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CHAPTER ONE ENTER ANGELS

Robert owes his life to an angel. While working in a mill, he grabbed hold of a killer 440-volt wire that he didn’t know was live. As he felt the electricity surge through his body, he thought, ‘My God, I don’t want to die!’

Instantly, he was pulled off the wire by an invisible pair of hands around his waist. He was hurled violently backwards and fell to the floor. The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back, looking up at a coworker. He should have been dead.

Robert’s colleagues said that his life had been saved by the fact that he was wearing new shoes that day, and the thick rubber soles afforded insulation. Robert believes differently. ‘I felt something pull me off,’ he said. ‘Something saved my life. I thank God I’m alive.’ That ‘something,’ he thinks, was his guardian angel.

Robert suffered some third-degree burns, and lost a little finger to gangrene. Within two years of the accident, he developed psoriasis. Irritated patches of skin appeared around his waist. One day, he noticed that the patches lined up with the imprint of hands. The association was eerie, and reinforced his conviction that divine intervention on the part of one of God’s messengers had rescued him from death.

Alice Haggerty too was saved from the brink of death by her guardian angel.

‘When I was seven years old, I got sick with diphtheria,’ Alice told me. ‘I was sick for about ten days. My family was living in a Mennonite community – I was raised Mennonite. We had very strong beliefs about God, the Bible and angels. We did not believe in hospitals or extra medicine – doctors, yes. While I was sick, a doctor came to the house about every day. Medicine was not helping. He wanted to hospitalize me, but it was against our religion.

‘I was in and out of delirium from the high fever. But I overheard him one day tell my parents out in the hall that I wasn’t going to make it through the night. Strangely, I didn’t have any fear about it. I looked forward to going to heaven.

‘That night there was a thunderstorm outside. My parents eventually got tired and went to bed. While I was asleep, an angel came into the room. I thought I had died and the angel was going to take me to heaven. He was bigger than a person, and had long hair and flowing robes, and was glowing. I never saw a face. He communicated through my thoughts that he was going to make me better.

‘The angel put a silver belt around my waist, picked me up and cradled me in his arms, and took me out the second-floor window, which was closed and had a screen. I could feel a tingling sensation in my body was we went through the window. We went out over a tree. I could see light in the distance. I thought it was the entrance to heaven. We went toward it and entered the light, but I don’t know what happened there.

‘The next thing I knew, the angel was laying me back down in bed. It was morning, and I woke up. I was soaking wet and the sheets were wet. And I was one hundred percent better.

‘The doctor was summoned. He came and examined me and couldn’t understand how the diphtheria had disappeared It was a miracle.’

She had a second experience when her guardian angel appeared to her.

‘I was thirteen, and we had just moved to a new house. I was sleeping in bed, in a room with my two sisters. I shared a double bed with my younger sister. I was against a wall. One night something made me jump awake. My sisters stayed asleep. The room had a strange, bright glow. I looked up and there was the angel hovering near the ceiling. I was looking at it, seeing the same long hair and flowing robes. The next thing I knew, I was up there with the angel, looking down at my body in bed. Somehow, this didn’t seem unusual to me. I felt the strange tingling again. It seemed like it was quite awhile that I was with the angel, and we were communicating, but I don’t know about what. We may have even gone somewhere. Then the next thing I knew, I was jumping back in my body. I looked up, thinking, “Don’t go away!” I felt the same awe and sense of beauty and loving feeling that I’d had when the angel healed me, and I felt a tremendous longing to be with the angel.’

For Aimee S. Lacombe her angelic rescuer appeared in the form of a human being. Here is her account:

‘I was in a hospital suffering from some rare throat virus that caused me to cough so violently, I would begin to strangle. During one of those fits in the middle of the night, I called for a nurse. No one came right away, and I began to panic, for I couldn’t breathe.

‘Suddenly the door flew open and a short, stocky nurse came bursting in, and with a voice of authority said, “Close your mouth and breathe through your nose.” When I gestured that no air would come through my nose, she clamped her hand over my mouth and shouted, “Breathe!” And, breathe I did and I stopped choking. Her next words were, “Just can’t understand why they haven’t taught you that.” And out she went.

‘Because I wanted to thank her, the next morning I asked the nurse who was it who was on night duty. When she asked me to describe her, she looked puzzled and said that description didn’t fit anyone on their staff, but she would check on it.

‘Later, the head nurse came in and asked me to describe the nurse again. She said there was no one employed there who came close to my description. When I asked why they hadn’t instructed me on what to do when I began to strangle, they said they had never heard of the method.

‘The doctor’s response to the experience was interesting. He knew about the method, but why he hadn’t told me, I’ll never know. But he whispered in my ear, “I think you met an angel.” By then, I was convinced I had.

‘There have been a few times in my life when an almost overpowering aroma of flowers would occur, when no flowers were near. With it was always a sensation of euphoria. I do not think that I am anyone special because of these experiences. But, through them and other spiritual happenings, I know we are here to evolve back to the spirit that we truly are. And once we believe we are not victims of life, but the creators of our reality, all manner of beautiful manifestations appear in our life.’

Robert, Alice and Aimee have plenty of company. In recent years, angels have made a tremendous comeback, and have undergone a resurgence of popularity. More than at any other time in modern history, people are believing in angels, and are talking about their encounters with them. Books on angels proliferate. Not only are people interested in angels, they want to learn how to communicate with God’s emissaries.

It wasn’t long ago that angels gathered dust, consigned to art and Christmas cards. Except for Catholicism’s cult of the guardian angel, most Westerners have scoffed at the idea that angels might be real. Even in the early 1980s, Dutch physician H.C. Moolenburgh found that people laughed at him when he asked if they believed in angels, or had ever encountered an angel. A few people who admitted having encounters with angels were afraid to talk about them, out of fear that others would think they were crazy. Undaunted, Moolenburgh wrote A Handbook of Angels. A few years later, the book became an international hit.

Similarly, French journalist Georges Huber encountered a great deal of skepticism about angels when he began research for his book, My Angel Will Go Before You, published in 1983. Huber virtually apologizes for his interest in angels, in an age where science and technology make them seem hopelessly out of date and the stuff of fairy tales.

The ecclesiastical world has been almost embarrassed over the question of the existence of angels. Various church figures from various denominations have suggested that angels are ‘out of touch with reality’ and thus endanger our belief in the Gospels, and that it would be best for all if angels simply disappeared from the liturgy, from sermons – and from public awareness.

Writing in 1969, Cardinal G.M. Garrone, the Archbishop of Toulouse, stated that:

‘It is an understatement to say that angels have gone out of style. We prefer not to think of them for fear of being confronted with a painful and insoluble dilemma. Either we must affirm with the Church the existence of these mysterious beings and thus find ourselves in the disagreeable company of the naive and uninformed, or else frankly speak out against their existence and be in the equally unpleasant situation of rejecting the faith of the Church and the obvious meaning of the Gospels. The majority, therefore, choose to express no opinion at all.’