For previous posts on the contributors, see these authors who were all featured in the first section of the book, “Mystics and Messengers.”
And from the second section of the book, “Angels Watching Over Me.”
Next up?
Christa Allan
A true Southern woman who knows any cook worth her gumbo always starts with a roux, Christa Allan is an award-willing author who writes women’s fiction, stories of hope and redemption. Since You’ve Been Gone is among Amazon’s bestsellers. Her other novels include A Test of Faith, Threads of Hope, Walking on Broken Glass, Love Finds You in New Orleans, and The Edge of Grace. She has been a speaker at numerous book festivals. Christa is the mother of five, grandmother of five, and retired after teaching twenty-five years of high school English. She and her now-retired husband recently moved to Madison, Mississippi, near my home town of Jackson.
“Angels Passing Through My Life”
Christa writes about her interactions with angels from childhood through high school, college, and married life, during which she experienced the birth of a daughter with Down Syndrome, getting sober, the death of a month-old grandson, surviving Hurricane Katrina, and her forty-year-old daughter’s severe stroke. Here are a few words from her essay:
My most recent experiences with angels were unlike what I’d learned about them after attending
twelve years of Catholic schools. In the “Creation and Angels” chapter from the Baltimore Catechism, we learned that angels didn’t have bodies, some were good and some were ad, and we each had a guardian angel. . . . My Catholic mother had married my Greek Orthodox father, and I worried he might not have his own guardian angel. Was he left out? What if one of us converted to Judaism? Would our angel be reassigned? And if our guardian angels were with us always, did they talk to our parents’ guardian angels and pass on information? Maybe we weren’t supposed to know the answer to that question. . . .
Sometimes God’s gifts may not arrive in the packages we expect. Maybe no fluttering wings or unformed bodies or melodious voices, but people who listen to the still, soft voice inside them and appear in our lives to guide us, to protect us, and to love us. And my gift? A guardian angel who’s quite patient with a human-in-training.
When I first read Christa’s essay, I wanted to say, “Yes! Orthodox Christians also have guardian angels, at least one that is “assigned” to us at our baptism. So, no need to worry about your Greek Orthodox father.”
Note about the icon: That’s an Orthodox icon of the Guardian Angel that I wrote for my Goddaughter Sophie Mansour, when she was baptized as a baby 20 years ago. Inside the orb, the angel is holding the baby at her baptism.