All the Pretty Angels

When I was a kid, my mother believed in angels, but I didn’t. I was on the fence about angels. I didn’t believe in hocus pocus. My thought was, if angels were real, then why were they always the worst team in the Major Leagues? 

My mother used to say, “When you get older, you will believe.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

“Because, when you’re older there will be moments in your life when you cannot logically explain things without believing.”

Mothers.

But then I started writing. And almost immediately, I started receiving stories from people.

Like this one: The young woman was in her car. It was midnight. The two-lane highway was desolate.

Her Impala struck a deer. It wasn't just a deer. It was an animal about the size of a subtropical continent. Her car spun. The automobile went into the opposite lane.

An oncoming vehicle struck her. She blacked out.

The next thing she remembers is a man helping her from the car. He lifted her out. He placed her against the guardrail. “You’re going to be okay,” he said.

When the paramedics found her, she was asking where the man went. “Ma’am,” the EMTs explained, “Nobody travels this highway at this time of night.”

That’s when she looked at what used to be her car. It was a pile of soot. If she would have been inside, she would have been permanently checked into the Horizontal Hilton.

And here’s another. The man worked at a commercial factory. He was overseeing huge production machines. And when one of the machines started acting up, one of his workers, a young woman, tried to fix the mechanical problem herself.

The employee had her arm inside the machine when one of the hydraulic levers pinned her arm inside the machine and was about to sever her limb.

The foreman was trying to help, so were the others, but they were incapable. That’s when a young man, dressed in jeans and T-shirt, showed up. Using his brute strength, the young man released the hydraulic arms and freed the woman.

“There was no way any human could have moved these hydraulic machines,” said the old foreman. “He would have had to be superhuman.”

When the woman was freed, she was in shock. They splashed cold water on her face. And when the employees looked for the woman’s hero, to thank him, nobody could find him. Nobody knew who he was.

Wait. I’m not done.

There was a young woman of 12 who was swimming across the lake where her family lived. She was doing it on a dare. Her friends had dared her to swim more than a mile across the slough. When she reached the middle point, she began to get tired and couldn’t go on. Her swimming turned into dog paddling. Her dog paddling turned into drowning.

There was a man in a boat who arrived and dragged her into his skiff. He rowed her to shore. And when they found her, there was an empty boat on the shore that nobody recognized. There were no identifying registration numbers on the boat. No identifying characteristics. The man was nowhere to be found.

Today, the woman is 64 years old. Her family still owns and uses that boat.

I tell you all this because about 10 years ago, I finally broke down and wrote my first story about the supernatural. It was a story told to me by an old man who claimed an angel saved his life.

Within 24 hours, I had received more angel stories than I knew what to do with. The stories had been emailed to me from all parts. Even from far, faraway places like Indonesia, Chile, and Milwaukee.

Currently, I still receive dozens of angel stories per week. I have received them from every state in the Union, and most European countries. I have thousands in my possession. I share them from time to time, even though I have no business doing so—I’m not what you’d call an inspirational writer. I’m more of a Pabst Blue Ribbon enthusiast. Mostly, I share these stories because I don’t know what else to do with them.

So anyway, a few days ago, I shared another angel story. Whereupon my mother immediately called me and said, “I thought you didn’t believe in angels.”

Well. You know mothers. They just love to rub it in.