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.