Grieving Parent

Tag: heaven

  • Full Moon

    Full Moon

    When I got home from work the other night there was a big ol’ full moon in the midnight sky. Like I do most times the moon lights the sky, I stood there beside my car for several minutes just staring up at it.

    Richard always liked the moon.

    As I gazed up into the heavens I was thinking, “Richard are you up there?” In fact I even said it out loud.

    Is heaven “out there”, out in space with the moon and the stars? Is Richard floating around out there somewhere?

    Or is he still here on earth, but in some invisible dimension we mortals can’t see?

    I passed many return trips from work listening to Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War on the car stereo. It made my head hurt. He talked about all manner of physics. Things like string theory. He claims there are a whole bunch of dimensions. He can’t really prove this in any concrete way, sort of how we can’t prove the existence of heaven. Yet all the data and calculations seem to say all these dimensions exist.

    And another principal of physics he mentioned many times, because it is one of the core beliefs of physics… energy is never destroyed. It may change from one form to another, but energy is always conserved. It never goes away.

    We are energy.

    So it seems the belief that our souls live on is very possible. Physics doesn’t disprove it. We just convert to another form of energy. Move to another dimension.

    That dimension could be right here on earth with us. Our kids could still be right here in the house with us, just living on another dimensional plane, out of our sight.

    Or they could be out there in heaven.

    Maybe on that big ol’ full moon.

  • Heaven Is For Real – Book Review

    Heaven Is For Real – Book Review

    Heaven is real.

    Can there be more important or beautiful words that any grieving parents could hear?

    Yeah, there could be better words. “Honey, wake up! You’re having a nightmare,” or “There’s been a big mistake, your son isn’t dead, he’s just been in the witness protection program. But it’s all OK now, so he can come back into your life again,” come to mind.

    But it’s pretty clear those words aren’t going to be played sweetly to our ears. Learning that heaven really exists is our greatest source of hope.

    Todd Burpo says he has proof, Heaven is real.

    Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back is his book. He shares the story of his 4 year old son Colton’s trip to heaven.

    The early parts of this book were hard for me to read. Colton was in the Intensive Care Unit. Been there, done that, and don’t want the damned t-shirt. It brought back a lot of hard memories. It was intensely stressful – I think that’s where the “Intensive” part of the name comes from.

    Like Colton, Richard recovered and came home from the hospital. Unfortunately Richard also came home with scar tissue in his brain that would cause him to have seizures and ultimately kill him.

    Colton was touch-and-go, the doctors didn’t have much hope for him.

    But Colton made a miraculous recovery. He also came home from the hospital. He came home with stories about Heaven.

    Some of the things in this book will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. For example, Colton was able to tell his parents things they were doing while he was out of it and in surgery. He couldn’t have possibly known what they were doing, each in a separate room and not with Colton. It gets your attention.

    Much of this story seems too perfect. The author, a pastor at Crossroads Wesleyan Church in Imperial, Nebraska, takes every detail of Colton’s story and matchs it perfectly with Bible scripture. It just seems too pat and lines up so well it’s hard to believe. Mr. Burpo could say anything he wants in his book. It just might be all made up.

    But it might also all be real.

    Debbie and I were talking about this. She made the comment,

    “If they had listened to the prophets back in Biblical times, we wouldn’t have all the problems we do now.”  She thinks we need to listen to the prophets God sends to us today. And this little boy just may be one of those prophets.

    You can read the book and come to your own opinion.