A reader passes along this story.
The story about the visitor to the Kildalton Old Parish Church struck a cord with me. I thought I might tell you a story from my family.
I believe in angels. I believe in them because the Scriptures speaks of them. I also believe because my father saw one. I believe him, and received the Faith from him, so if he says it happened, it happened. My parents led me to faith in Jesus Christ, so they are both my physical and my spiritual parents.
My father told me this story many years ago. It’s been a long time since I’ve asked him to tell it, so some of the details are fuzzy and possibly slightly inaccurate, but the essence of the story is true. That I would assert above all else: this story is true. I believe it. My father was not telling a ghost story, but recounting cold, hard fact. If some of the details diverge from the way he told it to me, the way it happened, the fault is entirely mine.
My father and mother were married in El Paso, Texas, shortly after he graduated from USMA in 19–. USMA (pronounced “USE-may”) is the United States Military Academy, the Academy for the United States Army. It is better known as West Point. My mother had finished college early and moved El Paso to attend the graduate program in English at UTEP. She lived there with her sister, who was a nurse in a Catholic hospital. My mother and aunt are lifelong Southern Baptists, but my aunt chose to work at that Catholic hospital because they did not perform abortions. She would go on to a long career on the foreign mission field as a nurse midwife in Sub-Saharan Africa, bringing babies into the world and spreading the Gospel of Christ. She has retired from that mission field to find a new place as an ultrasound technician in a crisis pregnancy center, because that’s just who she is.
Recently commissioned First Lieutenants in the US Army don’t make a lot of money, so my folks didn’t live in a good part of town. As my dad related the story, every other other apartment around them was vandalized with graffiti or broken into, except for theirs. One night, my father learned something that could explain how.
A loud noise woke him in the middle of the night. He went to investigate. It sounded like someone was trying to break in. But whoever it was couldn’t because, “There was an angel holding the door closed.”
Those are very nearly the words my father used, if they aren’t an exact quote. He never described the angel, but I always had the impression of an angel physically present somehow, with a literal hand pressed against the door, holding it shut from the inside. I can’t remember whether he said there was one, or more than one, but I can’t imagine needing more than one angel. It’s like, “One riot, one ranger.” One break-in, one angel. I imagine one tall, muscular man with long hair dressed in a white robe putting all his weight against the door with one outstretched arm holding it closed. He is translucent, but also radiant: a man made of light, glowing softly in the darkness.
I praise God for the way he defended my family.
May God defend us all.
