My Son Went to Heaven, and All I Got Was a No. 1 Best Seller At 3 years 10 months, Colton Burpo was a sunny child, a preacher's son certain of his faith and his eternal fate. Then his appendix burst, and as doctors failed to figure out what was wrong with him, he lay in a hospital bed until his father, Todd, saw "the shadow of death" cross his face. "I recognized it instantly," Todd, a pastor, recalls. With Colton's face "covered in death," Todd and his wife, Sonja, took the boy to another hospital, where he was wheeled into surgery. "He's not in good shape," the surgeon said. As Colton screamed for his father, Todd fled, locked himself in a room and railed at God. Less than two hours later, Colton was awake, still shouting for his father. "Daddy, you know I almost died," he said. But only over the months following his recovery did his parents hear his whole story: that while in surgery, he went to heaven and met Jesus, who assigned him homework; he also encountered angels, a rainbow-hued horse, John the Baptist, God the father, the Holy Spirit, a sister his mother miscarried (unknown to Colton) before he was born and his great-grandfather, Pop, as a young man. Everyone in heaven had wings; Colton's were smaller than most. He learned that the righteous, including his father, would fight in a coming last battle. Many people, even religious people, would have dismissed this story as the medication-induced hallucinations of a severely ill toddler. The Burpos made it into a book. "Heaven Is for Real" was published in late 2010, became a word-of-mouth best seller and has spent 59 (nonconsecutive) weeks as the No. 1 nonfiction paperback on The New York Times's best-seller list. Recently the publisher, Thomas Nelson, spun off a children's picture book, now also a best seller, with illustrations verified by Colton. And sometime in 2014, courtesy of DeVon Franklin, vice president of production at Columbia Pictures, who considers his faith "a professional asset," a movie version should be released in theaters. Colton, now 12, is an ardent spokesman for the story and its franchise, which he has promoted in a slick trailer and on various talk shows with his parents, including "Today" and "Fox and Friends." But it was Todd who wrote the book (with Lynn Vincent, Sarah Palin's ghostwriter). And it is a not-quite-4-year-old's story they're all selling. In the end, Colton said, Jesus returned him to earth as a concession to Todd's supplications. "We knew he wasn't making it up," Todd writes, because "he was able to tell us what we were doing in another part of the hospital. . . . Not even Sonja had seen me in that little room, having my meltdown with God. Colton's awareness of his parents" whereabouts is just one of many details that authenticate his story, according to Todd. Had Colton not gone to heaven, how would he have been able to recognize a photo of Pop, at 29, that he'd never seen? How would he know that angels had halos and that Jesus wore purple and had "markers," which turned out to be marks, on his hands and feet? Why would Colton weep so copiously to a baby sitter about the sister he missed if he had not known this miscarried child intimately in some other world? The visions children have in near-death situations often have a great deal to do with what they already believe. Culture to culture, these experiences involve bright light, celestial figures and a sense of watching your own body from above and sometimes all three. According to Kevin Nelson, a neuroscientist and the author of "The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain," adults often have a sense of looking back over a life; young children, lacking that perspective, tend to report "castles and rainbows, often populated with pets, wizards, guardian angels, and like adults, they see relatives and religious figures, too." It's hard to convey to anyone who grew up without the idea of God just how fully the language, stories and "logic" of the Bible can dominate a young mind, even - perhaps especially - the mind of a toddler. To some degree, I speak from experience. When I was not quite 4 - about the same age as Colton Burpo - my own newly born-again parents sat me down to impart the good news about Jesus, the son of God, who was born in a manger surrounded by sheep and donkeys and ended up being nailed to a cross on a hill and dying there. On the third day, he rose from the grave (you could tell it was he from the nail holes), and he did all of this to pay for my sins. If I accepted him into my heart, I would be rewarded with everlasting life in heaven. Otherwise, I would burn eternally with the Devil in hell. So we needed, urgently, to pray. Right now? I said, or something like that. I remember not feeling 100 percent ready to ask this undead man, with his holey extremities, to dwell inside me. "Well, yes," I recall my mother saying. Unless you'd like to spend eternity in the lake of fire, crying out for a drink of water. My father laid his hand on my shoulder. We don't want that, do we? "Daddy and I would hear you from our mansion up in heaven," my mother said. But we wouldn't be able to help.