Angels Among Us, 2nd Edition

I shared some of my "indirect" experiences with angels in the last lesson. When this teaching series was originally written, that was all I had to share. I had not experienced much by way of direct angelic interaction. There was the occasional angelic messenger, like the one who appeared to me when I was on the prayer journey through Italy, but I did not see angels very often. That changed in March of 2007, and the Lord began giving me much more frequent and direct encounters with His angels.

Those encounters were actually a birthday gift that the Holy Spirit gave to me back in 1999, only I did not realize it at the time. The birthday gift did not manifest in my life until about seven and a half years later.

Let me share how the Holy Spirit gave me this present. My birthday had been a very difficult day. Not only did everyone forget my birthday, but an amazing number bunch of unpleasant and frustrating things happened to me on that day. I got caught in unexpected bumper to bumper traffic on my way home from work and all I wanted to do was get home and go to bed and forget the day. But I'd been sitting on the freeway for over half an hour and hadn't even gone two miles. I was so frustrated that I wanted to scream.

That was when the Lord spoke to me and said, "Happy birthday Teresa. What would you like for your birthday?"

Please understand, I was in a bad place at that moment, and I did not think that was really God speaking to me; I thought it was my imagination playing tricks on me. I decided to play along because I had nothing better to do, but I did not really think that this was real conversation with God.

So I said, "Well, let's see, You are a Trinity, aren't You? So can I ask You for three things, one from each of You?"

The voice in my thoughts said "Yes."

So I made my requests. I said, "Ok, From the the Father, I want the gift of prophecy. From Jesus I want John 14:12 in my life--e.g., I want miracles and healings and mighty works. And from the Holy Spirit..." I paused because I was not really sure what to ask Him for. I pondered for a few minutes and then I said, "I'd like the Holy Spirit to give me something that I need but that I am not smart enough to ask Him for."

At the time of the conversation, I did not think it was real. But when I finally got through the traffic and got home, I received a phone call from a prophet from back east. God had told him to call me (and gave him my phone number). God said that he had to call on precisely this day, not before and not after. This was the message God had for me: "Today I am giving you the gift of prophecy." That was how I discovered that my conversation with God was real. I also began to see the Lord do healings and miracles through me.

So I began to ponder what the Holy Spirit was going to give me, and I had absolutely no idea what that might be. If He had told me back then that it was to be "angelic encounters" and "working with angels," I would have rejected it because I had some serious misconceptions about angels. The Holy Spirit had to work on me for close to seven years to change my views and attitudes about angels, to get me to the place where He could release angelic interactions into my life. He did that gradually over a seven hear period.

Then, in late November or early December of 2006, Jim Paul (a friend of mine who also mentors me from time to time) told me that he was having angelic visitations in his home. He lived in Ontario, Canada. That is a long way from San Francisco.

But when I heard that angels were showing up on a daily basis at my friend's house, I longed to go there to encounter God. At that time in my walk with God, I felt spiritually "dry," and I was very hungry for Him. I teasingly told Jim that I was half-tempted to fly out and camp out in his living room and pursue God. I did not seriously mean it when I said it, but Jim took it seriously. He invited me to come and stay with them. I said I'd pray about it, not really expecting to take him up on the offer.

But when I prayed, my hunger for God increased even more. I knew I had to go, so we made arrangements. The schedule worked out so that I could not go on this pilgrimage to until mid-January. I was a bit concerned that the angels would stop showing up by then. I called Jim about a week before the trip and asked him about it. My fears had been realized: the angels were not showing up on a daily basis any more. In fact, it had been a few weeks since Jim had seen one. But he thought I should still come anyhow, as there was a conference at TACF that he felt God wanted me to attend. Monday night was a special meeting just for the local pastors, and Jim invited me to it with him.

I ended up going to Canada to visit Jim and Diane. I spent hours each day sitting and praying in the room where the angels had appeared to Jim. I really longed for an angelic encounter. God had been speaking a lot of stuff to me over the past year, and I wanted to have a face-to- face with an angel and have that angel tell me basically the same stuff. I felt that would be a validation of my hearing, and I was very hungry for that.

The Lord did meet and refresh me wonderfully on that trip, but I never saw a single angel. Here is a funny part--one afternoon while I was praying in the living room, Jim was upstairs in his bedroom reading a book. His bedroom was directly above the room I was praying in. I was asking God to send an angel to speak to me. Right them, two angels showed up in Jim's room and began speaking to Jim--about me! When he told me that, I was miffed. It was like they missed and went to the wrong room-- only God never misses. He wanted me to focus all my searching and desire on Him, not on His servants.

God met me on that trip the way He always meets me, and He spoke to me the way He always speaks to me. But my spirit was revived in His presence, and God restored my sense of destiny and calling. I felt like a sponge that had been bone dry, and the Lord saturated me with His living water during the trip, so I wasn't dry any more. God did not meet me the way I expected Him to, but He did meet me and I was very satisfied.

I came home and had a crisis to deal with. It did not take long to get "back under it all" and loose the sense of refreshment I experienced in Canada. I cried out to God for help and all He said was "Trust Me." (I hate it when God says that, because I am not as good at trusting Him as I need to be.)

Over the next two months, I started to feel very dry again. I decided that the only thing I could do was to saturate myself in His word and cry out to Him for help. Then I was so hungry for God that I started spending about an hour or two a day reading the bible, and another hour praying and crying out to Him. God would meet me in the prayer time, and He even caught me into a few visions of Heaven. But when I wasn't in that prayer time, I still felt very dry and worn out, and I began to mentally prepare myself for a "desert experience."

That was in March of 2007. I had stopped looking for angelic encounters and I was desperate for God. I had been spending one to two hours a day in the bible for about a week when an angel suddenly showed up in my room as I was reading God's word. The angel began to speak to me and I could feel God's strong presence radiating from him. I knew that angel had to be from God, because he carried such a strong measure of God's presence. This was not a demonic "angel of light" -- this was the "real thing."

The angel began to instruct me. He showed up frequently, two or three times a day for about an hour or so at a time. It was wonderful and I felt myself coming alive in the Lord. The angel told me his name (which was Lub). I tried to ask him questions about what it was like being an angel, but he did not walk to talk about himself, he just wanted to talk about God. He would ask me a lot of open-ended questions that were designed to get me thinking about some aspect of God's character or faithfulness, etc. I found that as I pondered his questions, I could not help it, I would start worshiping God and get lost in worship. The angel taught me a lot about God's character and I was caught up into God's presence and into several open visions of being before God's throne. It was an incredible experience.

(The angel instructed me to document some of what he was teaching me. I was afraid that people would think I had "lost it" if I shared my experiences publicly. So the angel told me that I could put my experiences into a fictional story instead, but I needed to write them down. If you want to read that story, the book is titled Mercy In Judgment, and you can find out more about it at www.lulu.com/godspeak-intl)

This angel worked with me for about a week, appearing to me every day and sometimes multiple times in the same day. It was an incredible experience and it drew me closer to God than I had felt in a long time. At the end of that first week, a second angel began showing up. The two angels were both from God, but they were not alike. The first angel is what is called an "intimacy angel" or a "worship angel" and his main job is to help draw people closer to God and help them learn to worship Him better. I really enjoyed my time with him.

But after a week or so, the other angel started to take over, and my experiences with him were a bit different. I will share them in the next lesson.