Thunderstorms. The blips on the radar screen disturbed me as the copilot and I ran through our preflight checks. I leaned around the cockpit door. A young boy lay on a stretcher, unconscious, pale as death. His doctor and four nurses stood by.

Medical equipment crowded the aisle. I was chief pilot for a charter airline, and I’d handled hundreds of ambulance flights, but I seldom knew much about the patients I transported.

This boy was named Toby. He was 11 and had something wrong with his brain. We were all set to fly from Cincinnati to Branson, an hour and a half away. A new hospital there had surgical equipment that could help him. “He’s got a 50-50 chance,” a nurse said.

Fifty-fifty chance, I thought. Just like the weather. I would not have given the boy even those odds, considering how sick he looked.

I ducked back into the cockpit. “What do you think?” I asked the copilot. “Gonna be rough,” he said. This was the kind of storm that spawned tornadoes. Commercial flights were canceled in weather like this.

Our Learjet had two engines and two generators. The medical equipment drained our power. If we lost an engine or a generator, I’d have no choice but to cut off the power to the boy’s lifesaving equipment. And what kind of choice was that? Was I risking all our lives to try to save a boy who might not make it anyway?

My starched uniform felt like a straitjacket. Sweat rolled down my forehead and dripped onto my crisp white shirt. I reached for the checklist. My hands were shaking. Then I glanced back at the boy, unconscious on the stretcher. We were ready for takeoff. God be with us on this flight. “Let’s do it,” I said to the copilot. We hit the controls. The jet zoomed into the sky.

Once aloft, I turned around again. The boy was beginning to stir, ever so slightly. Low murmurs came from his lips. The medical staff worked furiously over him. They had no concerns about the flight or the storm, only the boy’s welfare. These courageous people are entrusted to my care. I would focus on my duties, not my fears, just like them.

The radar blipped its warnings: electrical activity, severe turbulence, pounding rain. Solid lines of thunderstorm cells seemed to dare us to approach. “They look angry,” the copilot said. I had to find openings to make our way through. Dear Lord, I can’t do this alone. The plane bounced and dipped in the turbulence. I’d read that a mature thunderstorm had the power of an atomic bomb. Now I believed it.

“Captain!” shouted the copilot. “We need to take evasive action.” I gritted my teeth. I pictured God’s hand on the controls, his angels calming the storm with their wings. I guided the plane into what appeared to be a safe zone. The radar warnings faded.

As we approached each storm cell, the blips disappeared before our eyes. The flight became eerily calm. We continued rising, finding even smoother air.

I sat back in my seat, relaxed but still cautious. I felt a tap on my shoulder. I didn’t turn around. I kept my attention dead ahead.

“Excuse me, Captain,” the nurse said. “What is our altitude?”

“Fourteen thousand feet and climbing,” I said.

After a while I felt another tap on my shoulder: “Captain, what is our target altitude?”

“Target flight level, 41,000 feet.”

Another tap. “Captain, what is our speed?”

Now I was annoyed. Why was this nurse distracting me from piloting the plane? I turned around to scold her. “Who wants to know?”

“Toby wants to know, Captain!” I was astonished. The boy was no longer lying unconscious on his stretcher. Toby sat upright, watching the activity in the cockpit. His brown hair was tousled and soaked with sweat, but there was a sparkle in his blue eyes. “He loves planes,” the nurse said.

A curious, vibrant boy looked at me. The same boy I didn’t think would make it. But that wasn’t for me to judge; only God knew the outcome for each and every one of us aboard this flight. My job was simply to fly the plane to the best of my ability.

During the remainder of the flight I answered a few more questions for my star passenger. We arrived in Branson a little late but without incident.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Toby,” I said when he was put into the ambulance. Excitement still sparkled in his eyes. “Thanks,” he said. “That was fun! Will you be back to fly me home?”

“I’d like that,” I told Toby. “I’d like that very much.”

That was many years and many flights ago. Someone else flew Toby home, but I have never forgotten that I’m a better pilot because of him. I focus all my energies on my own job without worrying about the things that are beyond my control. Angels guided me through the storm that day. One of them had sparkling blue eyes.

Download your free ebook, Angel Sightings: 7 Inspirational Stories About Heavenly Angels and Everyday Angels on Earth.

Back home in Brooklyn we did things different. You went to the butcher’s for meat, the pharmacy for aspirin and the grocery store for food. But when I spent the summer with my grandmother in Warwick, New York, she sent me down to the general store with a list. How could I hope to find anything on the packed shelves around me, everything all jumbled together?

I walked up to the counter. Behind it was a lady like no one I’d ever seen. Fake-jewel-encrusted glasses teetered on the tip of her nose as she read the paper spread out before her. Her gray hair was piled on her head with a crochet needle stuck in it.

“Excuse me,” I said.

She looked up. “You’re that Clements kid,” she said. “Your daddy sent you to stay the summer. I’m Miss Bee.”

Bee was a good name for this woman. She spoke so sharply I felt like I was stung. “I had pneumonia,” I explained. “Daddy thought the country air might be good for me.”

“Come closer and let me get a look at you,” she said. She pushed her glasses up her nose. “I want to be able to describe you to the sheriff if something goes missing from the store.”

“I’m not a thief!” I was shocked. I was seven—years too young to be a thief!

“From what I can see you’re not much of anything. But I can tell you’ve got potential.” Then she went back to reading her newspaper.

Never had anyone spoken to me like this! I couldn’t wait to get out of this strange store and back to my grandma.

“I need to get these,” I said, holding up my list.

“So?” Miss Bee did not look up from her paper. “Go get them.”

“But . . . but,” I said. Didn’t this woman understand my problem? “There’s so much stuff in here.”

Miss Bee pointed to a sign on the screen door. “That’s why they call it a general store, kid. It’s the only one in five miles as the crow flies, so you’d best get used to things. There’s no one here except you and me and I’m not your servant, so I suggest you get yourself a basket from that pile over there and start filling. If you’re lucky you’ll be home by sundown.”

Sundown was five hours away. I wasn’t sure I would make it.

I started at the nearest shelf and scanned it for the first item on my list: pork and beans. It took me three wall-to-wall searches before I found a can nestled between boxes of cereal and bread, on top of some soup cans. Next up was toilet paper. That was a real hunt. I found it under the daily newspaper. Band-Aids—where had I seen them? Oh, yes, next to the face cream. The store was a puzzle, but it held some surprises, too. I found a new Superman comic tucked behind the peanut butter.

An hour later I had found everything on the list—except for one thing. Bicarbonate of soda. I understood soda, but what was the B-word? I would have to ask Miss Bee. I screwed up my courage and approached the counter.

I put my basket down and reached up so she could see the list. I pointed to the strange word I had been struggling with. “I can’t read this,” I said.

Miss Bee wouldn’t even look at it. “Well, Miss Potential,” she said, “it seems you don’t listen real good. If you did you’d remember the items I’m sure your grandma told you as she wrote them down. Just like you’d remember me telling you I’m not your servant. Next time you should listen better to both of us.”

Miss Bee had stung me again! I stared in amazement and indignation as she tallied everything else up and put my purchases into a brown paper bag.

“That Miss Bee is without a doubt the meanest woman I’ve ever met. Probably the meanest I’ll meet in my whole life!” I announced when I got home.

Grandma just laughed and shook her head. “She’s a character,” she agreed. “But she’s not so bad.”

Not so bad? Grandma didn’t know the half of it! I never wanted to return to the general store again. Unfortunately, Grandma had other ideas.

I visited Miss Bee a couple of times a week that summer. Sometimes she shortchanged me. Other times she overcharged. Or sold me an old newspaper instead of one that was current.

Going to the store was more like going into battle. I left my grandma’s house armed with my list—memorized to the letter—and the prices in my head and marched into Miss Bee’s like General Patton marching into North Africa. “That can of beans is only 29 cents!” I corrected her one afternoon. I had watched the numbers change on the cash register closely, and Miss Bee had added 35 cents. She didn’t seem embarrassed that I had caught her overcharging. She just looked at me over her glasses and fixed the price.

Not that she ever let me declare victory. All summer long she found ways to trip me up. No sooner had I learned how to pronounce bicarbonate of soda and memorized its location on the shelf under the pink stomach medicine than Miss Bee rearranged the shelves and made me hunt for it all over again.

By summer’s end the shopping trip that had once taken me an hour was done in 15 minutes. The morning I was to return to Brooklyn I stopped in to get a packet of chewing gum. Miss Bee rang up the gum, then poked me with one of her chubby fingers.

“All right, Miss Potential,” she said. “What did you learn this summer?”

I pressed my lips together. That you’re a meany! The thought popped into my head, where it stayed. There was nothing I learned this summer that Miss Bee wanted to hear!

To my amazement, Miss Bee laughed. “I know what you think of me,” she said. “Well, here’s a news flash. I don’t care. Each of us is put on this earth for a reason. Some people will find cures for diseases; others will climb mountains. I believe my job is to teach every child I meet 10 life lessons to help him or her. Think what you will, Miss Potential, but when you get older you’ll be glad our paths crossed!”

Glad I met Miss Bee? Ha! The idea was absurd. And I continued to think so for many years. Until one day my daughter came to me with homework troubles.

“It’s too hard,” she said. “Could you finish my math problems for me?”

“If I do it for you how will you ever learn to do it yourself?” I said.

I saw myself back at that general store where I had learned the hard way to tally up my bill along with the cashier. Had I ever been overcharged since?

As my daughter went back to her homework, I wondered:

Had Miss Bee really taught me something all those years ago? Could anyone really learn from a mean old lady who made life so miserable?

“I teach each child I meet 10 life lessons,” Miss Bee had said. As my daughter went off grumbling, I took out a scrap of paper and wrote down 10 things I had indeed learned from my encounters with Miss Bee.

Yes, I had to admit it. It looked like Miss Bee really had done a job on me that summer. Sure enough, I had learned 10 life lessons.

Make that 11: I also learned that sometimes the angels God sends will be decidedly unangelic!

My husband, Don, and I pulled into the high school parking lot that cold December afternoon. It had been 20 months since the shootings. Twenty months, and still I could hardly bear to look at that building.

Sometimes it seemed like only 20 minutes since the April day in 1999 when we waited with the hundreds of other frantic parents for our children to make their way through the cordon of police and emergency vehicles surrounding Columbine High School.

Some of the kids came out crying, frightened, stunned. Some were rushed from the school in ambulances.

One teacher and 12 students, including our 16-year-old Kelly, did not come out.

For a day and a half they remained where they had died while investigators pieced together an account of two teenage boys who had fallen into the grip of a terrible evil—the evil that seemed to me to hover still about the place where it happened.

Like most of the others, Kelly was killed in the library, crouching beneath a table as bullets ricocheted through the room. Just inside those windows! I thought as Don got out of the car. Right behind that curved steel-and-glass façade. It was too much to bear. I turned my head away, unable to look.

It had been weeks before the examination of the crime scene was complete and police let the families visit the site. It was important to me to see the place where Kelly had tried to hide. I needed to pray at the spot, outlined in white on the floor, kneel where she died.

But if I thought actually going to the library would ease its menace, I was wrong. The bullet-scarred walls, the splintered tabletops, a shattered computer screen—violence and hate were still palpable there.

We live just two blocks from the high school, and for a long time I could not even drive by it, taking long, bizarre detours for the simplest errands. But for Don’s sake, and for our older daughter, Erin, I had to pick up my life again. And what helped most was remembering how Kelly loved angels.

From the time she was tiny, Kelly and I had shared a special affection for these messengers of God. I can still hear her piping little voice, at age three, reciting the verse on the little guardian angel card my mother had given her:

“Angel of God, my guardian dear
to whom his love commits me here,
ever this day be at my side
to light and guard,
to rule and guide.”

Kelly loved that card. I’d often see it on her dresser top or catch sight of it with her schoolbooks. When she was older we would sit together on the sofa and watch Touched by an Angel. We never missed an episode. We bought the soundtrack CD too, and would sing along in the car, just the two of us.

For Kelly and me, angels were our shorthand for “God is near!” And his nearness is what made her such a happy child—a girl who woke in the morning with a smile and literally skipped through the day, blue eyes sparkling, long blonde hair swishing behind her.

That’s what gave the library its peculiar horror for me. Kelly was such a gentle, trusting little soul to die amid such evil! I’d given her a poem about angels that she kept in a frame on her bedroom wall.

After she died I’d step into her room again and again and read it, lingering over one line especially: “Angels are with you every step of the way and help you soar with amazing grace.” I wanted to believe an angel had been beside her that day, with her beneath that table, helping her soar above the terror.

Almost as though they knew I needed them, people sent angel figurines along with their condolences. They came from friends, neighbors, total strangers—china angels, metal angels, wooden angels.

An eight-year-old daughter of a friend tried to count the angel images in our house one day and gave up at 175—and every one of those angels whispered to me that Kelly was fine.

Only around the library was I unable to feel comfort. Not that we hadn’t tried to exorcise the evil from that place.

The school district at first wanted to repair and refurbish the space, but Don and I and the other parents believed that no child should ever again be asked to study there. God brought us together in an organization we called HOPE—Healing of People Everywhere—to raise money for a brand-new library building.

What began as a fund-raising effort among the families was caught up by the whole community, then by the entire nation and even beyond. The new school building was under construction now—Don had driven in that afternoon, as he often did, to check on its progress.

“I’ll stay in the car,” I told him. I’d visited the building site with the other families just a few days earlier.

The new library posed no terrors. It seemed to me a sign of life continuing, life affirmed. It was the presence of the old site that continued to oppress and upset me. I glanced reluctantly at it through the car window.

Its exterior was unchanged, but inside, I knew, nothing was left of the old facility. Architects had come up with a design that preserved the cafeteria on the ground floor, while entirely removing the second floor where the library had been.

The cafeteria now had a spacious atrium feel, bright and light, with a beautiful mural of trees on the high ceiling, drawing the eye upward. Students and faculty of Columbine High School had a space that all could enter without fear. With the other families, we’d see to it that no physical trace of the tragedy remained.

Yet for me, the place still menaced. I turned my back on it and stared the other way out the car window. I need to know that Kelly’s all right, Lord, I prayed. I need to know she’s happy and at peace.

Turn around. Look at the building. The nudge didn’t come from me. That building was the last thing in the world I wanted to look at. I wrenched my head around…and blinked in astonishment.

Something bright was moving across those upper windows! Something shimmering and glowing, gliding slowly past the glass exactly where the old library had been. Open-mouthed I stared while the unmistakable figure of an angel hovered over that second story.

Wings, radiant hair, flowing garment—no artist could have rendered a heavenly messenger of comfort more gloriously.

I sat awestruck, seeing, yet scarcely believing. Even here, even here! Your angel was here with Kelly, just as you are with her always and forever.

How long did the vision last—15 seconds? However brief the time on a clock, I knew the angel had given me a lifetime of assurance. In the midst of all the evil that ever was and ever will be, God is present. God is with us. God is stronger.