Brad Steiger - Angel Miracles: Inspirational True Stories of Heavenly Help

Angel
Miracles

Inspirational True Stories
of Heavenly Help

Brad Steiger &
Sherry Hansen Steiger

Copyright 2008 by Brad Steiger and Sherry Hansen Steiger.
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced
in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions
are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

Published by
Adams Media, an F+W Publications Company
57 Littlefield Street, Avon, MA 02322 U.S.A.
www.adamsmedia.com

ISBN-10: 1-59869-609-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-59869-609-7
eISBN: 978-1-44051-528-6
Printed in the United States of America.

J I H G F E D C B A

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
available from publisher.

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought.

From a Declaration of Principles jointly adopted by a Committee of the American Bar Association and a Committee of Publishers and Associations

Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book and Adams Media was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed with initial capital letters.

While all the events and experiences recounted in this book are true and happened to real people, some of the names, dates, and places have been changed in order to protect the privacy of certain individuals.

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Y es, we believe in angelsand we are not alone. According to a poll conducted by Time magazine, 69 percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels, and 46 percent are certain that they have their own guardian angels to watch over them. Of those men and women polled by the newsmagazine, 32 percent claim that they have personally felt the presence and or guidance of ethereal entities in their lives.

Other polls had similar findings:

A poll conducted by Self magazine found that 87 percent of their readers believed in angels.

The Leger Marketing Survey of Canadians indicated that 57.1 percent of the population of Canada believes in angels.

Scripps Howard News Service released their findings that one out of every five Americans believes he or she has seen an angel or knows someone who has.

A Gallup Poll stated that 72 percent of Americans believed in angels, compared to 96 percent who believed in God, and 90 percent who believed in heaven.

A FOX News poll found that 79 percent of Americans accepted the existence of angels.

The Harris Poll declared that 68 percent of Americans believed in an angelic guardian.

An Associated Press survey stated that 97 percent of evangelical Christians counted on their angels to guide them in life. The same AP poll revealed that even among individuals without any religious affiliation, more than 50 percent believed in angels. Among the general population, 81 percent acknowledged the existence of angels.

Since 1968, we have been distributing the SteigerQuestionnaire of Mystical and Paranormal Experiences to our readers and lecture audiences. Of the more than 30,000 respondents, 78 percent claim to have witnessed angelic activity on Earth; 89 percent believe that they have personally interacted with a guardian angel or spirit guide; and 77 percent say that they have had an encounter with a benevolent being of light. Our respondents generally describe the beings as beautiful of countenance and often majestic and awesome. Manifestations of light often accompany the heavenly beings, adding to the grandeur of their appearance and the feeling of profound reverence that suffuses those who encounter them.

The broadest definition of an angel is simply one who serves as a messenger of God. In this sense, a living person could certainly serve in such a capacity and serve Gods purpose by delivering a particular thought, knowledge, or counsel that one might require at a certain crisis point. Many of us have been privileged to have a good friend or family member become an angel when we really needed the unconditional love and assistance of another, and some of us may even have had such a person assume a protective, guardian angel role for a time. However, when we speak of our true guardian angels, we are referring to those unseen, benevolent entities who, according to many traditions, have been assigned to us at birth to guide, direct us, and on occasion, to protect us.

Some skeptical psychologists and other researchers have suggested that those individuals who believe in a guiding and protective angel may be accessing an as-yet-little-known power of the mind, which enables ones subjective level of consciousness to dramatize another personality, complete with a full range of personal characteristics and its own voice. Such a theory sounds too much like a description of mental illness to those men and women who are convinced beyond reasonable doubt that they were guided, directed, and protected by a spiritual being. Those who believe completely, without question, that they interacted with a guardian angel stoutly maintain that the reality of a spiritual guide or teacher is so much more than any kind of psychological phenomenon.

The idea of a spirit guide or guardian angel dates back to the farthest reaches of antiquity. It is unlikely that anthropologists have ever discovered a single aboriginal culture that did not include the concept of a spirit guide in its theology.

All the great world religions have some kind of tradition of a guardian angel or spiritual guide assigned to each individual human soul. The ancient teachings are also in agreement that angels are an earlier and separate order of creation from that of human beings, who were sculpted from the dust of the earth, and who were brought into being a little lower in the hierarchy than the angels.

As early as the third millennium b.c.e., the written records of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia recognized a hierarchy of supernatural beings that ruled over various parts of the Earth, the universe, and the lives of human beings. The Mesopotamians wanted to be certain that they were well protected by their spiritual guardians, the shedu and the lamassu.

In the Sanskrit texts of the ancient Vedas, the word for angel is angira; in Hebrew, malakh, meaning messenger, or bene elohim, for Gods children; in Arabic, malakah; and in India, multiwinged angels or beings are called garudas. The teachings of Islam state that there are three distinct species of intelligent beings in the universe. First are the angels that are a high order of beings created of Light, the malakh; second, the al-jinn, ethereal, perhaps even multidimensional entities; and then human beings, fashioned out of the stuff of Earth and born into physical bodies. On occasion, the al-jinn can serve as helpful guides or guardians, but they can also be tricksters.