by The Angel Nurse
In 1998, Luke was diagnosed with bone cancer at the tender age of eight. As sometimes happens, he came down with an infection, which meant he had to go to the hospital. He was there for about two weeks, and that’s when something remarkable happened.
One evening, Luke’s mother was sitting at his bedside quietly praying as he slept. A nurse came into the room to check Luke’s temperature, but his mother noted something rather peculiar about her.
The nurse was wearing an old-fashioned uniform of the type that would have been common 30 years earlier, in the 1960s. The nurse noticed that Luke’s mother had a Bible by the side of his bed. She said that she was a Christian, too, and said she would pray for Luke’s healing.
Luke’s family had never seen this odd nurse before, and they never saw her again in Luke’s remaining time at the hospital.
“I came out of the hospital fully healed of my infection,” says Luke, who was 19 when he told his story. Remarkably, he is now completely free of cancer.
“My mom believes this nurse could have been a guardian angel coming down to give my mom some hope,” Luke says. “If she wasn’t an angel, why would she be wearing 1960s old-fashioned nurse clothing?”
Pushed to Safety by an Angel
Back in 1980, Deb was a single mother with two infants living in San Bernardino County, California. She occasionally needed reliable babysitters.
Fortunately, her parents lived only about 30 miles away in Alta Loma. Deb would usually drop off the children at her parents’ house, go do what she needed to do, then pick them up in the evening.
One night, Deb had retrieved her babies from her parents’ place and was heading home. It was relatively late, about 11:30 p.m. Deb was driving her “old clunker.” Among the car’s many deficiencies, the gas gauge was broken, requiring her to guess when the old thing needed fuel. Occasionally, her guessing was off.
“Halfway home, the car started to putter,” Deb remembers, “and I realized I was on empty. I pulled off the first off ramp I could, and it just happened to be one that was slightly uphill. Almost at the top of the exit, my car died and there was absolutely nothing around except empty fields and distant lights at a truck stop about a quarter of a mile down the road.
With no cars in sight, Deb didn’t know what to do. The kids were asleep and walking miles while carrying two kids in the middle of the night was not a good option. This was before cell phones, so she could not call for help.
“I put my head on the steering wheel while saying a short and panicky prayer,” she says. “I hadn’t even finished when I heard a few taps on my window.”
When she looked up, she saw a clean-cut young man standing there, who Deb estimated to be about 21 years old. He motioned for her to roll down her window. “I remember I was surprised,” Deb says, “but I wasn’t even the slightest bit afraid, even though I normally would have been terrified.”
The young man was dressed well and had a faint smell of soap. He didn’t ask if she needed help. Instead, he told her to put the car in neutral and he would help her over that last, small hill toward a place where she could get gas.
“I thanked him and followed his instructions. The car started moving. I steered it toward the lights of the truck stop and turned around to yell ‘thank you’ again to him,” Deb says.
“He was so nice! My car kept moving, but the young man was nowhere in sight. I mean, this area was completely remote. There was absolutely nowhere he could have gone that quickly, even if there was somewhere to go. I don’t even know where he came from to begin with.”
Deb’s car continued to roll down the hill until it reached the truck stop. She was able to get the gas she needed, and the kids remained sound asleep.
“I’ve always trusted in God to take care of us, but in relating that story many times to my children, who are now 30 and 32, they know for a fact that angels do exist and are sent to us if we just believe.
“I always thought it was so amazing that we were sent someone who I would trust instinctively without question. Since that incident, I’ve come to believe that we probably encounter angels all the time, and take for granted who they really are. I think they come in all shapes and sizes, young and old … and sometimes when we least expect them.”
The Reading Angel
It’s remarkable how many stories of angels come out of hospital experiences. It may not be so hard to understand why when we remind ourselves that they are places of sharply focused emotions, prayers, and hope.
Reader DBayLorBaby entered the hospital in 1994 with acute pain from “a fibroid tumor the size of a grapefruit” in her uterus. The surgery was successful but more complicated than expected, and her troubles weren’t over.
DBayLorBaby recalls that she was in horrible pain. She had an allergic reaction to the morphine she was given, and the doctors tried to counteract it with other medications. This made a bad experience even worse. She had just had a major surgery, and now she was dealing with the pain of an acute drug reaction.
After receiving more pain medication, she was able to sleep for a few hours. “I awoke in the middle of the night. According to the wall clock, it was 2:45. I heard someone speaking and realized someone was at my bedside,” she says. “It was a young woman with short brown hair and wearing a white hospital staff uniform. She was sitting and reading aloud from the Bible. I said to her, ‘Am I alright? Why are you here with me?'”
The woman visiting DBayLorBaby stopped reading but did not look up. “She simply said, ‘I was sent here to make sure you’d be alright. You are going to be fine. Now you should get some rest and go back to sleep.’ She began to read again and I drifted off back to sleep.”
The next morning, she explained the experience to her doctor, who checked and said that no staff had visited her overnight. She asked all of the nurses and no one knew of this visitor.
“To this day,” she says, “I believe that I was visited by my guardian angel that night. She was sent to comfort me and assure me that I would be okay. Coincidentally, the time on the clock that night, 2:45 a.m., is the exact time recorded on my birth certificate that I was born!”