Boo! Angels and Where They Find Us

Spirituality Column #259
October 25, 2011
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

Boo! Angels and Where They Find Us
By Bob Walters

“You’re going to love this story!” a Christian co-worker recently exclaimed.

I knew immediately this was a Kingdom faith story. A non-Christian would have said, “You’re not going to believe this, but …”

Anyway, my co-worker’s brother Mike (also a believer), slipped and fell – hard – the day before outside a busy gas/convenience store in a small northeastern Indiana town. Mike was numb from the neck down, tingly all over, and unable to move. A friend comforted Mike, told him to lie still, and dialed 9-1-1. A crowd gathered.

Amid the confusion, seemingly out of nowhere, a woman appeared. Telling Mike’s friend she was a nurse, she knelt down, stroked Mike’s hand and quietly, clearly assured him, “You’ll be all right.” Then she walked away.

Everyone’s attention was focused on Mike. The “nurse” came and went without being recognized. Immediately after she left, Mike’s feelings began to return. When the paramedics arrived, Mike was fine.

Certainly, it’s possible the injury was less severe than initially thought. And having been around sports injuries and charitable paralysis foundations, I know “stingers” can come and go quickly.

Or not. A small town and nobody recognized the nurse? She left before the ambulance arrived? (Most nurses would stay.) Mike’s paralysis disappeared just like she did? Gotta’ be a God thing; an angel moment.

My wife and I had a similar “close encounter” this summer when our right-rear tire exploded on northbound I-465 nearing the I-69 high-speed connecting ramp in heavy traffic at 10:30 on a Saturday night. Driving in the middle “thru” lane with no sane way to get to either shoulder, we were forced into the most dangerous place imaginable – that striped, “V” shaped no-man’s land in front of the ramp-split crash/runoff zone.

Needing not to stay there, we crept a hundred yards down the I-69 ramp (not the way home), still situated horribly: on the narrow left shoulder with a disintegrated right-rear tire exposed to whizzing traffic scant feet away. We had a flashlight and a spare tire, but no jack, tire iron or lug wrench (long story).

Suddenly, the way I like to tell it, “Jesus showed up.” A slight, scruff-bearded man in dirty work clothes stopped his old, rusted compact car, backed up the ramp’s left shoulder, dug through his cluttered trunk for loose tools and scattered sockets, grabbed his jack, and changed our tire crouching perilous inches from the speeding ramp traffic. ‘Said he usually drove a tow truck – in Noblesville. With my profuse, astonished thanks and $30 he didn’t ask for (all I had on me), he drove off.

I just love that story.

Walters (email rlwcom@aol.com) encourages people to tell angel stories this Halloween instead of ghost stories.

Halloween and Christian Kindness

Spirituality Column #51
October 30, 2007
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper

Halloween and Christian Kindness
By Bob Walters

I’m not writing this to be the Grinch Who Stole Halloween, because Halloween in our culture today is mostly an exercise in harmless fantasy and positive community building, not so much a dark Satanic acting-out.

Costumes trigger creativity no matter your age, and creativity is good – a gift of our Godly free will. Fantasy and playacting are keys to developing young, bright minds. But of course, I’m thinking Disney World, not Dungeons and Dragons.

Some of the best social nights in our neighborhood (Forest Dale area) were on Halloween, when parents and kids and grandparents and friends and wagons and jack-o-lanterns and candy … piles of candy … added up to treasured family and neighborly memories. But I’m thinking loving and sharing, not destructive pranks, burglary and demon worship.

Halloween is a real conundrum. It’s fun and freeing and harmless. It’s also dark and unloving and dangerous.

Halloween’s origin was in BC Ireland as a pagan Celtic end-of-harvest festival and occult blurring-of-the-lines between the quick and the dead, making it easier for the Druid priests to predict the future and the weather. It was called “Samhain.”

In the seventh century as Christianity spread to the Celtic lands, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 as All-Saints (All-Hallows) Day, honoring saints and martyrs, as a church sanctioned replacement to the pagan holiday. October 31 became Hallows-Eve, or Hallowe’en.

Ironically, it was when the church sanctioned the holiday that the real spooky stuff began. If you want a real fright this Halloween, just Google “Halloween history.”

Famed British psychotherapist and pastoral counselor Frank Lake (1914-1982) taught that Halloween was a way that Westerners dealt with their fear of death. A fine local pastor named Dave Faust preached that Christians should stay away from the occult not because there was nothing to it, but because there absolutely was something to it.

Giving strangers food at your door is very Christian, the mystery of death and resurrection is at the very heart of the Christian faith, and co-opting pagan holidays for Christian purposes (Christmas, Easter, All Saints, et al) is basic church history.

Just … watch it out there. Halloween is what we make it; be kind and use it for good.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests that in your Halloween travels you ask Christ to be with you. Remember, you can ask Him anything.