Everyday Angels

It has happened over and over again.

The harder life gets, the more I weep, yes. The less I sleep, yes. I know I’m in a bad way when I am as stark awake as a pig is naked and the watch at my bedside says 3:30. These things come in waves for me and for everyone. The brutal days come for all of us.

And yet, the angels keep coming. This past year and a half since Griffin was born has been relentless with some combination of illness, grief, utterly dogged and pressure-cooking work, or some sort of issue with our home or car. The brutal days can’t stop and won’t stop coming.

And yet, the angels keep coming. Someone calls me out of the blue. Or maybe someone at work or our sons’ soccer team pulls me aside to share comfort and encouragement. Or someone at the grocery store or at the park will just beam because they see something in our family that reminds them of theirs, which brightens their day and mine. Someone will come up to us at church and say, “I have been praying for you.” Or someone in my family or an old friend will just show up somehow, appearing as if through apparition.

How do they know? These people, these wonderful souls, how do they know I need them? How do they know I’m out of strength, many times before I even know I’m out of strength? How do they keep finding me?

I don’t know who keeps sending them. Or why.

But thank God.

—

I feel like an old man now.

Not in the sense of my body or mind — I feel sharp and limber, though I can’t run it back like I used to. It’s that I can’t not wear my heart out in the open anymore. I can’t live as a persona instead of a person anymore. I can’t hold back the laughter or tears or joy anymore.

I can’t hide. From the mirror, from God, from my demons, from love, from anyone. It is only old men who have learned not to hide, and to have learned this from hardship and death, from marriage, friendship, and from four remarkable sons is yet another way I feel I’ve grown up too soon.

But maybe that’s part of why these angels keep showing up. Maybe angels find us precisely when we stop hiding — when our darkness and our light is unhidden. Seeing that tension and dance of darkness and light emanating from another soul is perhaps what draws them near, as if our aura puts out a bat signal if we let it, and the everyday angels all around us see it.

That is perhaps a lesson in being an angel just as it is a lesson in calling one. I have been the recipient of so much love — I hope I can mirror back even a fraction of what’s been poured into me. I hope I can be an everyday angel to someone every once in a while. It seems so selfish and wasteful to just take and take without sharing it back.

It seems to me the key is simpler than I thought. Maybe it doesn’t take a relentless regimen of character development to be a good person. Maybe I don’t have to journal religiously and collect constructive criticism from everyone I can to shape myself into the man of honesty, sacrifice, and devotion my father was.

I think being an everyday angel is much simpler. We open our eyes and ears and hearts. Look for the light and look for the dark, and then just drift toward it. Let our hearts and souls be called. Maybe being a good man, an everyday angel, is really that simple.