Angels and Babies (Part Three)

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November 27, 2008

These reports intrigued me. It seemed logical that children were closer to paradise than we adults—hadn’t Jesus told us that their innocence and pure hearts were what the kingdom of God was all about? Perhaps little ones, so “fresh from heaven” hadn’t yet experienced a clear-cut boundary between the two worlds and, for a little while, could be part of each.

Jessica Morello, now a teenager, was five or six when her beloved grandmother died. “I was grieving as I fell asleep,” she wrote me. “But in the middle of the night I saw Gram sitting at the foot of my bed, her arms open to comfort me.” As they had always done, the two played together, “and we had a party, with white whipped cream cake and a red cherry drink.” Jessica fell blissfully asleep, “knowing that no matter what happened, Gram would always be with me.”

Could the little girl have simply been dreaming? Perhaps. And maybe angels left the red cherry stains and a smear of whipped cream that her father found on her sheets the next morning.

In addition to events happening to today’s children, I heard from many adults re-framing a childhood experience. “I remember crawling to the highway, close to the center lane, looking up and seeing a huge truck coming down the hill toward me,” Marsha Wood of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, recounted. “There was something in front of it, like the sun’s rays, with a shining figure in its center. I was much too young to understand then, but now I realize that it was an angel that caused that truck to come to a complete stop, without even a screech of brakes, just inches from me.”

Reverend Linda Walters, a pastor in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was seven when her younger cousin died of cancer. A few weeks later, she remembers, another little girl mysteriously arrived to play with her.

The child did not attend Linda’s school, and apparently didn’t live nearby. But Linda was lonely, and accepted her new friend gratefully. The two played happily each day, but when Linda asked her mother for a snack to share, she got a surprise. Neither her mother, nor anyone else, could see the visitor.

“At first my mother was alarmed that I was evidently having hallucinations, and she called the doctor,” Linda reports. “He assured her that imaginary friends were normal, so the family played along with me.”

The little visitor came every day for several weeks, banishing Linda’s sorrow. “Then one day she said she had to be moving along, that other people needed her help,” Linda recalls. She never saw the child again, but has never forgotten her.

These letters and others like them put things in a new light for me. Like Linda Walters’ mother, I had assumed my sons’ playmate was an illusion. After all, little children do have rich imaginations, and not every story they tell is true. And yet… could mine have concocted such a perfectly-timed practical joke, one that went on for several years before the veil between heaven and earth had fully descended? What if Peter was more than just a pretend figure? What if he was a guardian angel?

I guess we’ll never know for sure. But recently, one of my sons told of an evening when he was locked out of his truck. “I was in the back of a dark parking lot, miles from home, no stores open, and no way of getting the tool I needed to pop the lock,” Bill explained. “Then, all of a sudden, another truck pulled in and drove right to where I was standing. The guy got out—carrying the tool I needed—sprung the lock, smiled at me, got in his truck and drove away.” Bill looked at me. “What do you think of that, Mom?”

I think Peter is still on the job.