Angels Among Us

     This angel, my mother's favorite Christmas decoration, is also a music box, and she spins elegantly to "Silent Night."

     I sometimes think this is how we like our angels, beautiful, soothing, and fixed in place.

     A woman told me once that she believed in angels, and she even had proof, thrusting into my hands two old Polaroids. "The angel", she told me with a sage nod of the head, with trembling finger pointing towards what I took to be a reflection of the camera's flash off a mirror in the background.

          Angels I have encountered, both in the Bible and in my personal experience, have been neither so retiring or discreet, so undemanding or so ready to let us enjoy the status quo.

     In the Bible, angels are messengers, delivering messages from God to usually startled just-plain-folk.  Abram and Sarai, knowing that they are well past child-bearing age, entertain three desert visitors for dinner, and are shocked to discover that they had been visited by angels bearing news of a new beginning. Mary, whose hopes centered on her recent engagement to a man named Joseph, is blown away when an angel visits her and tells her that she has been made a partner in a divine plan to save her people.

     In my life, there was the Christian Education director who told me that she thought I should teach church school to 7th and 8th Graders, back at at time when I had no idea that I could attempt such a thing, and no inkling that this was anything I might ever want to do; there was the former missionary who stopped into worship at the church I served one Sunday and told us, in the time of prayer concerns, of the horrors of the civil war in Sri Lanka, which led to a mutually-enriching partnership between our church and a village church in that country; there was that obstinate Academic Dean at seminary who told me I had to take a course across the river at Harvard Div School (the horror!), which is where I ended up meeting an amazing theology student who joined me in the adventure of married life.  All this, for starters...

     Who are the angels in your life?  Looking back, where can you see that divine messengers have appeared on your doorstep, startling you with their news, calling you into something new?  Where are they today, and will you entertain them?