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angels, as messengers of God, are invested with divine
authority, which I believe they carry with them when they come
down to us humans.
    Ulrich and Ellen, close friends of mine over many decades (Ellen is
my secretary), experienced this in a very real way. They had eight
children, but lost their two youngest in the same year, 1977. The
first, Mark John, died at age three-and-a-half from cancer; I have
told his story at length in my book on children. Five months after
this death, Ellen herself almost died.
    During the birth of their youngest child, Marie Johanna, Ellen
bled so heavily that she required full resuscitation and transfusion.
Sufficient blood was not available and members of her community
with the right type had to be awakened at night and asked to
donate. Within an hour, new blood was circulating through her
body. Yet still the outlook was bleak, and the attending physician
commented, “All that will help now is prayer.” Sensing the same,
those of us gathered at the hospital, including those who had just
donated their blood, interceded in earnest prayer. Ellen did survive,
with all her faculties intact, but Marie Johanna suffered brain
damage from lack of oxygen during the birth. Because the doctors
at the university hospital felt medicine had nothing more to offer,
the baby was brought home. She lived for nine more weeks.
    My father, Ulrich and Ellen’s pastor at the time, said repeatedly
during those days, “Marie’s life is on a thread between heaven and
earth. Only prayer is keeping her alive.” Indeed, the baby’s doctors
said her survival was beyond reason – more than science could account for.
    Then, on the day before Christmas, she died. Her mother remembers:
    On Christmas Eve we were gathered around our baby. I was
holding her when suddenly Marie, who had never focused her
eyes on anything before, opened them wide – they were like
oceans: deep, dark blue, and bright – and she was looking at
something.
There was a movement, a breath of air. I felt Marie’s soul
lifted from my arms and pass in front of me, and firm, stiff wings
brushed my face. There was a scent, like the fragrance of a garden. Our children sensed that something had happened. I knew.
We looked down and could see that she was gone.
    The presence of angels remains a mystery: completely real, but not
completely recognized or acknowledged. Yet precisely at the point
beyond which our minds cannot comprehend, we must allow our
hearts to believe. A mother recently related the following to me:
    One afternoon my little daughter Jane and I were sitting by an
open window in our third-floor apartment. She was in her
highchair and I was feeding her cereal. I left the room for a
moment to get milk from the fridge, and when I returned my
heart skipped a beat: Jane was not only standing for the first
time in her life, but she had turned around and was leaning out
the window. I didn’t make a sound afraid that if I shouted she
would lose her balance and fall. I moved across the room and
grabbed her from behind. Relief flooded over me as I held her in
my arms. Then I looked down from the window and saw, some
thirty feet below, my neighbor Cynthia. She was standing there,
looking up, not saying a word, with her arms wide open, ready
to catch Jane. I thanked God silently, hugged Jane, and wept.
Later I went to thank Cynthia, but she had no memory of
the incident; in fact, she claimed she was never there.
    Carole, a close friend who died not long ago after a three-year
battle with cancer, wrote to me regarding angels:
    For some reason anything about angels goes straight to the
heart. We don’t know how many there are, what they look like,
all the people they must be protecting every day, or the comfort
they bring. It is hard to conceive of God being everywhere, listening to every heart at every moment, and it’s hard to imagine
him even