Willian Blake, poet and artist during England’s Romantic Age, saw angels in trees. He was only a ten-year-old boy who one day looked up and saw angels. Afterward could not stop drawing them and writing ecstatic poetry in tribute to them. His depictions included Jacob wrestling with an angel, an angel coming to Abraham, and Joseph Smith founding the Mormon Church after meeting with the angel Moroni.
We are told that angels appear as voices, dreams, signs, and visions and that they carry messages. A good question is why they appear at all, much less in one form or another. Some people insist that angels don’t exist because they have never seen one. People ask why they appear only to certain humans. Others believe they come to everyone.
Angels come in all sizes, shapes, and colors visible to the physical eye. But, for sure, people are always changed after having seen one. Some times angels come in the form of friends but it seems that are best recognized when they come as strangers, dancing into people’s lives for a only a moment and fleeting out again, sometimes without even leaving a name. Countless stories exist of angelic intercession and intervention.
When a spirit enters a room, you feel a chill as if a door has been left ajar. When it touches you or when its body passes through you, you feel an artic cold. All these signs mark the characteristics of a visiting ghost. But angels are different. No one whoever has seen an angel would mistake it for a ghost. Angels are noted for their warmth and light. All who speak of them agree on their iridescent luminance. They marvel at their brilliant colors or their glowing whiteness. People have reported being flooded with joy, laughter, and happiness.
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George Washington is said have been visited by an angel at Valley Forge. Johnny Cash was twice visited by an angel, once when he was twelve and again as a grown man, each time to warn of an impending death. There’s the story of a college professor who saw a group of female angels, and another story of six Russian cosmonauts, all atheists, who twice sighted a band of angels up in space with wings as big as jumbo jets.
Angels carry messages. The very word in Greek means messenger. The Oxford Universal Dictionary gives the definition: “A ministering spirit or divine messenger; one of an order of spiritual beings superior to man in power and intelligence, who are the attendants and messengers of the Deity.”
Paul writes in chapter 13 in his letter to the Hebrews, “Remember to welcome strangers into your home. There are some who did that and welcomed angels without knowing it.”