Visit From An Angel

I woke up from a sound sleep and looked at the clock.  1:00 AM.  What woke me up? I sensed a presence in the room. So then I turned and looked at the foot of the bed.

There was a figure standing there. He took my right arm and just kind of held it. I felt a pumping action going from the tips of my fingers down into my body. I don't know how long that went on. Then my arm was put back down on the bed.

I thought, “It’s an angel. It must be an angel.”

Then he spoke to me.  (I say “he” only because the voice was in a very low pitch. I had no sense that the presence was a man or a woman.)  He said to me, “Receive God's love and give it away.”

I just laid there. Then my whole body began to tremble.

He said again more emphatically, “Receive God's love and give it away.”

 So I turned and put my hand on my husband’s back.  He was sleeping on his side with his back to me.  I could feel the energy flow through my hand into him.  The trembling stopped.

There was more.  I saw a vision of a pedestal with an open Bible on it, and shimmering water beyond it. I asked the angel, “what does this mean?”

He said, “Be in God's Word.”

That was it.  I looked at the clock to see how much time had gone by. It was about 1:15 AM. The reason why I kept referring to the clock was because I wanted to make sure all that was happening was real and so I connected it with the time.

The very next day, I told it to John Bergman, the pastor of Newport Covenant Church. I went to him because I wondered if what I’d experienced was real.  “What do I do?” I asked him.  He told me “It’s Biblical. Keep it.”

At the time, I was working on the Seattle University (SU) campus on First Hill in the nursing home started by the head of SU to train nurses.  I was commuting every day across Lake Washington on the I-90 floating bridge.  Whether I drove in the day or the night, Lake Washington was shimmering with sun or moon, and reminding me of the shimmering water in the vision and its message – “be in God’s Word”.  That encouraged me daily to keep growing and relying on the Lord.

The timing of the vision was very significant.  It came right before two major overlapping hardships in my life  – a divorce, not by my choice, and my oldest son’s suicide.  Those were very hard things.  I can see why the Lord gave me the vision to anchor my faith in His love and in His Word.  This helped me hang on day by day and get through it all.

But still, why a visit from an angel?  That’s extremely rare.  I asked God the question, “Why me?”  The answer was I’m a visual learner. God made sure to get my attention and give me what I needed to get through those tough years.