I’m usually an every Sunday church goer, but this past Sunday I decided to do church at home. For me this means I listen to the sermon from the Moody Church in Chicago, IL from 11 until noon. I really like Pastor Erwin Lutzer; so I knew I’d get a little something out of whatever his sermon would be about.
This week’s message was about angels. Not just what they are doing in Heaven; but also what their characteristics are and how they manifest themselves to humans.
As I’m listening to the sermon it got me thinking: have I or other family members had encounters with angels? The answer to that is yes, and on many occasions. Some visits were much more vivid than others, but ultimately it turned out that the only explanation for what happened is that there was angel intervention.
For me, the encounter that always comes first to mind is when I was in the hospital having Brie. I didn’t realize I had an infection at the time, so when I gave birth they took her to neonatal for observation and I couldn’t see her. I had to stay in the hospital for almost a week trying to get rid of the infection; and of course I was worried about the baby. I had an IV in my arm but it hadn’t been put in right and my arm and hand started to swell. By the second day it hurt and I kept asking the nurses to remove it or put it in again but they wouldn’t. That night after 11 o’clock a woman came to my room. She was dressed in scrubs, a lab coat and had a stethoscope around her neck. She had brown-rimmed glasses and long dark brown hair. She introduced herself as Dr. Katherine and said she was there to check on me. I asked her if she could tell a nurse to do something about my IV; and she said she’d do it. So she took out the IV and replaced it; and very soon the swelling began to go down. We chatted a bit and I told her I was a little worried about my baby, because I couldn’t see her due to the infection. She volunteered to go to neonatal to check on her. When she came back she said the baby would be fine, and hopefully I’d be able to see her in a day or two. She stayed with me for about an hour; and then left. The next night, she showed up again. She checked on Brie, and then stayed in my room to watch a movie with me. It was “Brother Rat”, a really old (1938!) movie about recruits on a military base. After the movie she left. Dr. Katherine came to my room every night while I was there; and on the night I told her I’d be leaving the next day she said that she was going to start her vacation the next day. I thanked her for all of her visits to me and Brie, and wished her a wonderful vacation. The next day, when I was getting ready to leave with my baby, I stopped by the nurses’ station to leave a note for Dr. Katherine. But when I asked for her, no one knew who I was talking about. I described her, told them how she’d changed my IV and was starting her vacation but they said there was no one by that name employed as a doctor there. After I thought about it, I figured there were only a couple of options as to who she was: either someone escaped from the mental ward, or an angel. I’m pretty sure she was the latter.
That’s an angel that was seen, but there is one that I didn’t see. When Kitty was maybe 5 years old, she and her sister wanted homemade French fries for dinner. Since I was watching something on TV, I decided that I would peel the potatoes in the living room so I wouldn’t miss any of my show. After peeling the potatoes, I stood up to go into the kitchen. At that moment, Kitty came running up to me to give me hug. I had the knife pointing out and as God is my witness, she ran right into the knife and it went in her eye as she collided with me. I was terrified, she was pressed against me screaming and I was afraid to move my hand for fear her eyeball would be impaled on the knife. But I finally slowly moved back and took out the knife: and lo and behold there was nothing on it. I made her move her hand from her face and there was no sign of the knife having touched any part of her. I told her she was all right and she stopped screaming, and was fine! Lesson learned from that unseen angel: NEVER have a knife around children! And I never peel anything anywhere but at the kitchen table.
A couple of years ago, Brie was crossing the street and she was hit by a taxi. When the police arrived and parked in the lot across the street, the officer told her friend that Brie would have to come over to the squad car for him to take her information. Her friend helped her up so she could hobble across the street, but suddenly a gentleman came up to her, said his name was Mark, picked her up and carried her across the street: setting her down by the squad car. She said she had noticed him earlier, but afterwards when she looked for him he was gone. She had never seen him before, and hasn’t seen him since. So I’m thinking that was one of her angels.
Pastor Lutzer mentioned that angels often take the form of something familiar, so we are comfortable with them. This made me think of my father. I sometimes have dreams, or ‘visits’ from him, and he’s always dressed in his navy blue suit and his gold-rimmed spectacles. As I listened to the sermon though, I started to think that maybe I wasn’t being ‘visited’ by my father: but by an angel taking a familiar form. In some of these visits, my ‘father’ gives me a word to pass along to someone specific to keep them from harm. In a couple of instances, I was told of a bad situation that was occurring that I hadn’t known anything about, and it was true and needed to be taken care of. Since it says in the Bible that there are no tears in Heaven, I believe that my father wouldn’t be able to see what is going on here because some things would definitely make him sad. That’s another reason for me to now believe that it’s an angel, and not Daddy Clank I see.
These are just a very few examples of the angels that are in my family’s lives. I bet if you think about it: you can come up with a few examples of your own. Maybe something unexplained happened, you crossed paths with a stranger and it felt comfortable; or you were miraculously saved in a dangerous situation that defied explanation. Maybe the explanation is: you were touched by an angel. I know that I have been...
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