Angels, again

But God’s angels serve us!

Hebrews 1:14; 2:9 Are not all angels ministering spirits sent to serve those who will inherit salvation?

She did WHAT?!

I was reading one of Karis’s journals, age fourteen. She described a habit she had developed, when she couldn’t sleep because of pain. In the early morning hours, she would slip outside and sit on our front step, watching the sun rise and our neighborhood slowly come to life, greeting and blessing passersby hurrying up the hill to catch buses to their jobs across town. We lived in a sort of rowhouse, fronting directly on the street, sharing walls with neighbors right, left, and back.

A view of our street, our open carport on the left, the step where Karis sat behind the neighbor boy in blue (one of Karis’s closest friends). Karis, center, between Rachel and Valerie, holds her dog Buddy. Dave’s dad was visiting us. See the trees and lake in the middle distance? This is the water reservoir for our part of the city; it now boasts a park and walking track designed by a beloved member of our church. Living near the “represa” was one of the perks we enjoyed–along with our wonderful neighbors, who looked out for us in every way they could. We cherish friendships with them still, and visit whenever we can.

Why did I feel alarm—and outrage, if I’m honest—learning about this seventeen years later?

1. We lived in a dangerous neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, where assaults, robberies, and kidnappings were frequent, especially of white, blond children and teens, presumed to be from rich families. Karis knew this. Every one of our neighbors’ homes had been broken into; a teen across the street had been shot; one family’s young children tied up and terrorized; every home robbed … Most of this occurred in the vulnerable early hours of the day. All the horror stories sprung to my mind; our neighbors gathered in our living room seeking solutions. Yet Karis consciously and deliberately exposed herself to harm while the rest of the family slept.
2. It’s difficult to adequately express the complexity of keeping Karis alive day to day, totally apart from these external threats. On any given day, she could wake up feeling well enough to go to school, and I would proceed with my ministry and household plans for the day, only to be called a few hours later: “We found Karis passed out in the bathroom …” The race across the city to emergency care … the inevitable scolding by her doctor for not acknowledging school was not really an option for a person like Karis. (An extrovert, she hated every single day she missed being with her friends and all the activities of school.)
3. The cost of Karis care to each of our other children, when so often, for example, family plans had to be cancelled because Karis was once more in the hospital. Christmases, birthdays, weekends spent in one hospital or another. I couldn’t believe Karis would so brazenly add the danger of assault or abduction to her life and ours.

So why did she do this? We didn’t allow our daughters to walk anywhere alone. Not ever.

I took some time to calm down, then kept reading.

Over the course of her high school journals, Karis justified her early-morning breach of family rules because:

1. She needed those hours away from her pain-filled bedroom. She needed to breathe fresh air and commune with God in the beauty of sunrise, a beauty hard to come by in our concrete jungle.
2. She needed people. Anytime other people were present, even peripherally, she could focus on them and not on her distressed body. (This reached the point when she was in college that her doctor told us he couldn’t care for her anymore. That’s another story.)
3. She knew precisely when she had to slip back into the house and her bedroom before others in our home woke up—and figured “What they don’t know, won’t hurt them.”
4. She wanted to LIVE–and her health limited her in so many ways.
5. And finally, Karis felt perfectly safe, because she wasn’t alone: her angels were with her. Her angels, Faith, Hope, and Love, whom she could see, whom she talked to and often referenced in her journals.

Hmm, I thought. Perhaps this explains something. I had always wondered why in twenty years there, our house was the only one on our street never broken into. We were the “rich Americans,” the natural target of robbers and kidnappers. And we knew, because neighbors easily made their way into our house to put out a fire while we were away one Sunday, that getting in wouldn’t pose any problem to professional criminals.

Unknown to us, three powerful angels, apparently, resided at our address.

Karis never suffered harm for disobeying our family rules. Each successful escapade reinforced doing it again. And it seems, from her journals, that Karis’s angels supported her adolescent misconduct in this and in many other ways. For example:

• Riding buses across town (our “town” was a city of 22 million people) without telling us or asking permission.
• Maintaining relationships with people, including guys, she met on the bus.
• A whole night spent with her friends in a city park without letting us know where she was. Why didn’t she call when she missed the last bus home after a concert in the park? Because she “knew” we would be asleep and didn’t want to wake us. (We and the other parents, of course, spent the night phone-tagging and worrying and praying.)

How does God assess all that? Some mysteries, we will only understand in Heaven. But once we’re in the presence of the Lord, they probably won’t matter anymore.