Angels, For Cynics

Here's an angel you can believe in

I saw something four months ago that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind.

We were up at home for Christmas and staying at the house where Ethan and his family lived. It’s an old farm house, with plenty of dark corners and narrow nooks, especially in the upstairs where we sleep when we visit. As I bounded up the stairs one night, searching for more blankets for the kids’ beds, I flicked on a little lamp that his mother Anne always kept there to illuminate the corner while she did her ironing.

I’ve seen this lamp before, of course; in fact, I’ve even ironed a shirt or two beneath its warm glow. But I had never really looked at it before, or given it much thought. But on the night that we were home—perhaps because it was very dark and I had to scooch down right beside it to find the switch—I noticed a sticker that was stuck to its base that I had never seen before.

It was an extremely lifelike sticker of a bedtime scene. In it, there was a little boy sleeping peacefully in his bed, his arm drawn around some childhood comfort, maybe a teddy bear or a baseball glove. And then there was an angel standing in the foreground, keeping watch beside the boy’s bed while he slept. The angel was very serious indeed—not the floofy, ethereal kind but one clearly filled with dignity and power. His arms were crossed, he had a stern but kindly expression, and he held a candle which burned brightly in the dark room.

I stood staring at that sticker for a long time. Even as I heard the kids wailing and laughing downstairs and the adults making plans for dinner without me, I stared, drawn into the little scene that had clearly meant enough to Anne that she stuck it on her lamp in her ironing corner, where she would see it each time she pressed wrinkled collars and pants.