Sunday always found me at the same simple country church. We were a small congregation, about 40 or 50 people, and that meant everyone was familiar. I didn’t know every parishioner well, but we exchanged pleasantries before the service, kept each other up to date on our health and families.
One of our flock in particular didn’t have to tell us how he was doing. This parishioner, an older man with cancer, got paler and thinner each Sunday. He and his wife often sat across the aisle from my husband, David, and me. I had no specific details about the man’s illness, and didn’t want to pry, but as we walked to our pew one rainy Sunday I feared that his diagnosis was grim. “How are you today?” I asked.
“I’m one blessed man!” he said, patting me on the back. I wondered how someone in his position could be so brave.
“His voice sounded different today,” I whispered to my husband. “Softer, shakier—weaker.” I watched as the couple took their seats. His wife sat on the outside. The man leaned his frail body up against the church’s tan paneled wall, as if he needed support.
I bowed my head. Lord, please watch over this man and ease his suffering. But what if his suffering would end in death? What then?
The choir began to sing and I tried to lose myself in the melody of a gentle hymn. I relaxed into the sturdy high back of the wooden pew until something made me turn my head. A sphere of light lit up the wall in the back of the church. The sphere was like a spotlight, but its edges were soft and almost feathery. It was nothing so amazing, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Where is it coming from? I wondered. I looked at the small frosted windows of our church. They would never let in a light this bright, this white. Especially on a rainy day.
As the choir sang, I watched the light travel steadily, brilliantly along the wall. When it suddenly stopped, I looked around again for a source and I found none. No window, no lamp, no child with a magnifying glass.
The light remained stationary, just a few feet above the head of the sick parishioner. The sphere hovered over him for several moments—until, in an instant, it vanished.
I looked at David, then the rest of the congregation, to see if anyone else had witnessed this strange event. They were all oblivious to what I had just seen.
But what exactly had I just seen?
I told David about it in the car. “I think it was an angel,” I said. “I know it was an angel.”
“An angel of light,” David said.
Something tugged at my heart. “Yes,” I said, liking the sound of that so much I had to say it myself. “An angel of light.”
The following Sunday the sick parishioner and his wife weren’t in their seats. During the service an announcement was made. The man had died on Monday, the day after I saw the angel hover above his head. An angel of light came to escort him to heaven. But why had God allowed me to see this? Was it just one of those mysteries with no answer? It seemed so for several years.
Eight years, to be exact. Eight years after I saw the angel, my own dear husband died. It was a terrible time, but when I was feeling my worst I found myself thinking about that angel of light. It gave me such comfort, knowing that an angel watched over David, waiting to escort him to heaven. In recent years I was diagnosed with leukemia, but I’m doing terrific. I feel well physically. What’s more important is how I feel inside. And I understand what that parishioner meant when he said, “I am a blessed man.” When my time comes, an angel of light will be waiting for me.
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