Just a few more minutes and school would be over for the day.

I packed up my books and straightened my uniform, the same one worn by every girl at Blessed Sacrament Catholic School in St. Louis, Missouri. Finally the bell rang. “Bye, Sister,” I called as I passed her at the door.

I followed the crowd down the hall, jostled and carried along to the front door. Once outside I ran down the steps and over to the church, where I waited for my father to pick me up.

Inside it was quiet and peaceful. Statues of the angels looked down on me as I genuflected and made my way to the little chapel that was my favorite spot in the church. There hung the picture of two little children crossing a bridge. A beautiful blond angel watched over them, keeping them safe.

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I knew the world held more magic and mystery than people could ever imagine, but this guardian angel somehow made it all real to me.

I recited the prayer Sister had taught us: “Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here. Ever this day, be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.”

The nuns said every child had a guardian angel, but sometimes I wondered if that really applied to girls like me. Girls who weren’t white like the nuns at Blessed Sacrament and the little boy and girl in the picture.

I was only in first grade back in 1959, but I knew black people and white people weren’t considered equal by some. I heard my parents talk about it when they thought I wasn’t listening.

I’d even heard adults claim there were two separate heavens, one for white people and one for black people. God, they said, lived in the white heaven.

The angel in the painting looked so kind and loving, but she was looking after white children. Why would God bother sending an angel down from white heaven to look after me?

Because he’s God, something in me said. I remembered all the things I’d been taught at church every Sunday with my family. “God is love,” the priest had said just last week. Sister had said the same thing a hundred times. “God created all of us.”

Why would God create me and not love me? I thought. In fact, why would God have created so many different people in the world who looked so many different ways if he only liked one kind of people?

I looked up at the picture again. The joy and courage the angel always gave me came flooding back. Maybe I didn’t have all the paintings and statues that white children had to prove that they had guardian angels, but I believed I had one all the same.

Maybe black children had to have a little more faith. “Thank you, God, for my life and for my guardian angel,” I said.

Read More: Guided to Heaven By His Guardian Angel

A car horn from outside broke me out of my reverie. I grabbed my books and dashed to the church door. When I got to the front steps, the strangest feeling came over me. It was like being engulfed in a presence, like a sacred mist. I’d never felt so peaceful or serene, even inside the little chapel.

I saw Dad behind the wheel of the car, but he was looking at something other than me. Even after I reached him he continued looking beyond me. I glanced back, but there was nothing there. I didn’t want to disturb my peaceful feeling by asking a lot of questions.

I got in. Neither of us said a word all the way home.

I was doing my homework in the living room when Dad said he wanted to talk. He sat down next to me and seemed to be struggling for words. He held my hand and took a deep breath.

“When you came down the church steps today,” he said, “I saw someone behind you. A tall, glowing lady with…” He hesitated. “A glowing bronze lady with huge wings!”

I gasped. My pencil rolled to the floor. “Wings?” I whispered.

“She was radiant,” Dad continued, his voice going soft. “So radiant and beautiful I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I could feel her incredible love for you pouring into me. I know I saw your guardian angel.”

I didn’t know what to say. Dad looked me right in the eye like what he was saying was the most important thing in the world. “You will always be protected by God and his angels,” he said. “I want you to remember that always.”

I flung myself into his arms. I did have my own guardian angel as beautiful as the one in the picture in the chapel. Never again would I wonder if God cared enough to send one just for me. My God, our God, who lives in one heaven for us all.

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Modesty and spiritual power: Every Bible reader knows that these two qualities go hand in hand. Though it isn’t always easy to conceal their splendor and force from mortal eyes, the angels of the Bible often like to work incognito.

Think of the three shining strangers who visited Abraham at Mamre, for example, or the fourth man who showed up with Daniel’s friends in the fiery furnace. None of these people announced themselves as angels. Rather, they were simply and mysteriously there, at just the moment they were needed—and gone just as fast.

The Bible’s great human heroes do the same. Jewish legend says that after being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind, Elijah chose to descend to earth again and again over centuries, to help people unawares. He continues to return to this day, and when he does, he likes no disguise better than a beggar’s rags.

One place where this tradition of modesty and secrecy is most famously present is the group of stories and legends that have built up around the Lamed Vav—Hebrew for the number 36. First mentioned in Jewish teachings 1,700 years ago, the Lamed Vav are a group of saintlike men who never tire of doing good deeds for their fellow human beings.

Though not outright angels, the Lamed Vav do have a certain supernatural quality. They are privileged to be able to look directly upon God, and God himself, it is said, looks upon them as pillars holding up the human community. Legend has it that in every generation, you can always find exactly 36 of them doing their work on earth.

That is, if you can find them. For the most distinguishing characteristic of the Lamed Vav, along with their love for helping others, is their insistence upon anonymity. Modesty is so central to the Lamed Vav that, should fame or renown come the way of one of them, he must cease immediately from his activities.

One legend tells of a Russian couple whose son became mute. They asked their rabbi for help, and he told them to take their son and travel to a distant town. “There you will find a small house at the foot of a mountain belonging to a woodcutter,” he said. “Stay there until God sends a cure for your son.”

The couple did as told, but they were surprised to find that the woodcutter could not help them. Why come all that way?

“Well, I do happen to know a young man,” the woodcutter said. “A baker. He might be able to help.” In fact, the woodcutter told them, he had long suspected that the young man was a member of the Lamed Vav. Now, the woodcutter believed, he had proof. “That young man must be the real reason your rabbi sent you to me.”

The couple found the young man and told him of their encounter with the woodcutter, and of their rabbi’s words that had led them to him.

“What, he has discovered my hiding place?” said the young man. “Tell the rabbi that next time I won’t be so easy to find!”

With that he blessed the couple’s boy and vanished. Somewhere else on earth at that precise moment, we can assume, the young man’s place was taken by a new member of the Lamed Vav.

True or legendary, the Lamed Vav and the stories that have grown up around them illustrate a truth at the heart not only of Judaism but of all great spiritual traditions. God’s work happens best on earth when it is done with simplicity and humility, far from the limelight. And because this is so, we never know who, among the people we meet and interact with each day, might be one of the spiritual giants who are secretly holding up the whole world.

It’s sometimes the most ordinary, seemingly most overlooked people who make the biggest impact on our lives. Think back over the course of your own life. Picture all the people you’ve met who have done good things for you without any thought of receiving thanks. Who among them—a kind person in an airport, a friendly policeman, a teacher who never gave up on you—might actually have been one of the Lamed Vav?

Jewish wisdom tells us we never truly know—and that’s just the way God, and the Lamed Vav, want it.

Read more stories about heavenly angels and angels on earth.

A few years ago, I took my stepdaughter Evie snorkeling for the first time. She was eight, and though she’d put a face mask on before, she’d never had a chance to look below the waves in an area that was really populated with sea life. We were in the Bahamas, floating in the water by what looked like a pretty humdrum chunk of rock. Evie pushed and fumbled at her mask, getting the water out of it and blowing through her snorkel so she could breathe. When she was finally comfortable with her equipment, she lowered her head beneath the water.

Kaboom. The reef was swarming with fish—parrot fish, triggerfish, and swarms of little black-and-yellow sergeant majors that were all around her, investigating her completely without her knowledge. I’ll never forget the look in her eyes when she brought her head back out of the water and the uncontrollable smile that formed around the snorkel in her mouth. She had thought she was just bobbing about by a barren rock, when in fact she had been immersed in a whole other universe of color and light and life.

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Imagine: the world, changed in an instant from a place of fear and uncertainty and emptiness to a place of wonder and beauty and overwhelming numbers of beings, invisible but present all the same. Imagine a helmet like the ones old-fashioned divers used to wear: one that covers the entire head like a fishbowl. Then imagine that this helmet is made of a magical, glass-like substance, one so thin and unobtrusive that it lets just about everything through.

It never gets dirty, never gets wet, and is absolutely transparent to light and penetrable by air. Essentially, it’s as if this helmet isn’t there at all. Except it is. And the one thing this helmet blocks out—the one thing it keeps the person wearing it from experiencing— is the spiritual world. Everything else gets past these helmets. But that one thing—that singular, all-important part of the world, without which the world isn’t really the full, complete world at all, but only half of it—doesn’t make it through.

Sometimes, if the light and the circumstances are just right, you can catch a glimpse of the helmets on the heads of other people as they pass by you in the street. Sometimes the helmets other people wear are so obvious—so completely visible—that it seems laughable that they themselves could fail to notice that they’re wearing them. But then, just as often, most of us fail to notice that we ourselves are wearing one.

What kind of a world do we see when looking through these magical, spirit-filtering helmets? We see a world in which the earth is just the earth, where good things and bad things happen, where there is happiness and sorrow, where people are born and people die. Yet somehow, none of this seems to mean all that much. We see a world in which every- thing is relative and essentially insignificant, but complaining about this fact, or even bringing it up, seems silly.

Along with having no real purpose, the world seen through the glass of this helmet has no real justice either. Some people do “good” things, and others do “bad” things, but these are really just words we have cooked up to try to make sense of things that we actually can’t make any sense of. Bad people often do very well in this strange, pointless world, while nice ones have to bear up under all manner of pressures and struggles.

One of the strangest things about these helmets is that, even when we become aware that we’re wearing them, we can’t simply take them off. They can’t be wrenched off with our arms or shattered with a sledgehammer. They are extremely stubborn, extremely resilient.

At least, they are most of the time. But sometimes moments come along when these helmets seem to disappear all by themselves, with no effort on our part at all. Suddenly they are just . . . gone.

In moments like this, we find ourselves looking around at the world as if we’d never seen it before. Those moments are what Proof of Angels is about.

Deadlines are everything in the magazine business. That’s why I nearly hit the panic button when I was too sick to come in and close this issue. Who would oversee our final corrections and color work? And how could I ever write my editor’s note at home under the covers? But there was no way I was leaving the house.

From bed I made my first call: Nancy Galya, our administrative manager. “Feel better,” she said. “I’ll tell the Angels staff.” That was a big help, but I had to call my boss, Edward Grinnan, myself. I moved to the sofa and turned on my laptop.

Edward and I traded ideas about what I might write my editor’s note about, but I couldn’t seem to focus. Nothing felt right working from my quiet den. “I know you like to be at your desk, people in and out, all the activity going on around you,” Edward said. “But you’re going to have to improvise. You can talk to your readers from anywhere, even in your pj’s.”

I wasn’t good at improvising! I checked my e-mail. Three in a row from the Angels editors, Meg, Tanya and Kelly, all assuring me the issue was in good shape. “I’m giving it another proofread for good measure!” Kelly said. “All our authors are happy with their pieces,” Tanya wrote. And Meg was already looking at stories for the next issue.

Doug rang in from the art department: “The online video is ready to go!” Audrey and Olga sent a preview of the cover. A beautiful Easter angel filled my screen. She had wings but made me think of all the angels hard at work at the office, even when I couldn’t be, so that we could give you another issue of the best angel magazine there is.

I rearranged the sofa pillows and got on that editor’s note of mine. Turns out, it was easy to improvise when angels were everywhere. I guess they work from home too.

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Our new house was perfect for everyone in my family—even our pet turtle, Squirt, who’d been living in a one-gallon tank. Once, our dog snatched him right out of it. Luckily the only damage was a small v-shaped chunk taken out of Squirt’s shell.

Squirt would be much happier in the one-hundred-gallon pond outside our new place. The kids could visit him there whenever they wanted. “Here you go,” my son, Josh, said as he put Squirt on the ground.

The whole family watched Squirt waddle over to the edge of the pond and paddle into the water. Each day when I left the house I checked on Squirt in his pond. Then one morning Squirt was gone!

“He must have wandered off!” I said. The kids were heartbroken. We searched the yard for days with no luck. Squirt was never coming back. “We’ll just have to ask the angels to watch over him,” I told Josh.

Years went by. We had other pets. Our new house became a home. One evening my husband, Paul, and I were coming back from a walk when we saw a turtle cross our path. I couldn’t help but think of Squirt as Paul scooped it up to save it from traffic.

“Look at this!” he said. There it was—a small v-shape piece was missing from the shell!

“Squirt!”

God’s angels had done much more than watch over our pet turtle. They’d brought him home!

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I stepped off the bus with a heavy heart.

Usually this was one of the most exciting parts of my week, going to my college biology class.

That class was the start of a whole new life for me. I’d been ill during high school and only earned my diploma later in night school. Finally I’d enrolled at Medgar Evers College, a brand-new school opened by New York’s City University system. The college was so new it didn’t have a campus. My biology class took place at a church in Brooklyn, a 45-minute bus ride from my parents’ house in Bay Ridge. I loved that class.

Except today I was coming to drop out for a while. The day before, my father had died. He’d been a janitor at a big building in midtown Manhattan. He’d fallen from a ledge at work and broken his leg. Three weeks later he’d suffered a fatal embolism. My mom wasn’t doing well either. She was struggling to recover from an operation. I’d already missed yesterday’s class and I was coming to tell the professor I wasn’t sure when I’d return.

I approached the church, a beautiful Gothic sanctuary more than 100 years old with a soaring bell tower, Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian. A warm September sun shone down.

“Good morning,” said a voice. Startled, I looked up to see a familiar face. A tall man with thinning blond hair in khaki pants and a blue collared shirt stood at the church door polishing the glass. I’d seen this man most days I came to class. I assumed he was a janitor like my father. He was always cleaning something or sweeping the walkway. He wore funny, old-fashioned glasses. He was friendly, always said hello to me.

“Didn’t see you yesterday,” he said.

Before I could reply to him my eyes filled with tears. “I know. My father died yesterday,” I choked.

The man’s face clouded with concern. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “Can I do anything for you?”

Suddenly the prospect of going to class and explaining about my father all over again filled me with dread. “Would you mind telling my professor what I just told you? She needs to know why I won’t be in class.”

“Of course,” the man said. “Come back soon.” I thanked him and walked quickly to the bus stop.

Things only got worse. My mother’s condition deteriorated, and I realized that without my father’s income I couldn’t take care of her and go to school at the same time. I’d gotten a job at a coffee shop but it didn’t pay much. I figured I wasn’t meant to get a college education.

On the morning I decided to drop out altogether I left the coffee shop and walked home. I was tired—my coffee shop shift had begun at 4:00 a.m.—and depressed. I collapsed onto the sofa and fell asleep. Hours later I awoke with a splitting headache. For a moment I wondered what was wrong with me. Then the strangest thing happened.

Despite the eruption in my head I felt a sudden urge to stand up. The urge became a command to leave the house and board the bus toward Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian. Still directed by this mysterious force, I got off the bus, walked to the church and sat on the steps outside. My class had long since ended for the day. The church appeared closed.

Minutes later the church door opened and I shrank back. White light poured from the door. I shielded my eyes and saw, silhouetted, a familiar figure. It was the man I’d often seen at the church, the one I assumed was a janitor. The moment I saw him my headache vanished. The man stepped toward me.

“I didn’t see you coming to class today,” he said, smiling.

“I—I didn’t go to class,” I replied. The man stared at me. Something about his gaze caused me to blurt, “I’m dropping out of school. I can’t afford it. I want to go but I can’t.”

The man nodded. “How much money do you need?” he asked.

“Eighty dollars a week,” I said.

“You just got yourself a working scholarship for three hundred and thirty-two dollars a month.” He extended a hand for me to shake. I looked at him.

The man laughed. “I’m sorry, I haven’t introduced myself. I’m George Knight, the pastor here. I need someone to answer the phone and vacuum after Sunday services. You start Sunday.”

My expression grew even more dumbfounded. “Get some rest,” George said. “I’ll see you Sunday.”

I did see George that Sunday. And for many years after. My friendship with him only confirmed the miraculous events of that providential day. The same week I began work at Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian my mother passed away. George attended the funeral and asked if I’d like to live in a spare room in the church’s rectory. I said yes and in the following years George helped me finish school, even doing my vacuuming whenever I got too overloaded with homework.

Eventually I graduated, married, landed a stable career and had a wonderful daughter who grew up to become a social worker. What would have happened if I’d never met George, never returned to his church and discovered he was so much more than the janitor?

Well, God doesn’t think in what-ifs. George Knight was my rescuing angel. I thank him in my heart each and every day.

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