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Popular PBEs

There have been two news-making PBEs lately that I've been wanting to highlight.

First, the ground-breaking movie, 127 Hours, which came out earlier this year, tells the story of Aron Ralston's brush with death while hiking in southern Utah. For 5 days he struggled to win free of the 800 pound boulder that had fallen on his forearm. As he faced his fifth night, he resigned himself to death, recording final messages to his family and friends on his video camera. But then a vision burst upon his mind. He describes in his book Between a Rock and a Hard Place:

Color bursts on my mind, and then I walk through the canyon wall...stepping into a living room. A blond 3-year-old boy in a red polo shirt comes running across a sunlit hardwood floor in what I somehow know is my future hoe. By the same intuitive perception, I know the boy is my own. I bend to scoop him into my left arm, using my handless right arm to balance him, and we laugh together as I swing him up to my shoulder. The boy happily perches on my right shoulder, holding my arms in his little hands while I steady him with my left hand and right stump. Smiling, I prance about the room, tiptoeing in and out of the sun dapples on the oak floor, and he giggles gleefully as we twirl together. Then, with a shock, the vision blinks out. I'm back in the canyon, echoes of his joyful sounds resonating in my mind, creating a subconscious reassurance that somehow I will survive this entrapment. Despite having already come to accept that I will die where I stand before help arrives, now I believe I will live.

That belief, that boy, changes everything for me. (p 247-8)

I heard Colton's footsteps padding up the hallway and caught a glimpse of him circling the couch, where he then planted himself direction in front of Sonja.

"Mommy, I have two sisters," Colton said.

I put down my pen. Sonja didn't. She kept on working.

Colton repeated himself. "Mommy, I have two sisters."

Sonja looked up from her paperwork and shook her head slightly. "No, you have your sister, Cassie, and. . . do you mean your cousin, Traci?"

"No." Colton clipped off the word adamantly. "I have two sisters. You had a baby die in your tummy, didn't you?"

At that moment, time stopped in the Burpo household, and Sonja's eyes grew wide. . . .

"Who told you I had a baby die in my tummy?" Sonja said, her tone serious.

"She did, Mommy. She said she died in your tummy."

Then Colton turned and started to walk away. He had said what he had to say and was ready to move on. But after the bomb he'd just dropped, Sonja was just getting started. Before our son could get around the couch, Sonja's voice rang out in an all-hands-on-deck red alert. "Colton Todd Burpo, you get back here right now!"

Colton spun around and caught my eye. His face said, "What did I just do?"

I knew what my wife had to be feeling. . . . We had explained it to Cassie; she was older. But we hadn't told Colton, judging the topic a bit beyond a four-year-old's capacity to understand. . . .

A bit nervously, Colton slunk back around the couch and faced his mom again, this time much more warily. "It's okay, Mommy," he said. "She's okay. God adopted her."

Sonja slid off the couch and knelt down in front of Colton so that she could look him in the eyes. "Don't you mean Jesus adopted her?" she said.

"No, Mommy. His Dad did!"

Sonja turned and looked at me. In that moment, she later told me, she was trying to stay calm, but she was overwhelmed. Our baby. . . was - is! - a girl, she thought.

Sonja focused on Colton, and I could hear the effort it took to steady her voice. "So what did she look like?"

"She looked a lot like Cassie," Colton said. "She is just a little bit smaller, and she has dark hair."

. . . . Now Colton went on without prompting. "In heaven, this little girl ran up to me, and she wouldn't stop hugging me," he said in a tone that clearly indicated he didn't enjoy all this hugging from a girl.

"Maybe she was just happy that someone from her family was there," Sonja offered. "Girls hug. When we're happy, we hug." Colton didn't seem convinced.

Sonja's eyes lit up and asked, "What was her name? What was the little girl's name?"

Colton seemed to forget about all the yucky girl hugs for a moment. "She doesn't have a name. You guys didn't name her." How did he know that?

"You're right, Colton," Sonja said. "We didn't even know she was a she."

Then Colton said something that still rings in my ears: "Yeah, she said she just can't wait for you and Daddy to get to heaven."

From the kitchen table, I could see that Sonja was barely holding it together. She gave Colton a kiss and told him he could go play. And when he left the room, tears spilled over her cheeks.

"Our baby is okay," she whispered. "Our baby is okay."

From that moment on, the wound from one of the most painful episodes of our lives, losing a child we had wanted very much, began to heal. . . .

We had wanted to believe that our unborn child had gone to heaven. Even though the Bible is largely silent on this point, we had accepted it on faith. But now, we had an eyewitness: a daughter we had never met was waiting eagerly for us in eternity. From then on, Sonja and I began to joke about who would get to heaven first. . . . We constantly tell each other, "I'm going to beat you to heaven and name her first!"(p 94-97)