—
and the lure of meeting little Bennett, whom Steve had told us was the
world’s cutest baby—won out. So we packed up a weekend’s worth of
paraphernalia in our blue Ford Expedition and got our family ready to head
north.
Sonja and I decided the best plan would be to get most of the driving
done at night. That way, even though Colton would be strapped into his car
seat against his four-year-old, I’m-a-big-kid wil , at least he’d sleep for
most of the trip. So it was a little after 8 p.m. when I backed the Expedition
out of our driveway, steered past Crossroads Wesleyan Church, my
pastorate, and hit Highway 61.
The night spread clear and bright across the plains, a half moon white
against a velvet sky. Imperial is a smal farming town tucked just inside the
western border of Nebraska. With only two thousand souls and zero traffic
lights, it’s the kind of town with more churches than banks, where farmers
stream straight off the fields into the family-owned café at lunchtime,
wearing Wolverine work boots, John Deere bal caps, and a pair of pliers
for fence-mending hanging off their hips. So Cassie, age six, and Colton
were excited to be on the road to the “big city” of Sioux Fal s to meet their
newborn cousin.
The kids chattered for ninety miles to the city of North Platte, with Colton
fighting action-figure superhero battles and saving the world several times
on the way. It wasn’t quite 10 p.m. when we pul ed into the town of about
twenty-four thousand, whose greatest claim to fame is that it was the
hometown of the famous Wild West showman, Buffalo Bil Cody. North
Platte would be about the last civilized stop—or at least the last open stop
—we’d pass that night as we headed northeast across vast stretches of
cornfields empty of everything but deer, pheasant, and an occasional
farmhouse. We had planned in advance to stop there to top off both the
gas tank and our bel ies.
After a fil -up at a Sinclair gas station, we pul ed out onto Jeffers Street,
and I noticed we were passing through the traffic light where, if we turned
left, we’d wind up at the Great Plains Regional Medical Center. That was
where we’d spent fifteen nightmarish days in March, much of it on our
knees, praying for God to spare Colton’s life. God did, but Sonja and I joke
that the experience shaved years off our own lives.
Sometimes laughter is the only way to process tough times, so as we
passed the turnoff, I decided to rib Colton a little.
“Hey, Colton, if we turn here, we can go back to the hospital,” I said. “Do
you wanna go back to the hospital?”
Our preschooler giggled in the dark. “No, Daddy, don’t send me! Send
Cassie . . . Cassie can go to the hospital!”
Sitting next to him, his sister laughed. “Nuh-uh! I don’t wanna go either!”
In the passenger seat, Sonja turned so that she could see our son,
whose car seat was parked behind mine. I pictured his blond crew cut and
his sky-blue eyes shining in the dark. “Do you remember the hospital,
Colton?” Sonja said.
“Yes, Mommy, I remember,” he said. “That’s where the angels sang to
me.”
Inside the Expedition, time froze. Sonja and I looked at each other,
passing a silent message: Did he just say what I think he said?
Sonja leaned over and whispered, “Has he talked to you about angels
before?”
I shook my head. “You?”
She shook her head.
I spotted an Arby’s, pul ed into the parking lot, and switched off the
engine. White light from a street lamp filtered into the Expedition. Twisting
in my seat, I peered back at Colton. In that moment, I was struck by his
smal ness, his little boyness. He was real y just a little guy who stil spoke
with an endearing (and sometimes embarrassing) cal -it-like-you-see-it
innocence. If you’re a parent, you know what I mean: the age where a kid
might point to a pregnant woman and ask (very loudly), “Daddy, why is that
lady so fat?” Colton was in that narrow window of life where he hadn’t yet
learned either tact or guile.
Al these thoughts flashed through my mind as I tried to figure how to
respond to my four-year-old’s simple proclamation that angels had sung to
him. Final y, I plunged in: “Colton, you said that angels sang to you while
you were at the hospital?”
He nodded his head vigorously.
“What did they sing to you?”
Colton turned his eyes up and to the right, the attitude of remembering.
“Wel , they sang ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and ‘Joshua Fought the Battle of
Jericho,’” he said earnestly. “I asked them to sing ‘We Wil , We Wil Rock
You,’ but they wouldn’t sing that.”
As Cassie giggled softly, I noticed that Colton’s answer had been quick
and matter-of-fact, without a hint of hesitation.
Sonja and I exchanged glances again. What’s going on? Did he have a
dream in the hospital?
And one more unspoken question: What do we say now?
A natural question popped into my head: “Colton, what did the angels
look like?”
He chuckled at what seemed to be a memory. “Wel , one of them looked
like Grandpa Dennis, but it wasn’t him, ’cause Grandpa Dennis has
glasses.”
Then he grew serious. “Dad, Jesus had the angels sing to me because I
was so scared. They made me feel better.”
Jesus?
I glanced at Sonja again and saw that her mouth had dropped open. I
turned back to Colton. “You mean Jesus was there?”
My little boy nodded as though reporting nothing more remarkable than
seeing a ladybug in the front yard. “Yeah, Jesus was there.”
“Wel , where was Jesus?”
Colton looked me right in the eye. “I was sitting in Jesus’ lap.”
If there are Stop buttons on conversations, that was one of
them right
there. Astonished into speechlessness, Sonja and I looked at each other
and passed another silent telegram: Okay, we really need to talk about
this.
We al piled out of the Expedition and trooped into Arby’s, emerging a
few minutes later with a bag of grub. In between, Sonja and I exchanged
whispers.
“Do you think he real y saw angels?”
“And Jesus?!”
“I don’t know.”
“Was it a dream?”
“I don’t know—he seems so sure.”
Back in the SUV, Sonja passed out roast beef sandwiches and potato
cakes, and I ventured another question.
“Colton, where were you when you saw Jesus?”
He looked at me as if to say, Didn’t we just talk about this?
“At the hospital. You know, when Dr. O’Hol eran was working on me.”
“Wel , Dr. O’Hol eran worked on you a couple of times, remember?” I
said. Colton had both an emergency appendectomy and then an
abdominal clean-out in the hospital, and later we had taken Colton to have
some keloid scarring removed, but that was at Dr. O’Hol eran’s office. “Are
you sure it was at the hospital?”
Colton nodded. “Yeah, at the hospital. When I was with Jesus, you were
praying, and Mommy was talking on the phone.”
What?
That definitely meant he was talking about the hospital. But how in the
world did he know where we had been?
“But you were in the operating room, Colton,” I said. “How could you
know what we were doing?”
“’Cause I could see you,” Colton said matter-of-factly. “I went up out of
my body and I was looking down and I could see the doctor working on my
body. And I saw you and Mommy. You were in a little room by yourself,
praying; and Mommy was in a different room, and she was praying and
talking on the phone.”
Colton’s words rocked me to my core. Sonja’s eyes were wider than
ever, but she said nothing, just stared at me and absently bit into her
sandwich.
That was al the information I could handle at that point. I started the
engine, steered the Expedition back onto the street, and pointed us toward
South Dakota. As I hit I-80, pasturelands unrol ed on either side, dotted
here and there with duck ponds that glinted in the moonlight. By then, it was
very late, and soon everyone else was snoozing as planned.
As the road hummed underneath me, I marveled at the things I had just
heard. Our little boy had said some pretty incredible stuff—and he had
backed it up with credible information, things there was no way he could
have known. We had not told him what we were doing while he was in
surgery, under anesthesia, apparently unconscious.
Over and over, I kept asking myself, How could he have known? But by
the time we rol ed across the South Dakota state line, I had another
question: Could this be real?
ONE
THE CRAWL-A-SEE-UM
The family trip when our nightmare began was supposed to be a
celebration. In early March 2003, I was scheduled to travel to Greeley,
Colorado, for a district board meeting of the Wesleyan church. Beginning
the August before, our family had traveled a rocky road: seven months of
back-to-back injury and il ness that included a shattered leg, two surgeries,
and a cancer scare, al of which combined to drain our bank account to the
in the mail. My smal pastor’s salary hadn’t been affected, but our financial
mainstay was the overhead garage door business we owned. Our medical
trials had taken a heavy tol .
By February, though, we seemed to be on the other side of al that.
Since I had to travel anyway, we decided to turn the board-meeting trip into
a kind of marker in our family life—a time to have a little fun, revive our
minds and spirits, and start moving forward again with fresh hope.
Sonja had heard of a neat place for kids to visit just outside Denver
cal ed the Butterfly Pavilion. Bil ed as an “invertebrate zoo,” the Butterfly
Pavilion opened in 1995 as an educational project that would teach people
about the wonders of insects as wel as marine critters, the kinds that live
in tide pools. These days, kids are greeted outside the zoo by a towering
and colorful metal sculpture of a praying mantis. But back in 2003, the
giant insect hadn’t taken up his post yet, so the low brick building about
fifteen minutes from downtown Denver didn’t shout “Kid appeal!” on the
outside. But inside, a world of wonders waited, especial y for kids Colton’s
and Cassie’s ages.
The first place we stopped was the “Crawl-A-See-Um,” a room fil ed with
terrariums housing creepy-crawly critters from beetles to roaches to
spiders. One exhibit, the Tarantula Tower, drew Cassie and Colton like a
magnet. This stack of terrariums was, exactly as advertised, a tower of
glassed-in habitats containing the kind of furry, thick-legged spiders that
either fascinate you or give you the wil ies.
Cassie and Colton took turns climbing a three-step folding stool in order
to get a look at the residents of the Tarantula Tower’s upper stories. In one
terrarium, a Mexican blonde tarantula squatted in a corner, its exoskeleton
covered with what the exhibit placard described as hair in a “lovely” pale
color. Another habitat contained a red-and-black tarantula native to India.
One of the scarier-looking residents was a “skeleton tarantula,” so named
because its black legs were segmented with white bands so that the
spider looked a little like an Xray in reverse. We later heard that this
particular skeleton tarantula was a bit of a rebel: once, she had somehow
engineered a jailbreak, invaded the habitat next door, and eaten her
neighbor for lunch.
As Colton hopped up on the footstool to see what the rogue tarantula
looked like, he glanced back at me with a grin that warmed me. I could feel
my neck muscles begin to unknot, and somewhere inside me a pressure
valve released, the emotional equivalent of a long sigh. For the first time in
months, I felt I could simply enjoy my family.
“Wow, look at that one!” Cassie said, pointing into one of the terrariums.
A slightly gangly six-year-old, my daughter was as smart as a whip, a trait
she got from her mom. Cassie was pointing to the exhibit sign, which read:
“Goliath Birdeater . . . females can be over eleven inches long.”
The one in this tank was only about six inches long, but its body was as
thick as Colton’s wrist. He stared through the glass wide-eyed. I looked
over and saw Sonja wrinkle her nose.
I guess one of the volunteer zookeepers saw her expression, too,
because he quickly came to the birdeater’s defense. “The Goliath is from
South America,” he said in a friendly, educational tone that said, They’re
not as yucky as you think. “Tarantulas from North and South America are
very docile. You can even hold one right over there.” He pointed to where
another zookeeper was holding a smal er tarantula in his palm so that a
group of kids could take a closer look.
Cassie darted across the room to see what al the fuss was about, with