Angelic Pathways (3 page)

Her gaze nearly stole my breath away. They were the eyes of an angel. She seemed to have so much of Michael’s spirit in her that I wondered if I had finally cracked and was hallucinating.

“You know,” she began, “today was supposed to be my day off. And I could have turned them down when they called me to come in, but something said I needed to be here today.”

“Michael,” I barely uttered.

“Pardon?” She then looked down at her hospital ID and corrected me: “Michelle.” She thought I had misread her name, but I was simply addressing the light I saw in her eyes.

“No,” I said politely. “The Archangel Michael is all around you.”

The color drained from the nurse’s face and she nervously pushed her blonde hair back out of her eyes.

“Come again?”

“I see angels, and you have a lot of Archangel Michael with you.” I knew how much of a lunatic I sounded right then and there, but what did I have to lose? If they stuck me in the mental ward, at least I would have three meals a day. Not to mention, fellow patients would be vastly more entertaining than counting the dots on the tacky, yellowed wallpaper in the room back at the house.

Nervously, Michelle fumbled with my release papers and cleared her throat. “I know. I love Archangel Michael very much. I think he’s always been with me, ever since I was a child. I even named my son after him.” She took a cleansing breath as her concerned, pensive eyes looked me over. “What’s troubling you so deeply today?”

My tears immediately began again. “It’s too long a story,” I sighed and then looked at the wall. “All I know is when I leave here today, I have one can of ravioli left that I can heat on my desk lamp and eight dollars in my pocket.

“In light of my current circumstances, I’ve recently become a proponent of euthanasia,” I continued as I tapped my chin. “So I’m willing to volunteer if you think the hospital will do it for free.” My pride was decimated. Years prior, I would have rather died than admit to such problems, such utter failures.

“Those are harsh words for someone who can see angels,” the nurse shot back quickly.

“You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

“For seeing angels? No. For wanting to die when they’re so obviously close to you? Yes.” With that, she got up to fetch me a box of tissues and then left the room. When she returned, I had dried my tears and regrouped a bit more. But I felt smaller than ever, and I was furious with myself for unloading all my woes into the lap of a complete stranger. My sense of dignity, it seemed, had flown out the hospital’s third-floor window.

“When you get home, make sure you look in the release packet I gave you. There’s something very important in there you need to see,” she said as she wheeled me down to the hospital entrance.

“A bill?” I asked dryly.

“No, just a little something from a mutual friend,” she chirped.

I couldn’t help my cynical and incredulous chuckle. “Michael told me that this morning I’d find out why I came down with pneumonia.”

“Well, the angels always keep their promises.”

“Yeah, I know,” I sighed contritely. She helped me into a taxi and I was back to my place of residence all too quickly. Once I got settled into my room, I finally opened the folder and inside was a small get-well card—and a check for five hundred dollars.

I held the check in my trembling hands for what seemed like hours as I pondered her note:

My son, Michael, is going through a very difficult time right now. He’s young and looking for answers in all the wrong places. I trust that you can see the angels and talk to them, and I believe that Archangel Michael sent you to me today, as no one has ever said to me what you did. There’s no way you could have known what I’ve held in my heart without some connection to him, so I thank you for being so brave to speak up. If I may, I must ask one small favor. Please talk to Archangel Michael for me and ask him how I can best guide my son off the path of destruction he’s on.

I immediately called out to the archangel, who then showed up with a soft smile.

“Thank you.” I flashed the check up at him, as I felt rather sheepish for having doubted him.

“Don’t thank me. Next time you get caught in a flood of doubt and you begin to wonder if we’re here for you or not, let today’s experience serve as your life preserver.”

I nodded, surrendering to his wisdom. “So what about Michelle’s son?”

“Grab your notebook and pen, kid. This is gonna be a long dictation.”

I didn’t hesitate to get a response mailed back to Michelle, who replied two months later expressing that everything Archangel Michael had instructed had worked. She also sent another check for two hundred fifty dollars.

Any other time, my pride would have made me send both checks back, but hunger and desperation, I have found, trump pride every time.

Most of the money went toward groceries. What I had left over went toward repairing my clunker of a laptop so I could access my old manuscripts and start writing after years of doing nothing with my life but participate in daily pity parties.

Doing so would eventually lead to the sale of my first book,
Azrael Loves Chocolate, Michael’s A Jock
.

And so here I am.

Michelle and I never connected again beyond the second letter, but it was meant to be. My winding up in the hospital with pneumonia was never about the money. It was about trusting in God and understanding that all challenges that come before us occur for a reason. The hospital visit was as much about Michelle finding guidance for her son as it was about my regaining trust in the guidance of God’s messengers.

It also taught me a difficult lesson in how the universe sometimes works. There will be moments in our lives when prayers aren’t answered with rainbows and daffodils. Sometimes they’re answered with storm clouds and downpours, but the angels will always be there with an umbrella, a raft, and a helping hand.

So when the flood waters of challenges, disappointments, and doubt begin to rise, don’t flail and try to fight the deluge. Fatigue and panic will only cause you to get pulled down by the undertow. Instead, clutch onto the guiding hands of God and his heavenly messengers and let them pull you through. They’re awesome swimmers and they make the perfect flotation devices.

[contents]

chapter one

THE “GIFT” OF INTUITION

Since the release of my two books,
Azrael Loves Chocolate, Michael’s A Jock
and
The Angel Code
, I’ve been inundated with e-mails all expressing the same sentiment:
Gee, I wish I could communicate with the angels the way you seem to, Chantel! It must make life infinitely easier to deal with.
And after I’m done holding my aching sides from laughing so hard, I usually reply, “Working with the angels has been
anything
but a walk in the park.”

As more and more readers discover my work, they quickly realize what sets me apart from most of the other angel mediums out there—I don’t sugarcoat divinity. While connecting with the divine is often awe-inspiring, uplifting, and encouraging, it also has a side that sometimes makes me want to scream, pound the walls, and shake my fists in frustration.

From the very start when I began connecting to the spiritual world, I faced trials and challenges that would make a seasoned military veteran shudder with thoughts of his first days at boot camp. Learning to trust in my intuitive gifts proved just as grueling as learning to use them. And as if those in the Realm of Spirit possessed nothing less than the sickest, cruelest sense of humor, a spirit guide—not an angel—was assigned to me for
practice
. I’m sure he would say it was more like target practice.

Poor Jake. When he was first sent to me, he had returned to the Realm of Spirit only a year prior. It was 1993 when he died in a tragic accident in the prime of his life. And, as if it wasn’t torture enough to be pulled away from his happy life so abruptly, a year later he wound up serving as a spiritual and emotional punching bag for an ungrateful, thickheaded, would-be psychic medium. Me.

The night I first met him, the sky was falling. Thunder rumbled in the distance as evening shoppers ran from storefronts through a flooding parking lot to their cars. There were a few of us, however, who stood oblivious to the downpour and the crackling lightning overhead as we gazed enamored into the window of a candlelit storefront. I stood with my nose pressed to the window as condensation diffused the light of the candles inside. Then, as if suddenly waking from a dream, I shook off my rain-curtained gaze, wove through the other onlookers, and entered the store.

Despite the white candles lit about, the store was quite dark, which only magnified the eerie, foreboding silence. Creep factor aside, the store seemed to be an innocuous, albeit eccentric, gift and novelty shop. I strolled down the aisles of games, puzzles, and gadgets—
Nothing special there
, I thought. Nothing really caught my eye until I glanced at the back of the store where the poster display stood. I wasn’t sure why I was drawn there, but my steps were quick and purposeful as I obeyed my intuition and curiosity.

Eagerly, I flipped through the posters, seeing nothing of great interest at first. But then one almost got by me. It was an image of a handsome young man. Crow-black hair fell in his eyes as he bowed his head, chin to chest. In fact, the sweat-laden strands hid his face completely and fell upon burnished shoulders. No, this wasn’t some generic, high-gloss beach boy sporting a tan and other wares for girls to drool over. Instead of a blue sky, white sands, and a frothing ocean as a backdrop, there was only an ominous orange glow.

An immediate feeling of great unease came over me as my eyes took in the life-size poster. It was then when I heard the sounds of rattling chains. Frightened and confused, I took a step back only to be startled by the sudden, piercing sound of a soul-shattering scream. I yelped and tripped over my own feet as I backed up against the wall, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the poster. I couldn’t even blink as the image commanded my gaze. It wasn’t a difficult feat after all, for what was at one moment a mere photo then became a vision, a window into another reality. The dim, orange light reflecting on the man’s torso began to dance and flicker as if unseen flames were its source. As I felt a blast of immense heat assault me from the poster’s direction, I had no doubt that somewhere in the background a fire was raging.

I reached out my hand toward the image when I noticed that the man’s chest was sharply rising and falling. He was heaving for air as if he’d just run a marathon, and I imagined that the unbearable heat was hardly helping his situation. His suffering and obvious distress drew me in, triggering an overwhelming desire to help. It was at that moment that my intuition told me if I could touch his heart, I could rescue this tortured soul from his nightmare.

When my fingers were mere centimeters from his chest, his head shot up and his anguished eyes pierced me like a lance. Pain was etched deep in his sharp features as he tried to catch his breath. Sweat matted his hair and rolled down the sides of his face, and for what seemed like an eternity, our gazes remained locked.

My concentration was finally broken when he flinched —whether it was from pain or from some ghastly sight beyond my limited vision, I wasn’t sure. Regardless, I knew that he was struggling to break free from whatever was holding him captive. Though the poster only depicted him from the waist up, I could discern by how tightly his arms were drawn in before him that he had been bound at the wrists. Compulsion to help, be damned. A fear of what I had stumbled upon, and what my tampering might unleash, won out. I slowly began to retreat.

“Guilt … regret,” he finally said, stopping me in my tracks. “It’s too much to bear. No one should have to endure this. No one, Chantel. Not even you. You don’t want this.” He choked on a sob as tears streaked his soot-stained cheeks.

“Jake,” I breathed as I cowered against the wall; his name had suddenly popped into my head. “I don’t know how to help you.”

His eyes lifted heavenward for a brief moment as the chains rattled ominously again, then he let out a blood-
curdling wail of pure, concentrated agony: “You don’t want this!”