Laura Schroff - Angels on Earth: Inspiring Real-Life Stories of Fate, Friendship, and the Power of Kindness

ALSO BY LAURA SCHROFF

An Invisible Thread

An Invisible Thread Christmas Story

Howard Books

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Copyright 2016 by Laura Schroff and Alex Tresniowski

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First Howard Books hardcover edition October 2016

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Interior design by Devan Norman

Jacket design by Janet Perr

Front jacket photograph by Sava Alexandru/Getty Images

Back jacket sky photograph by James Brey/Getty Images

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-1-5011-4475-2

ISBN 978-1-5011-4472-1 (ebook)

To all the angels on earth who are changing lives and making a difference by sharing kindness through human connections.

M y first act of kindness, or at least the first one I can remember, was putting money in the collection basket during Sunday mass.

I was too young to really understand what the money was for, other than it was somehow helping the less fortunate. I just liked the act of dropping some coins my mother gave me into the basket when it finally reached me. I also remember that not eating or drinking all morning before massa requirement back thenusually caused me to pass out in my pew not long after my little act of kindness.

As a young girl I also really liked angels, and Id wonder if Id ever be able to glimpse one, hovering over me, feathery wings fluttering in the air. Much later, as an adult, when my mother passed away, I began to think about angels again. In the years after I lost her, I still felt my mothers presence in my life, watching over me, helping me, rooting me on. I could believe my mother had become an angelmy protector, my guardian, my guide through both the good times and the hardships of life.

Kindness and angelsI still spend a lot of time thinking about those two things today. In a way theyve become the theme of my life, and certainly the theme of the book you are reading right now. Now Im not any kind of expert in these matters. Ive never studied angelology (yes, there is such a thing), nor do I have any special training in the psychology of kindness. The reason I am writing to you about them now is that over the last five years, I have been on a kind of journey that has given me a new understanding of the role of kindness and angels in our lives.

Of what it means to be an angel.

You see, I still believe in angels in the traditional sensecelestial beings with beautiful, fluffy wings.

But Ive now learned there is another kind of angel, and over the last five years I have seen these angels everywhere.

These are the angels on earth.

And one of them is you.

In 2011 I wrote a book called An Invisible Thread . It was about an extraordinary moment that happened in September 1986, when I was thirty-five and a successful ad sales executive living and working in New York City. That day, I passed a homeless eleven-year-old panhandler begging for money on the corner of 56th Street and Broadway.

Excuse me, lady, he said to me. Do you have any spare change? I am hungry.

I kept walking. There were lots of homeless people on the streets in New York City in the 1980s, and it was easy just to keep my head down and ignore them. But as I walked away from the boy, something clicked in my head. It was his words, his simple declaration to me.

I am hungry.

I stopped in the middle of Broadway, turned around, and went back to the boy, whose name was Maurice Mazyck. I offered to buy him lunch at a McDonalds around the corner, and I asked if I could join him. I soon learned he hadnt eaten anything in two days. That was our first meal togetherBig Mac, french fries, and a chocolate shake, extra thickbut not our last. We wound up meeting for dinner the following Monday, and every Monday for the next four years, and hundreds of times after that. We lived only two blocks apartme in a luxury high-rise, Maurice in a notorious welfare hotel riddled with drugs and crimebut we might as well have lived on different planets.

Even so, Maurice and I became friends, and that friendship is still going strong today, exactly thirty years later.

The story of how our unlikely friendship grew and changed both of us is the story I told in An Invisible Thread . The title is from an ancient Chinese proverb: An invisible thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break. I chose that title because to me, it perfectly captured the essence of the friendship I share with Maurice. In a busy city of eight million people, on a street corner where literally thousands of people passed Maurice every day without so much as a glance, somehow we found each other at just the moment we most needed to find each other.

And everything that was to follow started with the simplest and smallest of gesturesme turning around and going back. Nothing dramatic, certainly nothing heroic. Still, that one, tiny moment changed everything. Some people call such a moment fate. Some call it destiny. Some refer to it as the hand of God at work.

I chose to think of it as an invisible threadsomething larger than either Maurice or me steering us into each others paths, pulling us together.

Our meeting had a profound effect on both our lives, but what I would come to learn is that the real gift of that moment was not from me to Maurice, though I helped him chase a dream he never thought he could have.

It wasnt even from Maurice to me, though his friendship has been one of the great blessings of my life.

No, the real gift of that moment was the gift we gave each other.

The gift of angel wings.

In different religions and traditions, angels are assigned different roles. Some are protectors. Some are messengers. Some are guides. Some are meant to carry out Gods tasks.

But think about itevery single one of these angelic functions is something that we, as human beings, are more than capable of.

The dictionary definition of an angel is a spiritual being believed to act as an attendant, agent, or messenger of God, conventionally represented in human form with wings and a long robe. Sotake away the wings and the long robe (at least for me; I dont own one), and that definition can apply to all of us.

We can be one anothers protectors, and messengers, and guides. And we can carry out Gods taskscharity, compassion, forgiveness, assistance, and love.

We can be the angels we so desperately need in our lives.