By the time Alice left to return home, it was starting to get dark.  More confident now, she hopped on the first bus, and got off at the University where she had to transfer to the second one. She waited an hour-and-a-half, as snow started to fall, but the second bus never came. She didn’t know then that on Sundays, the last bus on that route came at 4 p.m. She had missed it completely.

“It was getting very windy, and drifts were making streets treacherous,” Alice says.  “Walking home was out of the question because it was too far. I went to the Education building behind me,and was glad to find that the front door was still open. Now I could warm up, and call my dad to come and get me.”

However, that was a problem too.  Alice’s dad didn’t always come to his children’s rescues. “you got yourself into this, so you can get yourself out,” he would tell them.  And he would probably be angry that she interrupted her parents’ afternoon get-together. She hated it when he got mad…  But what else could she do?

Cell phones were not available yet. Instead Alice searched in the deserted Education building for a pay phone. Her father had never been on the university campus—how was she going to direct him, if he agreed to come?  She didn’t even have the address of this building. And where was everyone?  She had walked down several corridors and heard no noise of any kind. She turned yet another corner—and there was a bank of pay phones!  Relieved, Alice started searching her pockets for change.  She couldn’t believe it!  She had NO coins, only a transfer ticket for the bus. Now what? “Fear gripped me,” Alice says.  “It was completely dark outside by now.  I broke out in a sweat and started to pray, begging God for his help.”  Would she have to spend the night in this building, huddled in a corner?  Her parents would be worried sick when she didn’t come home.  A dime!  That’s all she needed, but it seemed impossible.

Alice prayed again, and had just started to cry when out of nowhere—-”and I mean nowhere!” she says—a young handsome man approached her. He was dressed in jeans, a long sleeve shirt and woolen vest. No coat in this storm, no snow melting from his hair…  He looked right in Alice’s eyes and smiled. “You look like you could use a dime,” he told her.

Stunned, Alice nodded.  How did he know?  And where had he come from?  She watched in disbelief as he dropped a dime into her hand. “Oh, thank you!” she said, turning immediately to the phone right behind her.  How had he arrived without her hearing him?  She looked back to ask him.

But there was no one standing there, no one walking away or turning down the long hall in front of her. The young man had completely vanished.  How….?  She dropped the precious dime into the phone slot and dialed her new home phone number.  Thank heavens she had remembered it! “Dad answered and I explained my problem,” Alice says.  “All I could do was tell him to look for the Education building.” Dad hadn’t sounded mad, not yet anyway.  But Alice was too amazed over the sudden appearance of the young man to worry about anything.

It took about 30 minutes before Alice’s father drove up in front of the building where she was waiting to flag him down.  Even though visibility was very poor, he had found her!”I was so glad to get in the car and sit beside dad,” Alice recalls.  “He could barely see the street signs, but we arrived home safely.”  Furthurmore, Alice’s father. didn’t scold her at all, or even complain about the treacherous ride.  He was just grateful to have her home safely.

“I know without a doubt that the Lord sent me two angels that day,” Alice says. “The handsome young man probably was my personal guardian angel, and I hope he is still watching over me.” The other angel? The most important man in her life, her hero, her Valentine.  Whether your dad is still on earth or home in heaven, don’t forget to send him a special Valentine this year.  Like Alice’s dad, he may not have always told you how much he loved you.  But he showed you—and that’s what counts.

To see the rainbow on Rob’s wall, click the following:  www.xzone-radio.com/angelvisit.htm   (Some of the people who commented on this site are a little “different,” but hey! we all love angels.)

Another awesome video, which doesn’t have a thing to do with angels but will warm your heart at how wonderful so many of our teenagers are, is located at  http://soonereyo.blip.tv/#1762059  Watch this when you have five minutes to really zero in.  It’s amazing.

As for the Easter poem, I recently came upon this, which is attributed to Phillips Brooks, often called “the greatest American preacher of the 19th Century.” He attended Harvard University and Episcopal Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Virginia and became an Episcopal priest in 1860.  His sermons were beautifully written and delivered (he also wrote “0h Little Town of Bethlehem”), but I have not been able to find the title or a definite source for this poem.  Can you help?  Happy Easter, everyone!

God hath sent His Angels to the earth again,
Bringing joyful tidings to the sons of men.
They who first at Christmas thronged the heavenly way,
Now beside the tomb-door sit on Easter-Day.
Angels, sing His triumph as you sang His birth,
“Christ the Lord is risen, Peace, good will on earth.”

In the dreadful desert Where the Lord was tried,
There the faithful Angels gathered at His side,
And when in the Garden, grief, and pain, and care
Bowed Him down with anguish, they were with Him there.

Yet the Christ they honour is the same Christ still,
Who, in light and darkness did His Father’s will.
And the tomb, deserted, shineth like the sky,
Since He passed out from it, into victory.

God has still His Angels helping, at His word,
All His faithful children,like their faithful Lord.
Soothing them in sorrow,arming them in strife,
Opening wide the tomb-doors,leading into life.

Father, send Thine Angels unto us, we pray;
Leave us not to wander all along our way.
Let them guard and guide us, whereso’er we be,
Till our resurrection brings us home to Thee.

P.S. As always, our crackerjack researchers have come up with the title and more information on this poem:  go to http://nethymnal.org/htm/g/h/ghatsent.htm for more information.

These children are the poorest of the poor, and rarely have a chance to enjoy a party, and of course JoAnn has been the beneficiary of our angel group for many years.  If you’d like to get involved, just contact JoAnn at 403 South Second St., Thornton AR 71766.  Here’s the story:
 
Luke Baird, then fourteen, was running late to meet his best friend.  He was pedaling his bike at top speed on a fairly busy street (and, his mother Doreen says, at six feet tall, Luke could work up a pretty good head of steam).  As Luke approached an intersection, his bike chain slipped and jammed his back wheel, stopping the bike dead in the street.  Luke, however, tumbled over the front of the now stopped bike at a very high speed.  “He remembers rolling head to feet, over and over again, so fast that he actually rolled to his feet, only to crash to the street again,” says Doreen.  Luke finally came to rest in the middle of an intersection. A car had been approaching, but the driver was able to slam on her brakes in time.

“The driver, bless her, got out and helped him out of the street, and called our home because Luke was shaking so hard that he couldn’t hold her cell phone,” says Doreen. Luke’s older brother was the only one home, and he had just received his learner’s permit, but he jumped in the family car anyway, and drove to pick up his brother.

At the emergency room, doctors discovered that Luke, having caught his hand in a storm grate while tumbling, has broken several fingers.  His shoulders and knees were badly gouged, and he had some serious “road rash,” visible even a few years later. And since Luke had had back pain almost all of his life, it was assumed that some serious problems would show up there too.

But his head and face were completely protected, and he even still had his baseball cap on his head without any debris on it.  When Doreen finally saw him, she couldn’t help wondering if something or someone had cushioned his back too, for he was not having any pain.  As it turned out, he never did, and has had a normal life ever since.

How did Luke emerge almost unscathed from that spooky, fast potentially deadly fall?  Doreen thinks she knows.
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Tony was a lost and confused 22 year old in his senior year of college, he says. He was deeply depressed and didn’t know how to get out of it. Of course, alcohol was an easy and convenient way, and available wherever he went.

“One night, my roommate and I had a party,” Tony says. “My younger brother and sister drove up from our hometown to come as well. It was late into the night and I was fairly intoxicated (I later found out my BAC was .19). It had become almost a ritual for me to get drunk and then think even more about the pain I was trying to make go away. This would result in me crying to whomever was around. Tonight was no different and I was talking to my brother.”

Eventually Tony went to the bathroom. While in there, he noticed an almost-full bottle of prescription painkillers. He remembered them. He had used them temporarily after knee surgery. “Being young and intoxicated, a deadly combination for impulsiveness, I decided right then and there to end my life,” Tony says. He swallowed every pill, and then sat on the floor, waiting. “Suddenly this moment of clarity came over me,” he says. “It’s like when you’re sitting in a dark room on a cloudy day and the sun breaks through the clouds and the room just lights up. This is how I felt and I suddenly realized that I wasn’t ready to die…I wasn’t ready to leave my family and I wanted to fight this rather then end it.”

The next few minutes were utter chaos as someone called an ambulance, and Tony was taken out of his apartment on a stretcher, in front of his shocked brother and sister. The next several hours passed in a blur, but eventually the emergency room personnel released Tony. He hadn’t slept, and felt as if a train had run over him. He stood in front of the hospital, waiting for his siblings to get the car and bring it around. There was just one person waiting too, in the middle of this night, a short, red-haired woman wearing glasses. She tried to make small talk, but Tony was short with his answers. He was still somewhat dazed. Had he really tried to kill himself?

The woman was talking again. “Why are you here?” she asked him.
He was going to brush her off again, but something stopped him. He thought to himself, “Tony, if you’re going to try and beat this and get yourself better, you might as well start being honest with other people about what’s going on.” Although she was a complete stranger, he found himself telling her what he’d done.

“I’m sorry…I didn’t mean to pry,” the woman responded.
It was okay, Tony told her. He had been depressed, and wasn’t thinking right, but now he wanted to try and get better. It was getting cold so he went inside. He sat down on a bench in the dark deserted vestibule. Everything that had happened in the past several hours came flooding back, overwhelming him, and he put his knees to his chest, buried his head and began to cry. He was so alone, so confused… What was he going to do? How was he going to explain this to everyone…

“Then I felt an arm come around my shoulder,” Tony says. “I looked up and there was this same red-haired woman. ‘It’s ok,’ she said, ‘it will be ok. You’re here now and that’s what matters.’ It’s amazing what effect a few simple words can have. I realized she was right…I didn’t die, I was still here. That was my first step to get better, understanding that I wanted to try and get help. A few seconds after she said that, she was called back to the ER for her mother who was sick. I never saw her again.”

A great weight left Tony’s shoulders in the short time that the woman held him. “It was exactly what I needed at that moment, as if God sent her there just so I could have a few minutes of comfort,” he says.

That was five years ago. Tony went through several months of therapy and has discovered ways to cope with his depression. “I’m proud to report that I’m happy and healthy and have been for quite awhile,” he says. And he’ll never forget the woman who was there at the perfect moment. “I believe that she was my angel that day, sent to comfort me when I felt so lost and alone. No one, to this day, has ever had such an effect on me.”

Because she was the cautious type, she decided to return home. She turned her car around on the highway (an automatic Dodge K-Car with the gear shift on the steering column) and started back. It had been snowing earlier, and the ditches and farm fields were crusted over with dry slippery snow.

Kelley always wore her seatbelt (in those days, seatbelts fastened across one’s lap) and was wearing it at the time.

The last thing she remembers is turning to the left on the highway. Her next moment of awareness was waking up inside the car, in the ditch. She was lying across the front seat. Vaguely, she noticed a farmer gently tapping on her window. “Are you okay?” he was asking. “Do you need to be towed out of the ditch?”
Strangely, Kelley felt fine. “I’d be grateful if you towed me out,” she said to the farmer, and sat up. Then….

“Imagine her surprise,” Sean says. “Those old Dodges had bench seats, so there was nothing to impede her from lying across both front seats. But somehow her seatbelt had been undone, and was in its sheath on the driver’s side. Her car was in neutral and was idling to keep the heater going and to keep her warm; and although it had gone down a steep incline, it was sitting perfectly straight on all four tires. Even the farmer who towed her out of the ditch couldn’t get over how her car had not rolled over.”

What Kelley never discovered was: 1) How did her seatbelt get unfastened and 2) How did the car come to be in neutral? Her car was new and it took some effort to change gears.

“Kelley has always had a nice devotion to her Guardian Angel, and perhaps this was his intervening on her behalf,” Sean says. “I’ll always remember her telling me about it and marvel to this day at the extraordinary grace she received.” Kelley was kept completely safe during that event. And from that day to this, although she does take her medication, she has never had another seizure.

(C) 2006 Joan Wester Anderson www.joanwanderson.com

Vince knows how they feel. A few years ago he went through a divorce, and his wife took their four teenaged children to live with her. Vince missed them all very much, but did not want to disrupt their lives by fighting for custody. Instead, he kept in touch as much as possible, and never let a day go by without praying for them. Soon his two sons came to stay with him.

Vince was thrilled, even though his daughters, Laura and Belinda, wanted to remain with their mother. “I am afraid that their mother blamed everything on me, and told them many lies about me,” Vince says. “Although this hurt, I believed with all my heart that God would make everything okay. I tried to keep in contact with them as much as I could. I prayed each night for the angels to watch over them”.

One night the girls were sleeping in their bunk beds, Laura on top and Belinda on the bottom. In the middle of the night Belinda awakened and needed to go to the bathroom. But her bed was so warm and cozy… should she just go back to sleep, and wait until morning? She thought about it, but although she was drowsy, Belinda felt prodded to get up anyway. Reluctantly, she did.

“While she was in the bathroom, she heard a loud crash,” Vince says. Belinda ran into the bedroom and found that the top bunk—carrying Laura— had fallen on top of the lower one. Bedding and broken boards were everywhere, and Laura sat in the middle, dazed but unharmed.

Belinda stared at the scene. If she had still been in that bottom bunk, she realized, the weight of the wood and the mattress might have done great harm to her. And what about Laura? Although she had fallen into the mess, she didn’t have a scratch. When Vince heard about it, he felt certain that the angels had indeed been watching both girls.

“My daughters have since come to live with me at their request,” Vince says. “Today we enjoy the life we are building together. God has great plans for us, as long as we leave our lives and faith in his hands.” If you are an absentee dad, for whatever reason, remember that you too can ask angels to comfort and protect your children. It is one of the many gifts that fathers provide.

C 2005 Joan Wester Anderson, www.JoanwAnderson.com