Angels and the Mirror of Truth

c. Visionary Living, Inc.

From a young age, I have always believed that angels walk among us all the time. They are either invisible until they need to be seen, or they walk disguised as ordinary people. They are on missions, agendas and their own matters, and some are responding to calls for help. The “mysterious stranger” who arrives at a moment of crisis to help out is one of the most common ways that people have encounters with the heavenly host. Sometimes the call is deliberate and urgent, and sometimes the call for help is more subtle, a beacon of despair and hopelessness that reaches out from the depths of our hearts into the spiritual realms.

Over the years of my research of angels, I have collected many stories from people who are convinced that angels came to their rescue when they needed help the most, including turning points in life. The story below is one of my favorites, from my book I Bring You Glad Tidings: Inspiring True Stories of Christmas Angels. It comes from a young woman whose life had completely unraveled, and how one night a mysterious stranger angel helped her get her life back.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The last time Kelly saw her father was the day he asked her if she and her little brother wanted to come and have dinner with him. Her brother wanted to go, but Kelly said no. She’d been invited to spend the evening and night at her best friend’s home. The next day, her father was dead, shot point blank in the head by his own hand. The date was December 6.

It was an unbearable shock for an eleven-year-old girl and her seven-year-old brother, despite all the years of abusive behavior that came out of a bottle of alcohol. The horror of it didn’t sink in until Kelly stole a peek into the window of the room where her father had met his violent end, and she recoiled from the blood-soaked walls and ceiling.

The guilt was even more unbearable. If she hadn’t been so selfish, she would have seen her father at least one more time. Maybe if they’d gone to dinner, she and her brother, their father wouldn’t have killed himself.

And then the shame set in. She was worthless. Not important enough for her father to stick around for. Not worth anything at all.

It didn’t matter that her father=s troubles were much bigger than she could comprehend. That he had been addicted to alcohol. Or that his addiction had created a family life of misery.

Sometimes he was gone for days without explanation, and her mother would sit by cold dinners and weep without end. There would be screaming and fighting and assaults with pots and pans. The drinking drove Kelly=s mother to desperation. Once, when Kelly was eight years old, she watched her mother slit her wrists. They were superficial cuts, a cry for attention, and Kelly’s father rushed his wife to the hospital. When that attempt failed to change his ways, she tried again, by overdosing on pills. There was another rush to the hospital and her stomach was pumped. The children cowered at home alone all night.

When he took his life, a divorce was finally in progress. Even though he had found solace in another relationship, there was no peace for his soul in living, and so he tried to find it in death.

On January 17, just a little over a month after her father’s suicide, the father of her best friend called her aside and asked, “How are you feeling about it now?” Little Kelly tried to be brave, and used the words she=d heard her mother say: “Oh, it’s much better now, he’s in peace, he doesn’t have to drive us crazy.” It wasn’t how she felt at all.

The next day, the news came that her friend’s dad had killed himself in the very same way– a shot to the head.

Wham wham. Two blows that shattered Kelly’s very foundation.

Thus began the spiral downward, what Kelly later called “swirling the drain.” The emptiness and the worthlessness grew bigger and bigger. The only thing that seemed to fill the space and keep the darkness away was numbness, and she found it in the wild life.

By the time she was in high school, Kelly was keeping company with a fast crowd. She started with alcohol and marijuana. It was the sophisticated thing to do in her small town–everyone who was cool did booze and drugs. At seventeen, she tried cocaine, and was a regular user at age nineteen. Life was getting high.

Kelly became involved with a man who shared her taste for drinking. They moved into a house together. They used drugs sparingly, and even gave them up for two years, but continued drinking. The relationship fell apart when her partner cheated on her. It was another body blow to her already low self-esteem.

Kelly fled to her old friends and haunts. The friends had graduated to heavier drug usage, and she fell right into step with them.

By the time Kelly was twenty-three, she was thoroughly miserable, but had neither the motivation nor the strength to change her situation. She swirled the drain, going down deeper and deeper into a bottomless pit of unhappiness. The next drink, the next line of cocaine would hold the misery at bay for awhile. She was able to keep a job, but night after night, she went out drinking and then dragged herself to work hung over. She called in sick often.

The year that she turned twenty-three, on the night before Christmas Eve, Kelly was partying as usual. Around 10 to 11 p.m., she and four friends set out to drink at a neighborhood bar in Milwaukee that Kelly had never been to before. They arrived to a nearly empty establishment. There were three people seated in a far corner. Kelly and her friends took a table near the bar and got themselves drinks. Hers was a screwdriver.

Finishing her drink, she went to the ladies room and snorted a small amount of coke. She returned to her table and resumed chatting with her friends. The bar was still nearly empty. One of the friends handed her some money and said, “Here, get us some more drinks.” She took everybody’s order and turned to go to the bartender, who was working behind the bar.

Suddenly she noticed that a large black man with a balding head was seated at the bar. Where did he come from? Kelly thought, wondering how she missed his entrance. Plus, it was unusual to see people of color in this particular part of town.

The man looked straight at her with the most compelling, magnetizing eyes she had ever seen. A mug of beer, full right to the brim and frothy as though freshly poured, sat in front of him.

She had the impression that he was kind. The thought made her feel odd. How could she possibly know that? He was a total stranger.

The man started talking to her in a low voice that was hard to hear.

“What?” she said.

He waved her over to him. When she was closer, he said quietly, “You don’t need to do that.” He pointed to the bottles of liquor behind the bar.

Kelly looked at him, puzzled.

“You know what you need to do,” the man said firmly. “You’re hurting herself, and that isn’t what God wants you to do. There is a reason you are here and there are things that you need to do.”

How does he know anything about me? Kelly thought. She wasn’t alarmed, however. The man had a comforting presence, and it seemed like the most natural thing to stand there and talk to him. “What do you mean?” she asked. “What things?”

“You’ll see,” he answered vaguely. “But you can’t continue on the path you are going. It’s not where you are meant to be.”

Kelly continued talking to the man. The surroundings of the bar faded away. Time seemed to stand still. He seemed to know so much about her. Talking to him was like talking to a father, the kind she never had, one who made her feel enveloped in unconditional love.

Everything he said hit the target about how Kelly was wasting her life. About her feelings of worthlessness. About her guilt over her father’s suicide. The man wasn’t at all judgmental. Rather, he offered words of wisdom, hope and encouragement that resonated deeply within her soul, touching a truth.

After what seemed like a long time–but turned out to be only a few minutes–Kelly walked back to her table of friends. “Hey, where’s our drinks?” one of them wanted to know.

She started to tell them about the strange man at the bar. She turned to point–but no one was there. The man had mysteriously vanished. A full mug of beer, untouched, sat alone on the bar countertop.

Kelly’s friends hooted with laughter.

“But there’s his beer!” she protested.

More gales of laughter. There had been no big, bald black man sitting at the bar, they insisted. They would have seen him. “You’re crazy!” They told her.

A queer feeling passed through Kelly. The thought crossed her mind that perhaps this was no ordinary man. Maybe he was an agent of God. Was he an angel? Had God reached out to her and spoken to her?

Kelly let the matter drop and tried to resume the holiday merry-making with her friends. She ordered more drinks. As she drank into the night, the image of the strange man refused to go away. She wanted to remember every word he had spoken, but most vanished like wisps of dreams.

But the essence of what he said stayed with her, and affected her deeply. Kelly knew he was right. She had to take responsibility for herself, take action to change her life. She couldn’t change the past. She couldn’t change other people. She could only change herself.

Kelly thought about angels. She believed in angels, though she never had expected to encounter one. Especially in a bar. Weren’t angels supposed to have wings and be obvious? But if angels were real and God did use them to talk to people, wouldn’t they go to a place where they were likely to find you? Wouldn’t they seem like a friendly person? Kelly had to admit that the place she most likely could be found would be a bar or a party.

The man most definitely had to have been angel. His eyes were so unusual, so compelling. Kelly had never seen eyes like that in a person. He knew too much about her. He said just the right things–a spiritual message that went straight to the core of her being.

Within days Kelly called an addictions treatment center and was put on a waiting list. She was admitted about a month later. Initially it was hard for her to stay in the program. She looked at others there, and thought them worse off and more desperate. They were the ones who needed treatment, not her. But soon she saw the desperation and need in herself, and stayed.

With the help of that program and Alcoholics Anonymous, Kelly got herself clean, straight and sober. She was able to reclaim her self-worth and self-esteem, and see herself as a good person who deserved to be loved, and who had a lot of love to give and many accomplishments to achieve in the world. Three years later, she met a wonderful man through AA. They fell in love, got married and became the happy parents of two children.

A decade has passed since that fateful Christmas, and Kelly still thinks about the mysterious black man. She knows without a doubt he was her personal angel, come to make her look into a mirror of truth. He saved her life.

She has often wished that she could find him and thank him, but–in the fashion of angels and the mysterious workings of divine intervention–he has never been seen since. Instead, his work carries on through Kelly, who has become an angel to others. She shares her story of adversity and triumph, planting the seeds of hope and encouragement that enable others to break free of their prisons of addiction and find the happiness that is rightfully theirs.

###