Angels

Angels

I woke up and realized that I wasn’t in Earth time anymore. The last I remembered I was watching my human, Janey, walking into the rehab after finally deciding to stop her madness and get sober. I must have been recalled because I was back in infinity and no longer had the instinct to save Janey. Oh no, I failed! I must have gotten pulled out because of Janey going to rehab but I thought that would have been a good thing. I was fully awake now and looked around. There were other Guardian Angels, we knew each other because of the mark, sitting around but some were smoking and several had tattoos. The mark was a G in a circle that was not visible to the humans. Many of the angels choose to get tattoos and it was allowed so they could blend in, but I never thought they would stay on us after returning to infinity.

Infinity is just what we call where we live, as good a name as any, I guess. Then there is Earth and its time and space context which I find particularly annoying because you have to wait around on everything. In the infinity, everything already happened before it happened but even here the bosses have to wait on Earth's time to move its results to the infinity. It sounds confusing but since I’m an angel it is all I know. The humans that get to come here all say that it took some getting used to though.

Anyway, I spotted the Guardian Angel for Janey’s boyfriend, Bill, and walked over to his table and sat down. “What’s going on? Did we fail? Did we get recalled?”, I said. He laughed and said, “No that’s what I thought at first, but the Old Man says we are being retired for a while because we had such a hard time with Janey and Bill”. I laughed too and thought about the time Janey was shot and the time they were doing CPR on Bill and wondered how we had gotten through all of that. I also thought about the times I thought I had died because I had no energy left after an intervention to keep Janey alive.

Most of the time the angel appears in human form and guides and influences the human. In more extreme cases like Bill and Janey, we would trade some of our power to influence events and other people to make something happen or not happen. I have never heard of an angel being extinguished but many of us took a long time to recharge enough to even think. Usually, when that happened, I would wake up to find Janey had gotten herself into some other kind of predicament because I was out of commission. So, the trick is to learn to balance your energy by learning your human’s behavior. In cases like Janey and Bill though they were so unpredictable they were always in danger, or so it seemed. They both used drugs and that makes any human unpredictable but in some cases like theirs, it is more extreme.

I looked around some more and could hear other angels telling stories about their humans and it started to dawn on me that all of us had been given difficult assignments. I heard stories of drug overdoses, gunshots, suicide attempts, etc., and started to think that maybe Janey hadn’t been that difficult after all. As we were sitting around telling war stories and laughing another angel was carried in by 2 other angels and laid down in one of the resting areas like the one I had woken up in. He looked pale, almost translucent, and we could tell he had been at this job a long time by the scars and tattoos.

As the other angels gathered around him and started sharing their energy with him, I joined in and realized that they must have done the same thing for me. His color returned and we left him to rest. Angels that have been in their positions for a long time are wiser and are referred to as ancients. I went and sat with one of the ancients and she told me they were all very proud of Bill’s angel and me. This had been both of our first assignments as guardians, and we had apparently done very well. She said that she had countless assignments under her belt and that Janey or Bill would have given even her a run for her money.

She said that I seemed to have a sense of timing and discernment that usually takes many assignments to hone. I told her that at first, it was fear of screwing up and being punished that drove me, but after a while I cared so much for Janey that the thought of losing her was unthinkable. She laughed and said that there is no real punishment for angels unless you do the unthinkable and sell out your assignment to the enemy and then you are simply cast out. I shuddered to think about it and asked her if that really happens. She said every once in a great while an angel gets fooled by the enemy into thinking they will gain power by selling out. She went on to say that in most of those cases, the assignment is saved by another angel unless they sell themselves out as well.

She said the cast-out angel becomes a demon and immediately loses all connection to God, goodness, and the rest of us. I shuddered again at the thought of losing my connection to goodness and my fellow angels, not to mention the power that fills us. If you think about it that is what started it all anyway. If the enemy had not thought he could outsmart God, we would not have any demons anyway. I asked her how long we rested before another assignment, and she said that was up to us. She said that after her first loss, yes we do lose some, she rested for many Earth years but now she jumps right back in. She went on to say that this group was the elite, and we could stay here forever if we wanted but that as far as she had seen no one had ever made that choice.

I asked her how that worked then with so many of us wanting to go back in. She laughed and said that we were not that powerful and that “the system” knew who was right for a job and would offer it to that angel first. She said she had never seen an assignment turned down, so no one knows what happens if you refuse one. I thanked her for the insights and thought about it all for a while. It all made a lot of sense since I just knew that I seemed to wake up in the role of Janey’s angel and didn’t remember how I got there.

Just then the most beautiful angel I had ever seen came into view and moved towards me. She said, “Sweetie, I know you haven’t rested long but we have an assignment that is perfect for you”. I looked up with a tear in my eye and said, “She’s going to be an addict, isn’t she?”. The angel looked at me with pure love and said, “Yes, but you wouldn’t have it any other way, would you?”. I smiled and said, “No, no I wouldn’t!”.

And so, it started all over again and I was suddenly back on earth in an ambulance watching the medics deliver a baby and I immediately knew the mother was an addict. One of the medics winked at me and pulled up her sleeve to show me the G in the circle mark on her arm. I recognized her and realized it was one of Janey’s friends, Liz, having the baby. The other medic asked the girl if she had thought of a name and the girl said she was naming her Janey after her friend because she had gotten sober and she wanted her daughter to be like her. I shed the first of what I was sure would be many tears for my new Janey.