An Angel’s Journal: Tales of Hope and Inspiration from His messenger’s hand

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I think that's why Angels continue to be such a success. People are searching for a deeper spirituality. The fact is, new religious trends and currents are not born in a vacuum; they often grow out of social and individual needs that are in themselves legitimate. The human need for transcendence is an example. Without going into detail, it is enough to note that for many years secular humanism focused so much on the all-sufficiency of humanity that God was left entirely out of the picture.

Many people experientially discovered how easily secular humanism can lead to nihilism - the belief that everything is meaningless and absurd. As secular humanism reigned supreme, Westerners increasingly lacked a sense of the transcendent - something people yearn for in the deepest part of their being.

The inadequacy of secular humanism made people crave for something more - something divine, something sacred. What should be of concern to Christians is that in reaction to Western secularism, many today have found a new sense of the transcendent by relating not to God but to God's angels - not to the Creator but to the Creator's celestial creatures. Of course, prior to the current angel craze many found and continue to find a sense of the transcendent in the broader New Age movement. As we will see, the current angel craze fits comfortably under the umbrella of New Age spirituality.

These "angels" seem right at home with the Ascended Masters and the "space brothers" aboard UFOs, all of whom seek to lead humankind into a New Age of enlightenment and harmony. Today one can hardly keep up with the seemingly endless flow of New Age books setting forth different methods for making angel contact. Popular methods include channeling, prayer, meditation, visualization, crystals, writing letters, and color-coordinating one's wardrobe. Let's take a brief look at these methods.

New Agers believe they can contact angels directly via channeling spiritism. One representative New Age channeler offers clients "angel listenings.

After going into a trance, the channeler writes down everything the angel relays to him or her using a pencil and pad. The counselee never actually hears the angel speaking, though some have claimed to see a glow of light or to sense a presence in the room. Others prefer contacting angels through prayer. Taylor says, "Prayer is the way we talk to angels When you pray to the angels, pray as if 'it is already done'; in other words, thank the angels in advance for taking care of your burdens.

Meditation and visualization - both used to induce an altered state of consciousness - are popular means of making angel contact. Smith explains that "as we practice withdrawing our attention from the physical world and focusing it on the spiritual, our perception becomes less limited to materiality. The nonphysical realm becomes more real to us, and we develop the mental habit of attentiveness to it.

A "cherubic crystal" can be of great benefit for one seeking contact with angels, we are told. A cherubic crystal is one that has been "activated in meditation and which has been charged by the Cherubim. Ask out loud for the wisdom vibration emanated by the Cherubim to flow through you and into your hands so that the stone will become charged with the Cherubim's vibration. Prepare the crystal once in this manner and you will never have to do it again. Another alleged great way to communicate with angels is through writing letters to them. All one has to do is "date your letter, write 'Dear Angel,' and just let your words flow Then sign it at the end as you would a letter to a friend.

Just "pick up another piece of paper Then relax and let your angel's words come through you in the form of a letter.

Guardian Angel

Still another way one can hail an angel is to color-coordinate one's wardrobe. Guardian angels allegedly like rose or pink and soft green; healing angels like deep sapphire blue; seraphim angels like crimson red; cherubim angels like blue; the archangel Michael likes deep green, vivid blue, gold, and rose; and Gabriel is attracted to tans, browns, and dark greens. By wearing specific colors, one can attract specific kinds of angels into one's life.

Assuming one is successful in using one of the above methods to make angel contact, what form might that contact take? New Agers tell us angels can appear as animals and humans, male or female, visions or voices, and with wings or without. They can take the form of nudgings, intuition, or coincidence. They can appear as light on the water, or in clouds and rainbows. It is also possible, we are told, for an angel appearance to be disguised in everyday events.

We are therefore urged to pay attention to the subtleties in life. For example, a child may spontaneously blurt out a statement for which only you know the meaning. While thumbing through a book, a page may fall open with a clear message in the print. Headlines in the newspaper, taken out of context, might contain your message. Regardless of what form an angelic appearance may take, the messages from angels are always said to be very positive.

Burnham says the typical message is "Don't be afraid, everything is just fine. There is nothing but love. The problem for New Age pantheists is how ignorance can enter into the picture if God is everything.

Heavenly Angels Show Collector He's a Messenger

If the current New Age literature is to be believed, angel contact reaps all kinds of benefits. Following are some notable examples. New Agers believe angels have a mission "to help us grow in wisdom and love, not just so that we will survive as a race, but so we will be able to grow into what we were always intended to be - perfected beings capable of incredible energies and immense, transforming love. Germaine, Buddha, and Lao Tze who have allegedly super-evolved and "ascended" to a higher plane of existence from which they now assist other humans to evolve.

New Agers tell us we can make a "declaration" to the angels, who will help bring about what we desire in life: Declaring your goals and statements of things to come will establish a plan of action with the angels The angels will bless the declaration and add higher inspiration and aspirations to it. They can help us transform negative beliefs to positive ones and 'addicted' cells to free cells.

"You Are a Messenger"

If we trust the angels, they can "comfort us with invisible warm hands, and always they try to give us what we want. We like who you are Everything's going to be okay We are proud of you. Some angel writers believe that when a new angelic guide comes into a person's life, he may acquire a desire to know something about a particular culture or religion that was previously foreign to his experience.

If, for example, one of this individual's angelic spiritual guides is from a Native American background, he may find himself having visions that put him in touch with Mother Earth. Michael the Archangel is said to be a strong proponent of free thinking, and he allegedly encourages people to create their own religions. Creating our own religion can help us free our thinking and figure things out for ourselves.

Indeed, "if you ever need them to take over, they are ready and capable Copilots act as your invisible secretaries, arranging and ordering your days so that you don't have to make extra trips, reminding you about appointments and deadlines you are about to miss in your confusion. The Reformer John Calvin once said that the error in much angelology is to deal with angels apart from the biblical witness. This is precisely what has happened on a popular level today.

Many of the best-selling angel books contain legend, lore, and outright occultism, but pay little attention to what God's Word teaches on the subject. We will now use the Bible as our standard of truth in briefly evaluating the "angels" of the New Age. At the outset, let us note that an implicit assumption on the part of many angel enthusiasts today is that all angels are good. Indeed, "there is a prior assumption that angels are only good and therefore contacting them is also only good and consequently without risk.

However, as critic Gary Kinnaman puts it so well, "Not everything that glitters is heavenly gold. Not every bright angel is from heaven. In the process of doing this, they propagate doctrines of demons 1 Tim. Part and parcel of this system of demonic theology is today's New Age angelology. The apostle Paul explicitly warned against accepting any "gospel" from an "angel" that goes against the inspired Word of God Gal. One would do well to remember that Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, said an angel named Moroni led him to the golden plates containing the Book of Mormon.

As well, Muhammad claimed he received the revelations contained in the Qur'an directly from the angel Gabriel a demonic impostor.

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Oddly I never had any thought of selling this collection, as I had others. Odder still, I began doing things no hard-nosed collector would, such as buying figurines that were in less-than-perfect condition. Once I was in a gift shop looking at a group of angels when I noticed one had a cracked wing. The salesperson, overhearing me, said quickly, "I'll give you that one for free. I, on the other hand, couldn't wait to get home to mend that fractured wing. My angels came to mean so much to me that when I noticed the cherub in my car was missing, I felt like I had lost a friend.

Its disappearance made the rough patch I was going through in my life seem even worse. Eventually I found the figure under the driver's seat, its wings broken off. Apparently it had fallen off the ledge by the speedometer, and I had unwittingly stepped on it. I carried the pieces inside.

As I washed the grime off the plastic, I began to feel better, lighter, as if I were being cleansed of my troubles as well. When I glued the wings back into place, for the first time in months I felt confident that things would fall back into place for me too. I found a job I love, working as a publications editor at Harvard University. Still an explanation for my strong, almost instinctual response to angels eluded me. In , my parents asked me to come back home to Missouri to clean out the belongings I had left in their basement.

I spent days going through boxes full of things from my childhood. I was astonished to find a number of angels that I had crafted long ago in grade school. Why had I chosen to make angels while my classmates were more interested in animals and cars? Perhaps it was no accident I had started collecting angels 20 years later. Some months after my trip home, my brother and his wife gave me a book about angels. One night I settled into my easy chair and opened up the volume. Though I know a lot about words, I did not know the definition of angel. But there it was right in the book: The word is derived from the Greek angelos, or messenger.

All at once powerful memories came surging back, memories from college, a difficult time I had no inclination to revisit. In college I was homesick, depressed, miserably confused about my direction in life. I loved writing but I had deep misgivings as to whether I was cut out for the competitive field of journalism. The anxiety of not knowing where I was headed grew until it was almost unbearable. During the last semester of my senior year I became physically ill. A doctor diagnosed the flu, and I was sent back to my off-campus apartment to rest and recover. But I only got worse.

Soon I was hyperventilating and throwing up constantly. I had just crawled into the bathroom one night and was trying to muster the strength to sit up, when suddenly I found myself looking down at my own body on the floor, curled up like a comma. Somehow I no longer felt the cold tile against my cheek or the terrible nausea that had racked me for days. Instead, I felt myself being pulled upward.

It seemed as if I no longer had a physical body, and I went through the apartment ceiling and the roof of the building itself just as easily as walking through an open door. As I soared over the parking lot, I noticed my roommate's car was not there. I shot straight up into the sky, flying through space so fast I was moving past what I took to be stars as if they were no farther apart than streetlights. The stars were singing to me, not a melody or even a language I recognized, yet it was, without question, the most beautiful music I had ever heard.

It suffused me with a joy I had never known. Then, out of this magnificent swirl of sound, individual voices emerged. I didn't hear what they were saying so much as feel it. Some were pitched high, others low, all of them telling me there had been a mistake, and I must go back. I didn't want to let go of this incredible feeling! As if in answer, one voice, deep and authoritative, rose above the rest: You are a messenger, and now you must go back.

The next thing I knew I was lying in a hospital bed, woozy but awake.

You are very fortunate, I repeated to myself. And then, in my mind, I again heard the otherworldly voices. You are a messenger. Years later, sitting in my easy chair, with my new book in my lap, I finally made the connection.

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