Angels Among Us

I must admit that I've never really believed in Angels.  I know Scripture is full of stories about the presence of Angels, but I thought that was for days gone by.  I haven't meant to be skeptical, I just hadn't thought about it much.  To me, Angels were probably more like bumbling Clarence in "It's a Wonderful Life," than Gabriel and the other magnificent Angels recorded in Scripture.

That changed a few weeks ago when I saw a program about people who believed in Angels, and the ways that presence had been manifested.  "Okay," I thought, "maybe there's more to this than I had previously believed."  And that was that.

Today, however, may have changed my mind permanently.  I was out shoveling snow, as I had been doing since the snow came down yesterday.  It was heavy and wet, and I had made very little progress from the sidewalk to the street that was piled high from where the city crew had cleared the street.  We live on an arterial, so our street is always kept clear.  But whenever we get a big snow, like we did this weekend, it means our driveway becomes almost unpenetrable.

Anyway, I was about out of strength for this session, so I was putting down some salt on the sidewalk and was ready to call it quits.  But as soon as I turned around, there was a man with scoop shovel standing there.  He politely asked if I could use some help, to which I politely replied that I couldn't ask him to do that.  He replied, "Well, don't worry, you're not asking, I'm offering."  He immediately started shoveling, and together we finished the end of the driveway in minutes.  He was so strong, his shovel took huge bites out of the snow in places where it had taken me multiple tries to get down to the pavement in one shovel-sized spot.

When he finished, we stood there a second, and I asked him if I could pay him for his trouble.  He said no, but asked that I do a random act of kindness sometime in the next week.  I told him that I do that all the time, and he said, "Well, there you go."  I thanked him, shook his hand, and went back to clearing a little bit of the sidewalk.  When I turned back around, he was gone.  I assumed that I should have been able to see him continuing to walk down the sidewalk, since we live in the center of the block, but there was no evidence of him to be found.

Now, I'm not claiming anything here, because ultimately, I don't know.  It could have just as easily been a nice man wanting to do something kind for someone else, a remarkable thing in-and-of itself.  But part of me thinks, "What if?"  No matter what, I am grateful for the stranger with the piercing blue eyes who helped me with a task that I found to be very difficult.

So, anyway, thank you, sir, for your assistance, whoever you are.  And thank you, God, for sending help when I was in need.  And if by chance it was an Angel, "Cool!"