My favorite part about class on Monday was hearing about the angel that appeared to Sherman when he was a child. In a movie, there would be dramatic music, special lighting or some sort of fanfare to signal it was a mystical moment. Real moments don't have the theatrics so I think maybe we miss it sometimes when the supernatural intersects our lives. The instance might be so fleeting, so unexpected and here, then gone, that we put the whole thing out of our minds and it is as if it never happened.

I haven't seen an angel that I am aware of, and yet I bet one has shown himself and I didn't catch it. I do think I have heard them whisper however; call it intuition or whatever, but sometimes I think they speak in almost words- more like ideas and images. Once I had the urge to go to the mailbox, even though it was the wrong time of day and the mailbox was a walk down the street. When I got there, a girl was in a tree trying to catch her birds. I got a ladder and helped her. And her mom gave those birds and the birdcage to me (I had been wanting some birds!) because she thought her daughter wasn't responsible enough to care for them. After that, the girl came to our house to play with her birds.

Sometimes I wonder where particular thoughts come from, and I don't think it's from an angel. But something trying to trip me up. A few years ago, I would have bought the angel part, but not the other voices- the ones that slyly try to convince me that something less than positive is really okay, or that it is only normal to hold a grudge under the circumstances... But I think it is important to acknowledge the good and the bad because the first step in sidestepping evil is to notice it coming at you. A think it becomes a zen sort of thing, like the way Keanu Reeves dodges bullets in Matrix, which is entirely different from focusing on the darkside so much, that the light has a hard time getting your attention.