Earlier this week, I was at dinner with Meghan, Emily, and her friend Sam. We were celebrating Emily getting a job, and somehow or another we ended up on a discussion of the paranormal: things that can't necessarily be explained. While we talked about ghosts and aliens and I think I even brought up dinosaurs (I was two mojitos in at that point), we eventually settled on angels, and I mentioned that they were something I had some first hand experience with. Since I shared that story then, it feels like a fitting opener for Story Sunday.
I must have been five or six years old when we went on a vacation trip with the whole family. I'm not sure which mall we ended up in (when you're that young, you don't particularly pay attention to where you are; this plays a rather heavy theme in the story, actually), but I am sure that I absolutely fell in love with riding the carousel that they had at the entrance to the mall. The details are fuzzy since this is likely one of my earliest memories, but from what I can recall I must have ridden the plastic horses at least two or three times when Mom and Dad finally said it was time to move on and have lunch. My Nana and Aunt Susie were there with us as well, and with John (back then we called him Nathan), Emily, and my Mom and Dad, there was a whole slew of folks to keep track of. This is when we had a bit of a Home Alone moment. I decided that I could hop back on the carousel real quick and have a ride around before they could get too far away. They thought that I was already with them, and headed off for Morrison's without a second thought. Since I was such a well behaved child, rarely disobeying my parents' word, I'm sure they just assumed I was right behind them. I wasn't.
Getting off the carousel, I fully believed that the extra ride was worth it, scratching the itch that I never knew I had before coming across the delightful circus music and slow, steady roundabout that those insufferable plastic ponies trotted through. I was giddy. However, when I started looking around and realized that I didn't recognize any of the people around me, and when I started shouting for my Mom and Dad and realized that no one was answering... I wasn't so giddy anymore. I started crying. Taking a seat on a bench, I thought this was it for me, that I was doomed to walk the mall forever as some sort of lost boy. So I sat on that bench, legs swinging underneath me with tears on my soft, chubby cheeks, and I heard a voice beside me.
"Are you all alone?"
I turned to see a beautiful lady in a blue dress sitting at the other end of the bench, smiling down at me. She had brown eyes and relatively short hair, but her smile dried my tears in an instant. I just nodded back, unsure of what to say to a stranger, especially when I just lost everything that I knew in an instant. She just tilted her head and put a hand on my shoulder.
"Did you lose your family?"
I nodded again. She just smiled and tilted her head again, speaking in a soft voice and sliding a little closer to me.
"It's OK... I'm sure they'll find you. Why don't I just stay here until they come back?"
Suddenly things weren't so bad. I nodded and smiled, wiping my tears away. I felt a sense of peace as this woman sat and talked with me, likely never getting more than two words out of me at a time. As a child, I was as shy as could be around new people. Today, I can walk up to complete strangers and have a conversation, but that took years of practice. So, I sat and let the lady in the blue dress talk with me and keep me company until, next thing I know, I see my family coming around the corner in a sprint, out of breath and wide-eyed. They spotted me and grabbed me up, my Dad holding me tight and telling me how sorry they were. I'm sure I apologized too for disobeying and getting back on the carousel, but told them that it was fine, the nice lady had kept me company and it didn't seem like it was long at all. Realizing that this woman had likely kept me from being kidnapped or wandering off or worse, my Dad turned to thank her profusely.
She was gone. Not "gone" as in, "Oh, there she is, walking away modestly and giving us this moment." No... "gone" as in, "Wasn't there a woman just here? Right here?!" It wasn't more than a moment that we were all facing away from that bench, and the next second, the woman in the blue dress was nowhere to be seen. Colors like that don't blend into a crowd, even if there was a crowd there. Besides, there wasn't enough time for anyone to make a getaway, even if they left in a rush. There had to be something more to that encounter, and to this day, I believe it was an angel sitting next to me on that bench, keeping me safe, keeping me smiling, and protecting me until my family could return. It would only be the first of many times that God's hand would reach directly into my life and save it.
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