My child said she saw an angel.
And so, children sometimes peel back the curtain of heaven for us to quickly glimpse before the curtain is closed again. All we have left is a memory. What is our response to hearing stories that push us into the realm of the divine, whether we want to go there or not?
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I was stretched recently in my travels to California. I have been spiritually stretched before. The gift of being stretched can spiral outward to others if they, too, say, “If God touched that person’s life, He could touch my life, too!”
So below is a previously published article about another of those stretching moments.
Click HERE to continue reading.
Thank you for liking me! I like you too! Let’s journey together!
My child said she saw an angel.
And so, children sometimes peel back the curtain of heaven for us to quickly glimpse before the curtain is closed again. All we have left is a memory. What is our response to hearing stories that seem to push us into the realm of the divine, whether we want to go there or not?
Will the divine moments that we hear about be wasted on us?
There are three typical responses to another’s spiritual experiences: we become blind, jealous, or thirsty.
Most commonly, we become blind. Like a beautiful pristine camping spot, one mountain range further than we usually travel on our summer holidays, we won’t go there. It is not within the realm of our routine.
And so we are unable to see.
WAS there ever a pristine camping spot one mountain range over, we wonder, years later? WAS it an angel she said she saw? And then we are distracted again by our lunch.
The second most frequent response to stories of divine encounters is jealousy.
Instead of falling on our knees in worship and petitioning for a similar outpouring of the divine in our parched lives, some of us will compare. The soil of our hearts hardens just a little bit. That didn’t happen to ME.
They must think they are SPECIAL, we reason. They must assume they are MORE SPECIAL than ME. Often, that idea hadn’t crossed their minds.
But we’ve already tossed the implications of the divine moment in self-righteous indignation.
The third response, that very few travel, is a recognition of our spiritual thirst.
This heart response is gas for our car. We understand that each of us is offered an adoption certificate into the family of God, which comes with a royal inheritance. And from that identity, we can petition the Father, on our knees before Him, and ask, “Can You please pour out the divine in my life, God?”
We can beg Him for water because we see another who seems to have found a drink.
He always has more water.
I want you woven into a tapestry of love, in touch with everything there is to know of God.
The Message
God, soften the soil of our hearts equally through the encounters we experience in ourselves and those we hear about from others. Thank you that we can come to You with our doubts too and that You meet us exactly where we are. I pray we stop trying to stuff You into a box.
Keep waking us to a deeper understanding of your love, I pray.
So, my toddler said she saw an angel one day.
Fast forward about seven years. We had moved to another house by that time. The subject of angels came up over lunch.
“You saw an angel once,” I ventured to that same child, now about ten years old.
I wondered if she would remember.
“WHAATT?” Her older sister demanded. She prided herself, as an older sister’s right, to know ALL of the family stories. How had she never heard this one?
I hadn’t mentioned it in all those years except for telling one friend and my husband what happened immediately afterward.
Who would have believed her anyway?
Children don’t have many words when they are three years old. Would she remember the incident now? And if so, could put more words around the experience? As much as possible, I wanted the conversation to come from her, not directed by me or influenced by my memory.
“Do you remember seeing an angel?” I ventured.
She said, “Yes”
I wanted to test her, to see if she was speaking accurately.
“Where were you when you saw the angel?”
“At the other house.”
I was startled.
Yes.
“And where was the angel?”
She said, “Outside”.
Oh no, I thought, she doesn’t remember. This event happened in the playroom. I was about to clean up the dishes when she continued, explaining more, “The angel was outside”.
Oh! Yes, I thought, the angel was outside the window we were staring at. That made sense.
Without my prompting, she explained that she was looking out the window in the playroom at the time.
She had remembered this very incident, which brought me shivers. This child was officially diagnosed with memory challenges a short time after this event*.
And yet she remembered the details of this event from many years earlier.
“What did you see?” I asked gently.
“The angel was singing. It had gold shoes and a gold sash.”
I sensed that we were standing on holy ground.
“Oh,” I said.
What else was there to say?
And then we finished our lunch.
~
And what is our response when divine moments encroach upon our lives?
Everyone should allow divine moments, either our own or others, to propel them further along God’s spiritual path for them. But how? The softness of our heart, exposed as one of three common responses, will determine whether we stay stuck in the mud spiritually or whether we are launched further and deeper along our spiritual paths.
In the next post, we will evaluate these most common heart responses after God interrupts the mundane.
He ordered his angels to guard you wherever you go.
The Message
God, thank you that sometimes, for a brief moment, You open our eyes to the possibility of the divine through our or others’ experiences.
Help us wake up to grasp what is right before us when our eyes are opened and our ears can hear. Help us to speak openly about what we have heard and seen. May the unusual become commonplace in each of our lives, we pray.
While we do not place our faith directly in angels, we should place it in the God who rules the angels; then we can have peace.
Billy Graham
What unusual divine moments have you experienced? Or what is a sacred moment that another has told you about that seemed plausible? Has this moment or a curiosity about this experience propelled your spiritual journey?
Blogpost Footnotes
*These cognitive challenges were later healed years after this event through diet, but that is a story for another day.
“Mommy, Mommy!” she called out, running into the room.
She was an adorable three-year-old redhead. Her older sister is comparatively more excitable. The older sister would emotionally max out due to many stimuli, including re-noticing her pink fairy wand or anyone visiting, no matter how sullen and grumpy.
This three-year-old was more even keel at both ends of the excited-angry spectrum.
And I had very rarely seen this child so exuberant.
She grabbed my hand and led me to a run. Where were we going? I wondered with a smile. I tried to get my excited face on, not wanting to squelch whatever new joy she had discovered.
We ran hand in hand to their playroom, and she stopped in front of the window. She looked triumphantly at me. I looked around, trying to grasp what she was showing me.
“Angel!” she exclaimed with desperation, pointing to the window.
Oh! I nodded and smiled.
I didn’t want to correct her, to say, “Oh honey, there is no angel there.”
What if she was seeing an angel? I let her correct me instead. And so my spiritual journey was fueled anew.
We stood hand in hand, looking out the window for a minute or two.
“Oh! Angel gone!” she exclaimed. And just as suddenly, she sat on the floor nearby, re-stacking her blocks.
Kids usher us into the divine. And parenting, because it involves kids, is like steroids for the spiritual life. They violently remove our blinders to how we have stuffed God into the small box of our expectations.
Spend time with children, and we fall to the ground, our knowledge tripping us up. Everything we thought we understood about spirituality has been upended and we are on our rears with dirt in our hair. Our children offer to help us to our feet.
They simplify things for us.
Consider Diane M. Komp, MD, a pediatric oncologist from Yale who:
“found a personal faith while treating . . .. dying children”
A Window to Heaven
In Dr. Komp’s words, children are the “littlest of God’s giants.”
So, can children help us on our spiritual journeys? That depends on our heart’s reaction to the clues children show us – more on this next time. But let’s assume that children sometimes walk ahead of us in critical ways.
Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God’s kingdom
The Message
God, give us humility to be led by our children further and deeper into the essential truths of Your Kingdom, we pray.
I’ll continue this story next time.
Restoring Life 