In my studio on New York City’s Upper West Side, I train professional opera, cabaret and Broadway singers right alongside talented amateurs from every occupation you could imagine. When I look out of my eighth-floor window onto Broadway, I know Frank Sinatra was right: If you can make it here…
Competition is fierce. But often it’s that competition that forges strong bonds between people. All different types of people. And it seems that every type of person has come through my studio. One February afternoon about three years ago, I received my most unexpected visitor ever.
I was giving a lesson to a young woman preparing for a Broadway audition. We ran through some exercises to warm up her voice, then I flipped to the show tune we’d been working on. I transposed the music into her best range as I played. She sang clearly and confidently. She just might get the part, I thought.
Halfway through the song, though, I became distracted. Something was different. I felt disconnected from the piano keys under my fingers, from the stool I was sitting on. I could hear the music so I knew I was playing the piano, but suddenly I was a member of the audience instead of part of the performance myself, watching my own fingers on the keys.
I wasn’t frightened by this, and before I could wonder how it had happened, my attention was caught by a small white light in the corner of the room, behind my student.
The light grew brighter as she continued to sing, blocking out the pale winter sun coming through the dusty window until it was so intense it was all I could see. Even my student was swallowed up in its glow, although I could still hear her singing.
Across the room, the figure of a man appeared. I couldn’t make out any distinct features in the brightness, but I immediately knew he had come here on business. And his business was with me.
By now the room was completely bathed in the pure white light. I could not only see it, but I felt it moving through me, filling me up like an empty cup, completely saturating me. Baffled, I looked more closely at my visitor. His face was still hidden, but I didn’t have to see it to know that he knew everything about me, and I wasn’t at all embarrassed. As I basked in the warmth of the white light, the man gave me a message.
Tell Stephanie that God always wants to listen to her, the man instructed me.
I knew the Stephanie he meant: She wasn’t currently taking lessons with me, but we’d worked together for years. Now we kept in touch as friends. Over time we’d had more than a few discussions about faith. Stephanie’s was very strong. “I just can’t be sure of something I’ve never seen for myself,” I would tell her.
Stephanie didn’t need proof to believe in God. He was as real to her as I was. So why had this messenger come to me?
His message delivered, the figure began to disappear with the beautiful white light. I was again aware of the stool under me, and played the last notes as my student finished her song. I took my hands off the keys and smiled uncertainly. Had she seen the light too? “Thanks, Bill,” she said, packing up her music. “See you next week.”
She didn’t notice anything at all! Had I imagined everything? Impossible!
All day while I taught I wondered why God would need me to get a message to Stephanie, who prayed often and regularly. “There’s only one thing to do,” I told myself as I shut the door behind my last student of the day. “I’ll just have to call Stephanie and see what happens.”
It had been too long since I’d spoken to my friend, and I was looking forward to hearing her voice. But as I dialed her number I couldn’t help thinking how crazy this was all going to sound. “Hello?” Stephanie said.
“Hi,” I said hesitantly. “It’s Bill Reed.”
“Bill?” she said. She sounded shocked to hear from me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She took a shaky breath. “Well, Bill, I have a lot going on….Frankly, I’m going through some problems I have to work out for myself. But this morning I started thinking about you. And here you are calling me this very evening after we haven’t spoken in ages.”
If I had any doubts about giving her the message I had received, this coincidence dispelled them. I plunged right into my story and told her what had happened in my studio that afternoon. “I can’t pretend to know what it was I saw or why I saw it, but I have a message for you: God always wants to listen.”
Stephanie said nothing. “I’m sorry,” I jumped in. “Of course you know that already, don’t you.”
“Yes, Bill. I’ve always known that,” Stephanie answered. “My whole life, whenever I’ve had a problem, I’ve always turned to God for help. But this time, for some reason, I didn’t feel like I could go to God. I thought I had to solve this problem on my own. Now I know I don’t. Thank you, Bill, so much.”
“I’m glad I could help,” I said, “but I simply delivered a message.”
“You know, I might not have believed this story coming from anyone but you,” Stephanie said. “But if my old friend Bill Reed says he was visited by an angel, I know he was visited by an angel.”
“Wait a minute, Stephanie, that’s not exactly what I said.”
“What other explanation is there?”
“A week ago I didn’t even think things like this happened,” I said. “If God had a message for you, Stephanie, why didn’t he just give it to you himself?”
“Maybe I’m not the only one who was getting a message,” Stephanie offered.
I remembered all the times I’d told her that I couldn’t completely believe something until I’d seen it with my own eyes. “You are a good woman, Stephanie, and a wise woman,” I said. “Call soon.”
When my first student arrived the next morning, excited over an audition that had gone well, I realized just how important it was to have people to support us, look out for us and care about us. And angels too, I supposed, no matter who we are or what we’re doing. I had seen it with my own eyes, up in my eighth-floor studio overlooking Broadway.
