Angelic Pathways (9 page)

I went from doing laundry once a month to every six. I went from venturing out of the house with a friend or to write at a café three times a week to once every three months. It seemed that the harder I fought to get back on my feet, the more my health drew me down into misery. It was like treading quicksand, and there was no help in sight.

I could go as long as eight weeks upstairs without a single word from anyone. No one called. No one cared if I lived or not. And during the summers, I sat in the darkness of that room cursing all of humanity. A walking miracle? Me? Sure, if you counted the fact that I have congestive heart failure and asthma and yet somehow survived a room that reached upwards of 103 degrees during the summer. My health and my life were of no consideration to anyone but me, and the more pressing the circumstances became, the less I cared.

I would sit upstairs with a single can of cold beans or ravioli as the scents of baked turkey and ham wafted through the house holiday after holiday, year after year. And as I listened to the hearty cheers and laughter of the merrymakers below, I scoffed at the very archangels who would sit by my side and whisper, “You are loved.”

If love came by way of scorn and solitude, then I had it in spades.

“I’m not a walking miracle,” I finally clipped in response to Michael’s words. “I’m a living, breathing disaster. I’m a statistic waiting to happen.” After all, if I had died, the only thing to alert anyone of my passing would have been the stench of my corpse. And though I prayed for death every hour of every day, I dreaded dying with so little dignity. Still, I pondered if it really mattered. Would dignity
really
concern me if I no longer lived on the earth plane among those who knew of me? Knowing my luck, that answer would be yes. Countless days I imagined a hell of being forced to sit in front of some television screen to watch the same world that mocked me in life now mock me in death.

When I looked in the mirror every day, I saw nothing, not a slip of a miracle that Michael spoke of. I only saw raw, unmitigated misery. Still, I held on to the visions that Gabriel had given me, visions of us sitting on a plush, green lawn discussing what this life would be. Every time the archangel pointed to a difficult challenge on the timeline, I would dismissively wave my hand with, “Pshaw, I can handle it.”

As I stared at the small confines of my room, those words echoed in my mind and haunted me to the point that I knew I would go insane from it. Yet, here I am. I survived. Despite the burdensome circumstances, I am still here. It is only by God and his messengers that I live and still maintain somewhat of a modicum of dignity. If nothing else in this life, I can hold my head up and say that I have survived a hell that battered me to a bloody pulp.

But it did not … it could not break me. And I’m praying it never does.

Had such a trial come before I had established connections with God’s messengers, I would have considered it either a punishment from God or an attack by the Devil. Too often in church during my youth did pastors attribute money problems to the evil machinations of Satan. Too many times had I watched faith healers “heal” by casting out devils that apparently were the cause of an affliction. But now, with clarity and a better understanding of how our reality works, I would be foolish to concur.

Throughout history, religions around the globe have taught humankind of their place in the cosmos. More often than not, adherents have been warned that they have a target on their backs. Their very souls are in the crosshairs as diabolical powers seek to tempt them away from the benevolence of their creator.

Tales of spiritual warfare have followed humanity since the beginning of time, it seems, and have served as explanations for why things happen as they do. If famine strikes a village, then of course a trickster spirit is among them, seeking to torment them. Or worse yet, perhaps the gods of rain and earth have not been appeased. If someone is prosperous, then of course it is only because the person is righteous and has found favor in the eyes of Heaven.

From superstitions passed through oral, cautionary tales to stories of the Bible, such as the book of Job, we are caught up in a never-ending cycle of judgment wherein we take stock of everything in our lives and place them in one of two categories: good or bad.

2 And the LORD said unto Satan, From whence comest thou? And Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. 3 And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause. 4 And Satan answered the LORD, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. 5 But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face. 6 And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life.

Look out, Job. They’re comin’ for you, man. They’re comin’ for you.

So here we have the most righteous man who had ever graced the planet during his days, and Heaven pretty much offered him up on a platter in some sort of unspoken bet. Did I mention he was the most righteous?

When Job was befallen with an acute case of rotten luck, his wife belittled him. His friends, however, heard about it and came from afar to cheer him up. What really stands out here is verse eleven: “Now when Job’s three friends heard of all this evil that was come upon him, they came everyone from his own place … to mourn with him and to comfort him.” The man had lost his home, his family, his riches, and his health, and it was all attributed to some sort of nefarious plot. Well, the Bible clearly sets the story up for us and shows that it was Satan who did it. Mind you, this was an evil that was permitted by God. God could have easily said no. But he didn’t. Without that approval, Job would have continued being righteous and rich until his cushy death.

Unfortunately, such was not to happen.

Stories like this are what keep many of us stuck in the belief that the Devil is after us when bad things occur, or that we must be in God’s great favor when good things occur. I believe we have to pull back for a moment and be honest with ourselves. It’s time we understood that the notions of good and bad are purely subjective and only describe situations or circumstances that make us uncomfortable to one degree or another. When Job had riches, it was assumed that he was in God’s good graces. When he sat upon a pile of ashes, homeless and destitute, everyone around him believed that a great evil was upon him.

These notions of good and bad have been with humankind forever, and I have no doubt that they always will be. Despite the fact that they are subjective and are based purely on one’s perspective and how they make one feel, it seems we will never be able to escape their prison of illusion. And for so long as we exist in this reality, we may be hindered from understanding and accepting that life is neither good nor bad, but
simply is
.

What befalls us has nothing to do with devils chasing us or God punishing us, but instead with the lessons we are to learn in this lifetime. If we can train our minds to first examine situations in terms of what we can learn from them instead of wasting energy on blame, we will find our existence far easier to navigate. While the challenges will be no less daunting, the losses no less painful, and the disappointments no less stinging, we will at least find ourselves able to endure much more than we might give ourselves credit for.

Though some of you may be a lot like my old self and therefore hesitant to view spiritual lessons in this light, I still ask you to give this perspective a chance. I believe that actively engaging the divine and connecting directly with our cosmic siblings helps to open our eyes to why we must endure the hardships we do. It helps us to see past the illusions we create in our minds and get to the core of each lesson we must learn. When we see life as
it just is
and are no longer so quick to judge everything as good or bad, there is less room for complacency and a false sense of security when life is good, and less room for panic and worry when life becomes turbulent. Our existence becomes less of a tug of war and more of a string of experiences that we can appreciate for the spiritual growth and maturity they foster.

When you encounter life challenges, try to think of them as a form of spiritual strength training. When you seek to build muscles in your body, you can lift weights, working against gravity, or you can use resistance training. The greater the weight or the resistance, the harder your body has to work and the stronger you become. We can apply the same principles to our spirituality. The adversity, trials, and tribulations we encounter in a lifetime serve as the resistance we need to build our spiritual selves. Without any of these challenges, what could we as spiritual beings hope to learn or achieve?

So how do the archangels fit into all of this? Well, they don’t work within the confines of good versus evil, either. They’re least concerned with what makes us happy or sad, and more concerned with what serves a divine purpose, God’s purpose, your purpose in this reality. They are here to guide us along our chosen script, as well as to create the conditions that motivate us into action—conditions that ultimately bring to us the lessons we’re to learn. In essence, the angels are working within the universal law of causality, or cause and effect.

Every action you take creates an effect. Say you leave an upstairs window open while your air conditioning is running. Since the AC will never shut off, your electric bill will be more than you were expecting. Now you will have to pinch pennies for the week when you had already made plans to spend that extra money at the local art fair. So, because you weren’t there to purchase a piece of art from a cute, little, freckle-faced kid who was trying to raise money for a new computer, he stayed an extra thirty minutes and instead was discovered by some French philanthropist who took an instant liking to the kid’s art.

Of course, that’s how it was
supposed
to happen. Still, you’re at home watching
I Love Lucy
reruns, cursing the electric company, and bemoaning the fact that you don’t have enough cash to go out that weekend. Cause and effect. Like dominoes, everything falls into place. With one action—the tipping of one domino—a string of reactions is set in motion. But unlike dominoes, there’s no end to that string. What we initiate in this life will ultimately follow us back home into the Realm of Spirit. That is to say that the decisions we make before come into being as mortals affect our experience and thus impact the decisions we make when we decide to take on the human reality for another round.

With this awareness and understanding of causality, as well as of the Realm of Spirit and our scripted lives, I believe there is no alternative but to acknowledge that we humans are wholly responsible for every experience we have.

Remember what I told Gabriel earlier:
I’m not coming back this way again
. Granted, I said that last time, but this time I mean it … I think.

Regardless of the life we choose, however, the angels will be there creating conditions in our lives to bring about desired effects, which in turn will create a cause in another human’s life. There is no such thing as an accident. The dominoes that led up to an incident, as well as the dominoes tipped by that incident, come from and move on into eternity, crossing time and space and affecting every sentient being on one level or another. Liken it to an earthquake in the Far East that in turn creates a tsunami. Across the vast Pacific and across the span of a few hours, that tsunami will be seen creeping toward the shores of California. Such is the way of our decisions and the actions we make in this existence.

Everything we do, from the trivial to the profound, will have an effect not only on our own lives, but on those of others. Whether we call it the Golden Rule, karma, or the butterfly effect, the law of causality is a cosmic wave that sweeps up every single being in existence and carries them through time and into infinity. We cannot escape it, and to acknowledge it is to acknowledge that we are all connected not merely as children of the Source, but we are also connected by the very scripts that we write when we decide to venture into human realms.

Take a minute to consider your life. Look at your past and plot out exactly how you’ve come to be in this moment. Look at the lives that have affected yours, and vice versa, and how those lives affect other lives, and on and on and on. No, this is not a new concept. There are hundreds if not thousands of books that say this. So why am I repeating it? Because I still encounter those who aren’t familiar with the concept or perhaps have some difficulty grasping it. I repeat it because I truly believe that life is about experiencing the effects of your choices, learning and growing from them, and appreciating the magnificence of the one law that governs the
entire
universe—ascended masters, angels, and human beings alike.