We “angels” shop at garage sales, send WalMart certificates or outgrown toys (and occasionally someone packs up a truck and just GOES.)   Occasionally we get a letter from the Cayces, updating the services we have helped to sustain.  It makes me feel as if we are doing what Mother Teresa always suggested,  “Bloom where you are planted.”

If you are already volunteering in your own community or caring for those who need you, please don’t stop.  Cayce Charities is mainly for those who are looking to get involved in something on-going, but there’s no commitment necessary.  We’ll keep you posted.

PS The address is Cayce Charities, 403 South Second Street, Thornton Arkansas 71766

And here’s the story:

On the  day that Amy Pruitt’s little boy was born, the doctors were grim.  Baby Cory had so many physical problems that he was not expected to live past a few hours.  “Don’t even hope,” Amy’s doctor told her, trying to prepare her for the loss.

But Amy was hearing a different voice inside her.  “Somehow I knew that despite his difficulties, Cory would be healthy,” she says.   And her son did make a miraculous recovery.  He was deaf, but this did not intimidate Amy.  “I had always heard that deaf children were easy to raise,” she says.  And Cory’s life seemed to prove it.

He was a bright, sunny little guy, with what seemed to be a deep spiritual connection. When Cory was about eight years old, he asked his mother if she remembered when he was a sick newborn.  “How could I forget?” Amy asked.

“Well,” Cory said, “I saw Jesus then.”

It was a wonderful story.  But could she believe it?  A few years later, Cory fell through the ice on a river, but ended up safely on shore, with no explanation of how he got there.  Later he told Amy that an angel had picked him up and placed him on the shore.  Amy had goosebumps.  The evidence supported Cory’s statement perfectly.

“ Last year a five-year-old friend of ours was in intensive care with a ruptured spleen,” Amy recalls.  “I asked Cory to pray.”  A few hours later Cory came to his mother.  “He looked as if there was a glow of some sort around him,” she says.

“I just finished talking to God,” Cory told her.  “That little kid is going to be fixed.”  The next day the boy was fine. The bleeding had mysteriously stopped in the night.  A few months later, Cory’s grandmother had a massive stroke and it seemed hopeless. Again Cory prayed, and his brother reported that Cory was glowing, and said that Grandma would be fine.  She made a complete recovery.

Just recently Amy was told that her initial belief—that deaf children are easy to raise—was not true.  In fact, most presents major challenges.  And yet “Cory has always been a very good kid, a joy and a gift in our lives,” she says.  The whole family waits to see what will happen next.

Both women were “addicts.” “We would talk about what we found and what we bought, and Mom would let me know if I had stumbled upon an especially good bargain.” One night, as they chattered on, Dale realized something. The barriers that always seemed to be between them were gone. “This call was different,” she says. “We really talked. Everything just seemed to open up and the conversation was truly mother-daughter.. When we finally hung up I noticed that we had been on the phone almost three hours.” Dale felt so good. Maybe their relationship would continue along this closer, more satisfying path.

Dale’s mother would be out of town the following Saturday, so no phone call was planned. On Monday morning, however, Dale’s brother called her. “Mom got home okay, but she’s in the hospital,” he said. “She’s had a stroke and it doesn’t look good.”

Dale was shocked. How could this happen? Quickly she made travel arrangements and soon arrived at her mother’s bedside. Her mother never emerged from her coma, and died a few days later. “Through everything, I kept thinking back to that last talk we had,” Dale says. “It was so comforting, and I was glad we had shared that good conversation.”

But life without her mother was difficult. “I really missed my mom,” she says, “and I kept longing to talk to her one more time. Sometimes I prayed that I could have a sign that all was well with her.” Dale had stopped going to garage sales too. The memories were just too difficult.

The second anniversary of Dale’s mother’s death was approaching, when Dale had an unexpected weekend off from work. Her thoughts turned to her mother as she ran errands and tried to ignore the garage sale signs that seemed to be everywhere. She would never be able to go to another one…. “I was heading back to my house when I saw a group of signs all in a row,” she says. “I intended to turn, but instead it seemed as if the car just kept going straight, following those signs.” The signs led to a particular yard, and Dale pulled up in front and stopped. Somehow she knew she was supposed to be there, but the thought didn’t keep her from trembling just a little, as she got out of the car.

At first glance, the merchandise all looked like junk that she would never buy. What was she doing here? Then she felt drawn to a particular table in the garage. Dale looked inside the box on top. A bunch of coffee cups. Why would she need those? Then—as if she was being guided—she put her hand down into the bottom of the box and pulled up yet another cup.

When she saw it, she started to cry. “Where did you get this?” she asked the woman in charge of the sale.

The woman looked it over. “I’ve never seen this before,” she told Dale.
But Dale knew it well—and so had her mother. The cup bore the logo of the college Dale had attended, a small institution six hundred miles away, one that no one in this vicinity had probably ever heard of. A cup just like this one had sat in her mother’s kitchen, a reminder of the care and concern her mother had always felt for her, despite their sometimes-difficult days.
“I know I was guided to this sale, to find the reassurance I needed,” Dale says. She bought the cup—and knows that she and her mother will meet again.

“On the morning of the service, I had some new batteries, just purchased, and I put them into the angel to be sure it would light up,” Debe says. “But nothing happened.” Maybe she hadn’t put them in correctly. Debe asked her husband to see if something was wrong with the batteries. While she finished dressing, he checked them out again. “You put them in right, but I did it again,” he told her. “They still won’t light.”

By now it was 9 AM and the family was to meet at the funeral home chapel at 9:30. Maybe something had broken inside the angel? But everything looked fine. “We have to go,” Debe’s husband told her. He had taken out the batteries again (although she didn’t know it) and they had run out of time. “Let’s just have the angel sitting by her photo,” he suggested as he went to start the car.

Debe was terribly disappointed. The lighted angel would have made the display so beautiful…She buttoned her coat and picked up the angel. Just one more try… She flipped the switch, and the angel lit up. Shocked, Debe turned the angel over to see if the batteries were locked in…
She opened the compartment.
There were no batteries inside.

Heart pounding, Debe looked around, and saw the 4 AA batteries on the table. She snapped them in as her husband pulled up. “Oh, you found some other batteries,” he said, looking at the angel’s beautiful glow.

“Uh huh,” Debe murmured. They were the same batteries, the ONLY batteries, she knew, but she could not tell him yet. If they had ever wondered where their mother was, they knew now that she was closer to them than she’d ever been.

A few days later, Debe told her husband what had happened. He had no trouble believing it. “Well,” he said, “that’s Mom. She wanted to have that angel at her service. And she did.”

“You see?” Debe points out. “You never know when angels are around!”

Angels don’t always announce their arrival.  And sometimes the helper is an ordinary person acting like an angel. Either way, they change our lives.  Tammy Kline would agree.

Tammy, her husband Rich and several others had embarked upon a climb on the Grand Canyon.  An experienced hiker (and married to one), Tammy had never had a serious problem climbing hills in Colorado.  But now as the group approached Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Canyon, the huge uneven steps going down the trail were about 18 inches apart.  Each time Tammy landed on one, she jarred her knee and gradually the pain began.  At first, as she soaked her leg in a cold creek along the way, she thought she would be fine. “We reached Phantom Ranch around lunch time, and I would be able to rest until our early departure the next day,” she says.  “I kept my leg iced, elevated, and wrapped.  My husband, Rich, went to the general store and bought an Ace bandage because the wrap that was in our first-aid kit wasn’t supportive enough.”  The bandage didn’t seem to help either.

But as the time passed and the pain continued, Tammy began to worry. How was she going to get out of this situation? What if her leg didn’t respond to rest?  If she needed a mule to ride, would one be available? What if she got part way up the mountain, and couldn’t go any further?  “I prayed all night that God would help me find a way out,” Tammy says.  “This trip had been Rich’s dream since I could remember and I didn’t want to let him down.”

The next morning, the hikers were on the trail by dawn. Rich set a slow pace up the Canyon and the group stopped frequently. But the rest had done little if anything to relieve Tammy’s pain.  And by the time they stopped for a break at Indian Garden, she was wondering if she could take another step.

A climber named Tom was there finishing his break.  He had passed their group earlier that morning, and now noticed Tammy’s limping. “Trouble with your knee?” he asked her.

“The wrap I’m using isn’t supportive enough,” she told him, “and every time my foot hits a rock, the pain shoots through my leg.”  She sighed, looking around.  There were rocks everywhere.

“I have an extra compression knee brace in my pack,” Tom remarked.  “Let me find it.”

An extra compression brace?  As unlikely as an extra pot of gold, Tammy thought.  And it surely wouldn’t fit—Tammy was very small, and Tom was large.  She held her breath as Tom pulled out the brace and handed it to her.  It fit her perfectly.

Tom did not vanish,as angels sometimes do.  He simply waved away her thanks, and continued up the path. The trip was still very trying for Tammy.  “But the brace, unlike the wrap, held my knee rigid and it didn’t twist every time I stepped on a rock,” she says.  “We made it to the top in about eight hours, which is within the average time span.  But I don’t think I could have made it without Tom. He saved our vacation.”  And if that’s not what angels do, what is?

For many days after this experience, Tammy could think of little else.  It was such an obvious answer to her prayers.  “I know in the depth of my heart that God answers prayers,” she says.  “And he truly listens when we talk to Him and open our hearts so we can see and understand His answers.”

Here is a link to another “earth angel,” who has made something beautiful come out of a difficult situation:

“George was not comfortable about having a second surgery,” says Mary, “so we prayed that someone would help him make the right decision.”

On the evening he was admitted, George was still pondering, when a doctor came into his room. “Are you George LaGrange?” the doctor asked.
“I am,” George responded.
“I’d like to take some pictures of your eye,” the man explained. “Just follow me,”

More pictures! George had never seen this physician before, and he still wasn’t convinced he was going to have the procedure. But he followed the doctor down the hospital hallway to a door at the end. The door didn’t open easily, and the doctor had to fiddle with the doorknob, as if he didn’t know how to use it. But there were the x-ray machines in the room, and the doctor set everything up, and took the pictures. “You know,” George said, as the session ended, “I’m not really sure I need this treatment.”

“Well, it’s up to you,” the doctor pointed out. “You can do it, but in my opinion, it’s really not necessary. The condition could very well clear up on its own.”

“Really?” George was surprised. No one else had mentioned this possibility. When the doctor left, George returned to his pondering. By the time the nurse came in that morning, he had made his decision. “We had asked for someone to give us some advice,” says Mary, “and that’s what we received. George decided not to have the surgery, and he went home feeling very relieved.”

About a week later George stopped in at the hospital accounting department. He wanted to see if that last set of x-rays would be covered by his insurance. But a surprise awaited him. There was no record of any extra pictures taken. “Are you sure?” George asked. “Maybe they’re lost.”

“What was the doctor’s name?” the woman asked.
George hadn’t noticed him wearing any identification. And there was no record of his visit to George either.
The bills never turned up—and George was never bothered by his eye condition again.
“The whole experience was amazing,” Mary says. She won’t forget to ask for help the next time.

Eva and her mother were at the hospital, sitting at the bedside of her father.  He was very ill and hadn’t spoken in several days, and although she and her mother had prayed so hard, it looked as if her father was not going to recover.

“Suddenly Dad began speaking, and praising the Lord!” Eva said.  “It seemed as if he was seeing Jesus.  Less than a half hour later, he died.”  As machines shut down, several nurses came into the room to check his pulse and do a final examination.  Eva’s mother was devastated, so when the nurses left the room, Eva went with them.  She thought her mother might need some time alone.

Eva, of course, was also grieving, but that memory of her father’s vision had made her feel—almost joyful. What had he seen during those last moments? Soon she went back to his room, but now there was another nurse there. Eva hadn’t seen her on any of the shifts, and although she wore an identification tag, there was no name on it.  The nurse was talking quietly with her mother, and whatever the nurse was saying was having a calming effect. “I listened for a few moments-—it seemed as if they were talking about the Holy Spirit—and then I left again and walked down to the nurses’ station.”

A nurse that she knew gave her a hug.  “I’m sorry about your father,” she said.

“Who is that new nurse in his room?” Eva asked.  “She’s certainly making my mother feel better.”

“There aren’t any new nurses on this shift,” the woman told Eva as she flipped through the charts.  “Just us.”

“But….”  By now Eva knew each nurse on each shift.  Nor had she seen anyone entering her father’s room, or coming out of it. And when she returned to the room, her mother was alone.  “Who was that woman talking with you?” Eva asked.

“A new nurse,” her mother answered.  “She was very kind.  She just left.”

But Eva had been watching the doorway from her post at the nurses’ station.  No one had come out during that time, and she hadn’t passed anyone when she went back into the room.

“Then I realized that God had sent an angel to comfort my mother,” Eva says. “I believe with all my heart that angels come when we are in trouble, sick or sad, whenever we need to be strengthened for what lies ahead.” The following days were difficult, but hopeful. Eva knows she will see her father again.

Recently Daniel had what the family thought was flu, but it got worse and when he was taken to the hospital, a smart doctor in the emergency room did a CT scan, which showed that Daniel had fluid around his heart, which was making it beat 200 times per minute.  They airlifted him to another hospital, where a heart team waited for him. No heart surgery but he was in Intensive Care for five days.  When he did finally get back to school, the same thing happened and he had to return to the emergency room.

Needless to say, the family was not able to get the news around to everyone, but they are convinced it was prayer power that kept Daniel from dying.  In fact, they have been told that the e.r. doctor probably saved his life.  He is back at college (probably finishing his finals) and is okay but very tired.  How the family will bring Christmas to the people there this year is anyone’s guess.  Obviously we need prayers for this fine young man and his wonderful family, as well as prayers for those who depend on the Cayces.  Let’s send some extra angels to Thornton this year.  And here’s our story:

“When you were a little girl, Grandma, was there a Christmas?” my granddaughter asked one December day as, heads together, we read a book about the season.

“Why of course!” I laughed. “There’s always been Christmas, honey, ever since Baby Jesus was born.”

“What was it like-—your Christmas?” she wanted to know.  And I set the book down for a moment as the sounds and scents and the magic of long ago crept into the room…

Christmas started back then, strangely enough, with the aroma of wet wool.  Scarves and mittens dampened by the first snowfall and hung to dry over steamy school radiators somehow signaled the beginning of the season.  As the scent stole across the classroom, we children would catch each other’s eyes, unspoken understanding passing among us.  It was the beginning.

From wool, we progressed to boots, not the sturdy leather footwear that today’s children use, but floppy rubber overshoes clanking with metal buckles, fitting snugly over oxfords or saddle shoes—if one tugged hard enough.  In every home in mid-November, the same scenario ensued: locate the stored-away boot box, drag it to the drafty back hallway, measure which child would be promoted to which pair—and caution children to wear the contents Every Day.  We didn’t mind. It was another ritual, another step in the dance.

Then slowly, almost without notice, the trappings of Christmas began to appear.  Store windows took on a  dusting of artificial snow, an occasional red ribbon or evergreen bough, very often, the beloved manger scene itself.  Lights sparkled over the front door of the village hall while local firemen hung stockings from the mantelpiece behind their engines.  Wreaths, hand-drawn in colored chalk, festooned the school blackboards, and the faint sound of carols drifted across the snowy landscape.  No raucous commercialism, no hucksters exhorting us to “Buy, buy!”– just a simple but growing awareness of the time that was to come.  And we children watched, and held our breath and waited.

Christmas came in bits and pieces in those days, changes in our routines that whispered rather than shouted.  An extra delivery of coal to ensure a warm house for the visitors who would share the day. Sledding on the big hill, then coming home in the late-afternoon dusk for warm soup, and hearing the rustle of tissue paper behind Mother’s closed bedroom door.  The soft aroma of sugar cookies unexpectedly mingling with breakfast oatmeal and toast.   In the Chicago area, the radio program “The Cinnamon Bear,” faithfully reviewed each day on our walks to school.  Being asked to accompany Dad on an evening shopping trip, the sound of our boots squeaking on the packed snow, the thrill of being out after dark with the most important man in our lives.  Those pleasures were as much a part of the awareness of Christmas as bells and candles and holly.

And then one day, at last, the tree.  Pine-scented needles scattering across the kitchen floor,  Dad carried it to its place of honor in front of the window so we could share its beauty with all who passed.  First, the lights, then the delicate colored balls, and the tinsel which we hung one strand at a time in a shimmering waterfall.  The angel at the very top and finally the crèche in the place of honor, its chipped statues heralding memories of Christmases past.  “And it came to pass…” someone would read the comforting words that gave the season its true meaning.

The countdown began in earnest now.  Five days…four days… Hurriedly we completed our own shopping —a comb for a favorite aunt, a candle for Grandpa—and stored our wrapped cache under our beds, understanding again the joy of giving. Three days…two..the turkey on the cold back porch. Quick errands, candles, stockings that didn’t have holes (my brother hung a kneesock), cookies for Santa, and the feeling that one’s heart would burst..

And finally, on a cold dark morning, my siblings, wrapped in flannel bathrobes, bouncing on my bed in excitement.  “It’s Christmas!” they were shouting.  “It’s here!”

The remembered wonder gripped me again as I sat in my own living room, my own grandchild listening in delight.  “It came!” she exclaimed.  “Your Christmas always came!”

And yours will too, I told her silently.  Oh, the trappings will be different from the slower days of my childhood.  You will have frozen turkey breasts, TV commercials, a wrapping service at the local mall—by-products of a more modern age.  But beneath the gadgetry and clamor will be the same holy Child, the joy at his arrival shared by millions, past, present and yet to come.

For Christmas is excitement and anticipation and wonder, the secrets, the smiles, the sharing.  It’s the message of the little King repeated down through the ages, the message of hope and peace, renewed again in a troubled world. The message that keeps us believing in the magic of love.

“Yes,” I told my granddaughter, “Christmas will always come.  For what would we do without it?”

—I had the honor and privilege of being able to interview the last survivor of the World Trade Center bombing, whose story ultimately appeared in my book, IN THE ARMS OF ANGELS.  At the point when she was discovered, the rescue workers had given up on finding any survivors, and were absolutely astonished when they came across this young woman, bruised and broken but alive.  How had she survived those terrifying hours?  By holding on to the hand of a man named Paul, she insisted, a man who kept her spirits up and encouraged her to keep calling for help.  But there was no man anywhere in the pit where they finally found her—and no way for anyone to have gotten in or out.  I could re-tell her story.

—During subsequent days, people wrote to ask, “Where were the angels in this tragedy?”  And I was able to answer with conviction:  “Right there.  Right on the scene.”  I knew this only because those with angel experiences came forward to share.  A man who saw smoke breaking up as it ascended, and then saw each piece in the shape of an angel, carrying a human being home to heaven…a trumpeter playing at Ground Zero a few days later, attracting a curious crowd. And yet no one’s camera worked.  No one there was able to get a photo…..A man who was escorted out of the building via a nearby stairway that he had never seen before…  There are probably many stories like this.  I could research one or two.

—Or I could tell all of you how meaningful that day was to me personally.  The night before, at 11 p.m. our
daughter had given birth to our first grandson, and I was up practically the entire night thinking about him.  The following day, as my husband and I drove to the hospital, we heard the news of the crashes.  Of course, like everyone else, we did not know how far such horrors would spread.  Was this unbelievable happening the end of the world?
When we finally arrived at the hospital, it was on lock-down, and for a moment I thought that we would not see this precious child, not today, not ever.  But the reception room nurse took pity on us and let us in, one of so many kindnesses offered that day.  It was when I held that little bundle that an the answer occurred to me, in a quote I’d heard: “A baby is God’s promise that life shall go on.”  It was not the end of the world.  And yesterday, in the midst of painful memories, we celebrated an eight-year-old’s special day.  I could write about that.

But maybe, as we lower our flag to half-staff today, it’s enough to quote something from the angel book:  “The future holds exceitement and opportunity.  We may grow inwardly in new ways, emerge stronger, holier and more interested in ministering to the needs of others than to ourselves.  We may learn that the people in our lives are far more important than any personal achievement or possession.  Rabbi Harold Kushner once observed that all the complicated structuress we spend so much time and evergy creating are built on sand.  “Only our relationships to other people endure.  Sooner or later, the wave will come along and knock down what we have worked so hard to build up.  When that happens, only the person who has someone’s hand to hold will be able to laugh.”

See you next time.

Well, Jo Pabon writes from LaGrange, Illinois to offer another story, unique in its own way (as they all are).

Jo’s mother, Harriet Cimock, grew up in Corning, a small town in southwest Iowa. She was a farm wife and helpmate, working alongside her husband and raising five children.  Harriet had many interests, but she loved collecting (especially butterflies) and shopping garage sales. She spent a lot of time making rosaries and baby blankets, to give to those who needed them.

In April 2007, Harriet had a routine mammogram, and since her husband had had shingles recently, she took the vaccine too.  Shortly afterwards, she developed a rash on her chest.  Her doctor diagnosed it as shingles—she was apparently one of the few who got the illness from the shot. “Mom was not a complainer,” says Jo, “but two months later, she still had the spots, and was distracted by them.”  Harriet had a biopsy, and the family was stunned at the result.  She did not have shingles; she had Inflammatory Breast Cancer, an especially quick-spreading type.  Chemotherapy started immediately.

Back in Illinois, as Jo and her sisters struggled to handle their fear, a strange situation developed.  Jo began finding dimes.  “Not quarters, nickels or pennies, but dimes. Dimes in unusual places-—peeking out from under a baseboard, in the back of a dusty broom closet,in the shower! It became almost comical.” Jo told her good friend Vicki about it, and Vicki started finding dimes too.  “We joked about where we had found them, and somehow the dime would turn the day into a good one.”

In October Jo went to Iowa to be with her mother.  Harriet was not doing well. No amount of chemo seemed to stem the rapidly spreading cancer, but she kept her hopeful attitude.  One day Jo accompanied Harriet to chemotherapy, and after she stood up from the chair, they both saw it where she had been sitting—a dime. When Jo returned home, the dime discoveries continued—in a forgotten coat pocket, on the seat of a taxi, a store parking lot. Surely the law of averages would have intruded by now—how could people find so many coins, and why were they all dimes? But they were. Jo couldn’t help but wonder what the purpose of it was.  She longed to turn it all into a “sign,” something to reassure her that her mother would have many healthy years ahead. But Harriet’s decline continued.  She died just five months after her diagnosis.

“Her service at their country church was beautiful,” Jo says. “She had planned everything in advance, from the music to her obituary, and her memorial was filled with butterflies.  Afterwards, we were taking funeral flowers back to the house, and I lifted up a big vase.  Under it was—a dime.”  Back at the house, the family received another surprise.  The siblings began to sort through Harriet’s treasure trove of garage sale finds, and Jo discovered a clear plastic piggy bank.  It was stuffed to the top, with dimes. “My brother mentioned that he had given my mom a bank several years earlier and he went to the bedroom to find it,” Jo says. “He returned and turned it over on the table top. We could not believe our eyes as the dimes started pouring out!”

Jo returned home to Illinois trying to accept the suddenness of this great loss. Her mother had lived a healthy life—-why her? Strangely, the only consolation the family could muster was the fact that they were now all finding dimes. The stories made them laugh.

One day Jo was searching for breast cancer awareness items on the internet. She came across a picture of a pink breast cancer pin.  Next to it in the photo was a dime! The ad said the dime was in the picture to show the size of the pin. “That was a light bulb moment for me,” Jo says.  “It was not right that we would save all our dimes, and sit around and look at the pile. We were to pass them on for a good cause, and what better cause than breast cancer research and awareness?”

Today Jo and her family have a special jar in the kitchen, and her family knows just where to put the dimes that they continue to find. (Her nine-year-old son even cashed in his $25 savings account, converted the money to dimes and added them to the jar.) Their friends save too. When the jar gets big enough, they change the dimes into a check and send it to Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation, in memory of Harriet.

“I have two beautiful reminders of my mom,” Jo says, “every time I see a butterfly and every time I find a dime. (Or should I say – a dime finds me?!)” She knows there will be more coming their way. Thanks, Mom!

If you would like to find out more about IBCRF, check the website at http://www.ibcresearch.org/

“You’ve had surgery—you don’t need to be doing any lifting,” one told her.  The others agreed.

Liz has no idea where the impulse came from, but she suddenly gestured over her right shoulder with her thumb.  “That’s okay,” she said, smiling.  “Meet Cletus, my angel.  He does all my heavy lifting.”  Everyone laughed and let Liz help, and the patient was settled comfortably.

Liz had always believed in guardian angels, but she had never named hers, nor had she spoken to anyone about her beliefs.  (Twenty years ago, angels were not as popular as they are now.)  Why had she mentioned it?  She had no answer, but as the days passed Liz began to notice something unusual.  Whenever she was called upon to lift a heavy weight (usually a patient) she could do it easily.  “Usually they were dead weight too, about 180 to 200 pounds,” she says.  But the loads were no problem for her.

Had she suddenly developed amazing strength?  That was the other unusual feature:  Liz could lift easily ONLY at work.  At home she had the usual difficulties.  A forty-pound bag of salt for her water softener was a real challenge.  This situation continued for over eighteen years, until Liz retired from nursing.

“Now, in another life, I am the owner of a religious gift shop, and although my weight-lifting limit is only 25 to 30 pounds I know I can still rely on Cletus when the need is there,” Liz says.  “We are all so bleassed by God to have these amazing halpers with us to guard our steps, guide our decisions and just be our “best friends.”