September 13, 2021 8:00 am

Entertaining Angels

Faith

I lost my grandma two weeks ago – my loss, heaven’s gain. ❤️

I want to share an experience I had when she died that demonstrates how often we can have spiritual experiences without them “feeling” spiritual.

My mom and I had been camped out at the nursing home for four days, and I was exhausted. I was debating between making another coffee run and going home to sleep for a few hours so I could recharge and come back. I asked the nurse if she thought I should stay, and she replied that she couldn’t say for sure but that her gut said this would be the day. I stayed.

I’d been watching my grandma sleep for days, her chest rising and falling about every four seconds. I tried reading a book for a bit but had this feeling that my grandma would be going soon and I should put the book down so I didn’t miss it.

I abandoned the book and was just texting my brother to see if he could bring us coffees when I realized the room had finally cooled off a bit. It had been so stuffy from all the visitors and from being cooped up in a tiny little space with the door closed. The thermostat on the wall didn’t seem to be working, and we’d tried adjusting it several times.

I felt a cool breeze in front of my legs like someone had just walked past me, even though there was nobody else there but my mom and me in our chairs and my grandma in her hospital bed. I initially didn’t think anything of it but said something insightful like, “Ooh, do you feel that? Now it cooled off!”

Something told me to look at my grandma again. I waited for her to breathe. I counted one, two, three, four, five, six…and I knew. She was gone.

That’s when I realized it: that cool breeze had been a spiritual thing. It felt absolutely real and natural – not spiritual whatsoever. But I knew that I knew that I knew that had been the moment my grandma went to heaven.

My grandma loved Jesus and had accepted his gift of salvation, so I knew all along where she’d be going, but I wasn’t sure if I’d notice or feel anything when he came to take her home.

I did, but it didn’t look or feel anything like I expected! When my grandpa died a few years ago, my relatives saw his eyes pop open and they were the brightest blue they’d ever been as he looked at something – Someone – at the foot of his bed. Then he was gone.

A part of me expected something more like that: dramatic or highly emotional. Instead, my grandma went quietly in her sleep and I felt a simple cool breeze. (And no, it wasn’t an air vent or fan, either. Believe me, I checked.)

I’m not totally sure if what I felt was one of my grandma’s angels leaving along with her spirit or Jesus himself. My guess is it was an angel and I felt the breeze as it swept by on its way out. But I can tell you this: it didn’t feel spiritual at all! It felt completely, 100% natural. If I hadn’t looked up at that very moment and realized the sensation happened at the same moment my grandma stopped breathing, I would have never made the connection that this was a spiritually significant event.

So often, that’s how my spiritual encounters with the Lord are. I don’t necessarily feel something, I rarely see anything, and I don’t have these big, dramatic moments that other people sometimes do. More often, I take things in through my physical senses – or what feel like my physical senses – and later realize there was more to those physical sensations than I thought. Most of the time, I just have these “knowings” that feel very logical or physical sensations that feel very real and it takes a while for me to figure out they actually were from the Holy Spirit. (Sometimes I’m a slow learner. 😉)

I had been hoping for some kind of cool thing to happen as my grandma’s life on earth ended and she went to be with Jesus. I got what I prayed for and more: a peaceful home-going and a cool experience…literally.

If you’re someone who doesn’t feel like you have spiritual encounters the way others do, pay attention to your physical sensations and the thoughts you have in your mind. God might be showing you more than you think! Sometimes, as the Word says, we are entertaining angels and we don’t even know it.

God is cooler than we think.