Read Time: 5 Minutes, 41 Seconds
I’ve been seeing personal angels my whole life. I’ve never met anyone without one, and in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot of people around. Despite these being some of the most common kinds of angels I see, I always had the hardest time explaining what they do. Worship angels partner with worship. Protection angels partner with God’s protection over us. Personal angels worship alongside us, defend us from the attacks of the enemy, encourage us, partner with God’s purposes in our lives… it always sounds like an arbitrary list of tasks. It’s one of the reasons I call them personal angels. I saw them a bit like supernatural personal assistants.
Furthermore, I didn’t exactly understand what the point of a personal angel was. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate them being there, but what is their purpose. As Christians, we all have the Holy Spirit within us, God makes Himself present in our lives, we can speak to Him directly. What extra benefit does a personal angel provide?
Eventually, I realized the reason I had such a hard time defining what a personal angel did was because of a little piece of God’s nature that I had forgot to consider, almost like forgetting a bit of grammar when trying to form a coherent sentence.
Before You Were Formed, God Had an Angel Set Aside for You
April and I had been married for a little more than a year. We always wanted to have kids, but our conversations were starting to sound less like dreams and more like plans. We were going to wait until we were married for two years, but we wanted a big family and April was concerned that her running career might make it hard for her to get pregnant.
We were sitting on the couch in our apartment when we made the decision. We were going to start trying to get pregnant. The moment we agreed on this, an angel stepped into the room. She was the same height as April, had brown hair and pleasant blue eyes, and was wearing a classic nurse’s uniform, something straight out of a World War II movie, hair in a bun, little white hat with a red cross, the whole thing. I knew April had some concerns about getting pregnant, so I figured that this was some kind of health or nurse angel, sent to take care of her.
The angel followed April everywhere she went for the three months we spent trying to get pregnant. It jumped up and down with joy along with us when we got our first positive pregnancy test. I would often see the nurse angel rubbing April’s growing belly with a soft cloth, running comforting fingers through her hair as she went through horrible bouts of morning sickness (more like morning, noon, and night sickness), and massaging her back as the growing baby put more and more strain on her body.
The nurse angel followed April all the way up to the big day. It was standing with her when her water broke. It rode with us to the hospital. It was in the room during every moment of labor. And it was there the moment my son was born.
He laid on April’s chest for moment that seemed as close to a second as it did to an hour. Eventually it was time for the doctor to check on April and the baby to go to the baby inspection table (it probably has a fancier name). I followed the baby and noticed that the nurse angel followed along right behind me. I stood there for a moment, feeling worlds of love open in parts of my heart I’d never felt before. The nurse angel stood right beside me, staring just as intently as I was.
The nurse angel followed me as I escorted my son from room to room for all the baby tests. It stood right next to the little crib as I called my grandfather to tell him that we had decided to name the baby after him, Haydon. It followed him everywhere, never letting more than a step or two of space come between them, for the rest of the day.
Later that night, April lay in the hospital bed fast asleep while Haydon slept soundly in the tiny hospital crib. The futon I was sleeping on seemed specially designed for causing lasting back problems, so I was having a hard time falling asleep, that and I was incredibly excited.
I kept staring at my sleeping son, feeling a love like none I had ever experienced grow larger with every passing second. It was then I noticed the nurse angel, looking down at Haydon from the other side of the crib. The nurse outfit was gone, the brown hair was hanging loose over her shoulders, she was wearing a simple blue tunic. She looked younger now too, but I knew it was still her. She had the same face, and her eyes were the same too.
Those eyes were looking down at my son with absolute affection. I recognized the look. It perfectly reflected the same overwhelming love I was feeling. I am sure the angel’s expression matched my own. It was the one I had when I looked at my newborn son. It was the one I had when I looked at April. It was the look of love, the kind of love that can only happen between those who belong together.
Most of you have probably already guessed where this is going, but it was a complete surprise to me at the time. I looked up at the angel and said, “You’re not a pregnancy angel or a nurse angel. You’re his angel, aren’t you?” tilting my head toward Haydon.
The angel looked up to meet my gaze, smiled, and then nodded, tipping her head with a little “well duh” attitude.
That question I had rolled around in my head so many times before came rushing back into my mind. What is the purpose of a personal angel? What is the point? What is their job?
Haydon’s angel looked at me, smiled again, and then answered.
When I hear angels speak, it’s rarely an English sentence. I see their mouths move, I sometimes hear a sound, but it bears no resemblance to any dialect I’ve ever heard on Earth. Rather than hearing words, blocks of information just land in my head, I suddenly just know what they are saying. It’s something between a download of data and the feeling of recognizing whether a series of notes are intended to evoke sadness or joy. It isn’t either of these things, but it is like them. Since I hear this way, I can usually translate what I heard into an English sentence, but if I’m being honest, it always feels like something is lost in the translation. Like hearing poetry in a language it wasn’t written in, the meaning is there but something precious is inevitably lost.
I’ve tried to say what Haydon’s angel told me a hundred different ways, all of them fall short of how it sounded it my heart. Here’s attempt one hundred and one:
I wondered again about the purpose of personal angels. Haydon’s angel looked up at me, smiled, and said, “What’s wrong with the idea that the Father saw fit to send someone whose only job is to love you every day of your life?”
If we want to understand the spirit realm by learning the language of heaven, then we must recognize that love is its chief rule of grammar.
Personal angels do a lot of things for us. They pray for us, guard us, and support us—but these are not their purpose. Personal angels exist because God wanted every person on this planet to have someone who’s sole purpose is to love them well. Everything they do is an expression of this.
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This article was excerpted from chapter 4 of Blake Healy’s book “Secular Sacred Spirit” (Charisma House, Jan. 2023). For more information, or to order the book, visit charismahouse.com.
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Blake K. Healy is one of the senior team members at Bethel Atlanta Church in Georgia. He is also the director of the Bethel Atlanta School of Supernatural Ministry. He lives in Tyrone, Georgia, with his wife, April, and their five wonderful children: Haydon, Finnley, November, Ender and Sybil. For more information or to contact Blake, visit blakekhealy.com.
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