by William A. Burt

Out Of The Darkness

Michael Bryant’s encounter with an angel – a small, gentle Hispanic lady with a soft voice and comforting hands – was truly a life-altering experience when he was at his lowest ebb one lonely Christmas just a few years ago.

He describes his amazing encounter in a moving letter to the Miami Herald:

“For almost four years now, I can’t think of my accident without thinking of her.

“She came out of the darkness to help me out of a car wreck that should have killed me, and comforted me until the ambulance came.

“She stayed with me until the police handcuffed me and took me away. I would later be charged with DUI, my life was about to change, and I was forced to take a deeper look inward.

“I had woken up one Christmas morning and realized I was truly alone. It was then that I started going to bars to be around others, and then that I started to drink heavily.

“I was driving down one of those infamous San Francisco hills when I slid through a traffic light, hit the back of a taxi, and crashed into a street lamp. If I had gone through the intersection one second sooner, I not only would have killed myself but the passengers in the taxi.

“Before I could regain my senses, she was there – pulling me out of the car, whispering to me that everything would be OK, that the ambulance was on its way. She was small, Latin, with short black hair. She had a soft voice and comforting hands. She sat with me in the ambulance as they cleaned the blood from my face and hands. And then she was gone.

“I wondered who she was, and why she chose to help me. I went back to the scene days later and wandered around for hours. I described her and asked people in the streets if they knew her. Nothing. She came from nowhere, she helped me, and she disappeared.

“Years later, I still can’t think about the accident without thinking of her. An Angel? She was to me.”

An Assurance Of Peace

A few days short of her eighteenth birthday, Charmaine Donnelly entered a religious order because she felt her life was out of control.

“It was an attempt to awaken the small, still voice inside me,” she says. “I thought the convent would offer me physical comfort and spiritual discovery. Through no fault of the convent, I found neither. I was still in the desert.”

Six years later, she left the convent, still emotionally despondent. Her life went into a tailspin – marriages, divorces, failures, dabbling in cults, drug and alcohol use, depression.

Then an angel intervened. Charmaine, now forty-nine, recalled in a Buffalo News interview how an angelic presence turned her life around.

“At one low point in my life I happened to be driving in the country by myself. I had this sense that this being was with me. It was the most absolutely exquisite assurance of peace I had ever had in my life up to that moment.

“This peaceful presence stayed with me for quite a while. It looked angelic to me. I could see a light – like when you read near-death experience books and people say there is no description on earth for the light they see.”

Sadly, that exquisite feeling of peace passed for Charmaine. And for several long, desolate years, she continued to feel constant despair.

Again she cried out for help – and it came again in the form of a support group of caring individuals who understood her despair because they had traveled the same, painful route.

Up to that point, Charmaine had seen God “as a sort of judge, a quite harsh judge. An Old Testament kind of person,” she recalls.

Now she rejoiced, “Suddenly, it was as if someone had turned up the flame under my spiritual hunger. I was learning to live according to a set of principles; to function in the world in a responsible, responsive way.

“I began to feel safe, protected,” she says. “Life at last had meaning. Being connected to a spiritual being had a lot of sweetness for me, like a deep love affair.”

And one of the most important side effects of her life-changing experience was the return of that angelic light, the comforting presence she had felt on that lonely country highway.

“I was in Hawaii on a retreat and a woman asked me if I knew that there are angels all around me, that we are protected by angels,” remembers Charmaine. “This reawakened my conscious connection with angels.”

That comforting connection stayed with Charmaine throughout a period when tragedy and despair again threatened her well-being.

“I was diagnosed with a potentially fatal, progressive disease,” Charmaine explains. “But I didn’t give up.

“I now knew that the discipline of gratitude can transform every hurtful, troublesome, painful, dark situation – so I used my will to be grateful even when I didn’t feel grateful.

“Now I don’t know words strong enough to express what I have – but simply to say it is a new appreciation for the wisdom of God’s will and the enormous beauty that the love and support of others offers us. I am glad I have lived long enough to be experiencing the kind of life I have now.”

In An Angel’s Arms

When Donald E. Styck, of Leesburg, Georgia was just three years old, he had an angel encounter that has been etched indelibly in his consciousness all his life.

Donald writes:

“I was a little boy, only three and a half years old, when the angel Gabriel came down and picked me up and took me up in the sky and showed me the pretty trees, the fields and flowers.

“It’s all so vivid in my memory. I remember the angel saying, ‘Isn’t this pretty.’ Then he said: ‘I had better put you down now or your mother will be worried about you.’ I have a clear recollection of being dropped two to three feet to the earth.

“Years later, I had other angel experiences. One I’ll never forget is when one of God’s angels helped drive my car for me in a blinding snowstorm. That storm caused great damage in our neighborhood. Roads were impassable, trees were blown down, and it was chaos all over. But the little house trailer where we lived was untouched.”

Underwater Angel

An angel appeared to rescue diver Debra Pruett in the murky depths of a river as she was about to slice her trapped finger off to save her life.

With just five minutes of air left in her tank and her finger caught in the door of a submerged car, firefighter Debra Pruett was faced with a life-or-death decision – she had to cut off her finger or drown.

But just as she was about to slice into her skin, Debra says, her hand and her life were saved by an angel!

“I was moments away from death when out of the darkness a strange light appeared,” recalled Debra, mother of two. “It was an angel. Nothing will ever convince me otherwise.”

Coincidental with the appearance of the comforting light. Debra’s trapped finger slipped free and she found herself swimming to the surface and safety.

Ironically, Debra – something of an angel herself – was risking her own life to rescue a baby she believed was still trapped in the car when her guardian angel lent a hand.

The riveting drama took place October 14, 1991, when Pruett and other divers with Nashville, Tennessee’s elite fire department rescue squad dove in search of a despondent woman who’d driven her car off a ramp into the Cumberland River. Debra found the woman and dragged her to the surface. Then she went back into the murky depths to search for a baby reported to be in the car.

By the time she found the car again, the brave rescuer had less than six minutes of air time left in her tank. Determinedly, she reached to open the car’s door when a sudden shift in water pressure slammed it on her middle finger! She frantically tried to open the door, but it wouldn’t budge. “I knew I’d drown if I didn’t take my knife out and cut off my finger. I decided to do it.

“I prayed: ‘Help me, God. Please don’t let me die like this.’ That’s when the angel appeared. I turned and over my shoulder I saw this bright light. The light came within arm’s length, and then it was gone. Suddenly my finger was free.”

Debra scrambled to the surface and was pulled into a boat by two other rescuers. Fortunately, there was no baby in the car, she was told.

She was curious about the light she had seen, thinking perhaps it was one of her colleagues who had come after her. She asked her supervisor which diver had gone down and tried to rescue her.

“Nobody,” responded her puzzled chief.

“That’s when I knew it had to have been an angel,” says Debra.

Saved From Killer Sniper

Olivia Sue Lambert was a student at West Virginia University when a protective angel in a long luminous robe appeared to her and a friend in broad daylight with a warning that saved then from dying at the hands of a psycho killer.

Olivia, of Phillipi, West Virginia was out for a walk on the university campus one clear summer’s day in the early 1960s with Alun, a fellow graduate student, when the angel appeared.

The young couple were nearing the Monongahela River when the angel suddenly confronted them and said, “Go no farther. You are in grave danger. Turn around and go back the way you came. Go slowly. Now.”

For years the incident was lodged firmly in Olivia’s mind. “Then one day, several years later, a headline in the local paper caught my eye. ‘Morgantown Sniper Strikes Again’.

“I read with horror about a person who had randomly killed over a period of years, always striking in broad daylight, using a high-powered rifle atop a ridge overlooking the Monongahela River.

“Realizing Alun and I had been saved that day by one of God’s angels, I whispered, ‘Thank you, Lord.’”

Angels On The Cliff

Probably the most dramatic intervention of guardian angels ever reported is the story of Chantal Lakey, which has been documented in Time magazine and in a dramatic network television reenactment.

A band of protective guardian angels led Chantal to safety as she clung desperately to the face of a four-hundred-foot sheer cliff, her hands and feet unable to find a firm grip on wet rock as slippery as ice.

Seconds before, Chantal watched in horror as her beloved fiance, Dale, toppled to his death on the rocks below. She was certain she would follow him.

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” she screamed at the top of her voice. “Please help me!”

Chantal and Dale, driving from a visit to Eugene, Oregon to their home in San Diego, had stopped to enjoy the rugged scenery atop the coastal cliff on California’s scenic Highway 101.

They hiked a winding trail to a spot called Lookout Point, where they could see the Pacific Ocean. Entranced by the scenery, they decided to continue down the trail to the ocean’s edge.

“Very soon we realized what a foolish thing we had done,” remembers Chantal. “The path was fast becoming a sheer cliff. But it was too late to turn back – the climb up was too steep. There was nowhere to go but down. To make matters worse, it began to rain – a soft light drizzle that turned the loose rock as slippery as soap.”

As Dale inched his way down, he paused on a tiny ledge, reaching his hand behind him to help Chantal find her footing. Then, as he was looking upward at Chantal, he simply fell off the ledge to his death on the rocks below.

Chantal went completely numb, trapped in a real-life nightmare unfolding in front of her eyes. She had no idea how to descend the cliff and she prayed and screamed, convinced she was doomed to share Dale’s fate.

Then came the miracle: “I suddenly felt as though the gateway between heaven and earth had opened up. And I saw angels all around me like a wall of protection, holding me up, closing in around me to keep me from falling off the cliff.

“The next thing I remember is looking up and seeing the cliff high above. Somehow I had managed to descend more than three-hundred feet of slippery wet shale safely, and I was about seventy-five feet above the beach. I have no idea how I did it, but I am convinced that the heavenly beings who had surrounded me high on the cliff supported me in some way as I came down. I felt their presence all around me.”

On the beach safely, she made her way to the main highway, where she flagged down a passing motorist. A rescue team later recovered Dale’s lifeless body. They marveled how she had been able to descend that sheer four-hundred-foot cliff.

“How you got down that rock face safely is beyond me,” one rescue team member later told her. “Chantal, you’re a living, breathing miracle!”

A Businesslike Savior

A soft-spoken businessman type in a dark blue suit with a white shirt – who looked remarkably like the late actor James Mason – appeared out of nowhere to come to the aid of two Chicago teenagers involved in a life-or-death situation.

More than thirty years later, one of those boys, Lawrence Gray, now a forty-seven-year-old computer software salesman is convinced that the quiet stranger who came to their rescue and averted a tragic drowning that fateful day was a guardian angel.

Lawrence Gray, a Vietnam veteran and father of two, with degrees in accounting and business administration, recalls vividly the experience that happened when he was just sixteen:

“A friend and I went swimming in deep water off a seawall in Lake Michigan, off Foster Park on the north side of Chicago. It was April of 1964 and we were on spring vacation. The day was extremely warm (83 degrees) for April – hence there were not many people around and the water was still cold (probably 50 degrees).

“I was going to sun myself while my friend swam. He dove in, then swam back to the wall, but could not get up because the handhold was too high to reach. We had been in the same location many times the year before but the lake level had dropped and made it impossible to get up the wall.

“The waves were also high that day and that caused my friend to get smashed into the wall each time a wave broke. He was being beaten into the wall constantly. Along with the cold water, it was quite an ordeal. Trying to scale the wall he cut his foot, and that was also a problem.

“I tied two towels together and was able to hold him up but couldn’t pull him out of the water. This holding on went for at least thirty minutes, but the moss-covered seawall was too slippery and made it impossible for either of us to get a foothold.

“I weighed about 140 pounds and my friend about 180 pounds, so it would have been difficult for me to haul him up. And after those painful thirty minutes, I was exhausted from trying.

“All of a sudden a man in a blue suit appeared and asked if he could help. With one hand he pulled my friend out of the water, which was a significant feat of strength since my friend weighed 180 pounds.

“After my friend was safe the stranger just disappeared! I could see for a mile and there wasn’t anyone around and I did want to thank the man. My friend didn’t believe me but that guy in the suit simply vanished!

“The rescuer was a white businessman-type with a blue suit and blue-gray hair. He reminded me of the movie actor James Mason. The only words he spoke were, ‘Do you boys need help?’

“I don’t have any other explanation for this incident, other than that he must have been an angel. As I am convinced this incident happened to me for a reason, I think it important to share it with anyone who wants to listen.”

Angel On The Tracks

Almost half a century ago, the powerful unseen hand of a guardian angel pushed fourteen-year-old Marilynn Webber to safety out of the path of a roaring express train.

The train was so near, Marilynn remembers to this day, that she could see the blue eyes and terrified, red face of the train’s engineer as he blew his whistle, waved his arms, and screamed “Get off the tracks! Move! Quick! Get off!” to the young girl frozen to the spot in his path.

Now in her sixties, Marilynn still vividly remembers that warm Friday in the spring of 1946 when she was a high school freshman from Wheaton, Illinois.

She was coming home from her school in Chicago, thirty miles east. And while she usually looked forward to her weekend visits with her family, she was deeply depressed this particular day after learning her favorite Sunday school teacher was dying of cancer.

Deeply grieved and hurt that bad things could happen to good people, she had got off the train at her station and was walking home, head bowed, nursing her deep grief, oblivious to what was happening around her.

Suddenly she heard the rumbling of the oncoming train. It was almost upon her. Above the roar she could hear the shouts of its engineer. She remembers his terrible face.

Literally paralyzed with fear, she knew the train couldn’t stop in time. This train is going to hit me and send me to heaven, she thought. But I don’t want to go – not yet.

Then, says Marilynn, “It was as if a giant pushed me from behind. I went flying off the tracks and fell down on the cinders just beyond.”

Too grateful to worry about her scratched hands and legs, she jumped up, eager to see who had shoved her to safety. She looked in both directions. There was no one in sight.

“My guardian angel saved my life,” says Marilynn. “Who else could it have been?”

This was a story Marilynn didn’t tell many people over the years because she didn’t want people to think her “strange.” But today Marilynn, a mother of two and a retired schoolteacher, confesses, “This event changed my life. It made me want to do something worthwhile . . . to be an earth angel.”

Recently she opened a shop of angel collectibles in Riverside, California, where she has surrounded herself with visible symbols of her invisible protector – a collection of more than two thousand angels over the years, from figurines to postcards to the seven-foot tree in front of her house she has pruned and sculpted into angel form.

Every November, Riverside’s angel lady organizes an auction locally to raise money for abused children. “I’m combining my love of people with my love of angels,” says Marilynn, “and I’m having so much fun doing it.”

Excerpt from Embraced By Angels