My Guardian Angel

Humor In Chaos

Searching for Joy Series

My Guardian Angel 

One of the blessings that came out of all my traumas was the reminder that I have a constant caregiver sent by God – my guardian angel.

We have a serious problem today of making big mistakes with our guardian angels. Most of us either forget about them, ignore them, or think they are something they are not. We certainly don’t understand them. Instead of listening to our best sources on what and who they are, we listen to those not only outside the Catholic faith for those who are Catholic, but outside Christianity entirely.

Instead of praying to God to keep us in sync with our angels, we try to connect with them directly and give them names and force them to be who we think they should be. Isn’t that the common mistake we make with our spouses and our children too? Dictating to others never goes well.

Our guardian angels are here to help protect and guide us according to God’s will for us, not our own will. They are tasked with keeping us in line for God’s ultimate plan. The more we cooperate with that plan and try to understand our individual roles, the more fulfilled we can be in our lives.

Our guardian angels are sent to fight the unseen spiritual battles for us. We battle by prayer, strengthening our angels. The battle is for real.

I do not name my guardian angel. He isn’t my pet. He is God’s creation. I am considerate when I talk to my angel. I do talk to him, but I try to stay aware of what I say. He is God’s soldier.

When I do talk to him, I thank him for protecting me and guiding me to do God’s will in my life. When I am awake enough, I say good morning. When I am pretty certain he did something in that immediate moment, I say thank you.

Anything I directly want from him, I say it in a prayer to God and ask God to direct my guardian angel to do that if, and only if, it is in His will. And things have happened.

A few months ago, I got a bit of bad news. I was doing really good on living in joy, but this news knocked me out of it somewhat. I was okay because I knew I was going to recover from this one. Nonetheless, it hurt, and I was down in the dumps.

I prayed to God for a sign to remind me that He was still in this journey along with me.

The next day, I was still down. My daughter insisted we drive to Santa Monica to go to a coffee shop where she loves to sit and work. I didn’t want to go, but I remembered my prayer the day before and got ready. Maybe my daughter’s idea was my answer? So I went.

I was having a hard time appreciating the warm sunshine and the blue sky. We sat outside with our avocado toast and organic drinks. People came with their dogs. That’s normal around here. There seems to be an unspoken rule about dog ownership. If you don’t have a dog, there is something wrong with you. (We used to have dogs.)

While sitting at a table, all of these dogs were coming up to me. Staring at me. Tugging on their leashes to come over to me. They all, I mean all, wanted my attention. Their owners were a bit confused to the point of scolding them. There were lots of people sitting around working or relaxing, but these dogs wanted to come up to me.

There was one dog, a poodle cross of some sort, that wasn’t allowed to come near me. It kept staring at me, giving me a periodic, light-hearted yip, and continuously wagging it’s tail. The owner kept scolding it for harassing me. He was not harassing me. He was making me smile.

It took a while, but I finally recognized that my angel was sending these dogs over to give me some love. And I said thank you to both God and my angel. The next day, it continued on my normal morning walk. Dogs I often pass by that usually ignore me were doing the same thing. And, there were a number of other dogs too I did not recognize. They all came up to me or tried to. There was so much love coming from them.

Those two days knocked me right back into joy.

Remembering that I have the gift of a guardian angel trying to keep me on course is a way of being intentional. Another is letting go of the past.

Years of pain and then the loss of my marriage kept trying to put me into the downward spiral of ruminating on all I lost out on, and on lost dreams and aspirations for my life and my marriage. Ruminating is an emotional tar pit.

What I lost, I lost. The future I planned is no more. That’s reality. Dwelling on losses does no good. It keeps me from taking forward steps.

Forward steps were baby steps for a long time. Baby steps add up. Eventually, the baby grows and takes bigger steps. At first, babies struggle to crawl. Then they struggle to cruise along the furniture. Then they struggle to walk across the living room. What seems like a forever process turns into a blink-of-an-eye move to a soccer field kicking the ball in for the winning goal.

Experiencing the good and the bad of today is enough.

It drove me crazy when my life coach told me to focus on today’s problems. He was right. Focusing on today’s problems led to solutions for tomorrow’s problems. The problems I thought I was going to have tomorrow ended up not being the problems anyway. Unexpected things happened that either created different problems or created blessings. Things I thought I needed to protect myself from didn’t manifest at all.

When I was evicted from my home, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was barely making ends meet as it was. Inflation was making everything too expensive. I couldn’t afford anything. I was in a panic. I was trying to be intentional and accepting of my reality. I was failing and faltering.

I finally found a one-bedroom apartment for my adult daughter and I that was going to cost me about the same amount as the three bedroom home I was leaving. However, we couldn’t move in right away. I needed to store items for two weeks while the apartment was cleaned and prepared, and I needed money for the moving expenses. How were we going to live for two weeks?

My friends in my Bible study group were praying for me. Other friends in two different churches were praying for me. The ladies in my online marriage/divorce support group were praying for me. I knew I needed to hand it over to God and keep packing boxes.

As the time grew closer, offers to stay here and there, couch surfing, started rolling in. My son spearheaded some of those offers. My sister and her husband in another state offered up their guest rooms for a few days. We accepted all those offers with a day here and two days there. I still had to pay for moving expenses and a rental car, but things were coming together.

Out of the blue came a friend with a check. A donation. No expectation of paying back. I didn’t feel right about accepting it. There are other people in our area in greater need than me. My daughter laid into me with a list of things I still didn’t have the money to cover including the rental car, moving truck, food for the two weeks, we were going to have to stay in a hotel part of the time, the security deposit on the apartment, furniture for the new place cause our old furniture was way too big and had to be sold for next to nothing so they would go, and regular bills that were going up with inflation. Legal expenses for the pending divorce were adding up too. Life happens that leads to other costs. I was already short every month. Still, I felt bad about it. I couldn’t get it out of my head that other people needed that money more than me. I thought, “God will take care of me.”

I mentioned it to my online support group. Wonderful ladies who know when to speak the truth with force and when to stay quiet. One of them said, “Sarah! God is trying to bless you. Take it. You can give back in another way when things are better.” The other ladies concurred.

I accepted the gift. It took a huge load off my shoulders. I was about to reject the gift from friends and God. That was God’s way of taking care of me. Since then, I have been finding ways of giving back to people around me in financial need. I pray those seeds grow for them within God’s will.

I am hoping this book/blog series will be another way of giving back by helping others find joy after traumas.

I can be intentional now that I know God’s got my back. So long as I keep taking the forward steps, one at a time as He is guiding me, I am fine. So long as I keep moving forward, slowly, thoughtfully.

Intentional, self-aware of my thoughts and feelings, and forward focused, one step at a time, are the things that get me from point A to point B.

Most of all, I was intentional in my time with God. I made my daily and weekly Bible studies, my daily prayer times, a priority. I consciously made God my first love. Without Him, I am nothing. With Him, things slowly got easier and easier. Step by step.

Now, things that used to be an emergency to me, are no longer emergencies.

I had the habit of taking unimportant events and turn them into emergencies. I’m working on stopping that.

I don’t know who first said this. I hope to find out and add their name in appreciation. There is this philosophical thought on nuisances being made into emergencies. It’s evolution we no longer need.

Prehistoric man needed to be on guard all the time. After all, we are meat to saber-toothed tigers. When we went out to hunt, we were at risk of them hunting us. We needed to evolve into having an internal alarm system to help us to sense the subtle signs that we are being stalked by a tiger that wants to eat us.

We no longer have saber-toothed tigers stalking us. That internal evolutionary sensor trying to protect us still exists. It tends to deal with things in emergency mode that we don’t need to get hyped up about. That leads to anxiety that increases hormones in our bodies that now have nowhere to go and nothing to do because we don’t need to run away from anything. Those excess, unnecessary hormones have the potential of doing damage to our physical bodies. All for what? Because I have a flat tire? I can either change the tire, or call AAA to come change it for me. The flat tire is not a tiger.

Now, when my daughter and I find the other one of us starting to treat a problem as an emergency, we ask each other, “Where is the tiger?” Most of the time, there is no tiger. All other problems are solvable. That’s another way of being intentional, to properly label the issue and the associated feelings. I do it in prayer and hand the anxiety off to my guardian angel.

We don’t have to take these journeys of healing and searching for joy alone. God does provide companions in both the physical and the spiritual realm.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for more!

Sarah

Humor In Chaos

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