Where Angels Walk
Margaret had gone to our big shopping mall for a job interview, and during that time put her two- and three-year-old girls in the baby-sitting service the stores provided. Now the interview was over and she was standing at the top of the escalator in her suit and high heels, looking down three floors through all that chrome and glass, and feeling a bit disoriented. With her left arm, she was carrying her two-year-old, her purse and a rather heavy diaper bag. With her right hand, Margaret was attempting to pull her three-year-old, Tammy, onto the escalator. But Tammy was afraid to step on the moving stairs. “Mommy, I don’t want to go!” she shrieked. Any moment Margaret was going to lose her grip or her balance.
“I was already a very nervous mother, someone who saw danger almost everywhere,” Margaret admits. “Right now I was working up to a panic. How were we going to get down safely?” No one seemed to be near them, but then, Margaret saw a firm hand come down on Tammy’s shoulder. The hand belonged to a dapper-looking elderly gentleman, with white hair, wearing a dark suit. “He had smiling eyes,” Margaret recalls. Even though I was almost paranoid about strangers being near the girls, I felt comfortable with him right away.”
The man eased Tammy onto the escalator, and nodded at Margaret, as if to say, “I’m holding your little girl. She won’t fall.”
Margaret nodded back, saying “Thank you,” without words.
The ride down was over in seconds, and during the brief flurry of getting her daughters off the escalator, Margaret lost sight of her elderly guardian. When she looked up, although he had been behind them and, to her recollection, hadn’t stepped around them, he had vanished. There was no one matching his description anywhere around the sparsely populated mall, not even walking away from them. Where had the helpful stranger gone?
“Tammy,”she asked, “Did you see where that man went?”
Tammy looked up. “What man, Mommy?”
“The man on the escalator. The one who put his hand on your shoulder so you wouldn’t fall.”
Tammy looked puzzled. “There wasn’t any man on the escalator, Mommy. There was just us.”
In a sudden burst of comprehension, Margaret understood. She had been given a glimpse of Tammy’s guardian angel. And a message too. For now, infused into her spirit were words that had seemed to accompany that long look she and the elderly man had exchanged. “As you see me now, with my hand on your child,” he had somehow told her, “I am, always. So there is no need to be so anxious. You cannot add one day to your child’s life by worrying, nor take one away that is not already in God’s plan. “But what you can do, what you must do, is to love your children, with the kind of love only a mother can give, for however long they have been placed in your care. This is your most important job.”
“In an instant, “Margaret says today, “I was healed of my fear, my constant worry over every aspect of my daughters’ lives. And I remain so to this day. I’m concerned and watchful, but not panicky, and there’s a big difference.”
No ordinary encounter could have brought such a profound and instant Emotional healing, Margaret says. She had been touched by a messenger of God.
…..Copyright 2011 by Joan Wester Anderson by way of “Christian Voices” (www.ChristianVoicesWorldwide.net) Published by Joan Wester Anderson, P.O. Box 127, Prospect Heights, IL 60070. For more stories of God’s love, check the blog at http://www.joanwanderson.com
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