Angelic Pathways (5 page)

Convinced the makeover had done the trick, I headed to work with a new attitude. But somewhere between matching accessories and trying on a new perfume, I left my brain on the dresser, for upon getting in the car, I decided not to wear my seatbelt lest I wrinkle my new suit. Instead, I decided to drive a bit more carefully.

“Good morning.” Jake appeared from nowhere, as I sat in the usual rush-hour traffic. Whenever I was driving, he always appeared sitting in the center of the back seat.

“I told you to go away and stay gone.”

“Put your seatbelt on,” he said calmly.

“Leave me alone, Jake. Go. Away.”

“Put your seatbelt on right now and I promise I’ll leave.”

“Fine,” I grumbled and clicked the belt in place. I looked up in the rearview mirror, scowling at him. “Happy now?”

“Actually, yes. Thank you,” he replied, and that’s when I looked past him—or more like
through
him—and saw a car speeding toward me.

It wasn’t stopping.

I gripped the wheel tighter, held my breath, and braced myself as I heard a symphony of screeching tires on the road behind me, followed by the thunderous roar of metal impacting metal.

I walked away from the collision with only whiplash. My poor Chevy wasn’t so lucky, as the impact had slammed my car into the one ahead of me. So much for my new attitude—it, my suit, and my car were now crumpled.

Dejected, I called work and went home. The rest of the afternoon slowly passed before everything sank in. I played that morning over and over in my head. Coincidence? Dumb luck? I didn’t know what to call it. Later that evening, a friend recommended that I call it “simply a blessing.”

A few days passed before I let Jake back into my life. I fought hard to move on without his presence. I tried to apply some semblance of logic to our relationship by thinking he was just an imaginary friend, or maybe he was just wishful thinking, or maybe he was me, a smarter me that I could never give myself credit for. All of those possibilities, however, were shattered by the numerous “coincidences” that seemed to follow on the heels of every other word Jake uttered. From the car accident, to strange encounters with people who would shape and mold my spiritual life, to unerringly accurate dreams and predictions, Jake had proven that he was the real thing.

At this point one might think that Jake had been sent to wear me down and prepare me for my future connection to the archangels. Well, that would be a safe assumption. The angels, however, would get no warmer a reception from me than Jake did. In fact, I held their feet even closer to the fire because of the sheer power their presence exuded. Even though Jake was my spirit guide, his energies still felt very human to me. The angels, on the other hand, possessed a power that I was wholly unfamiliar with.

Though I was raised with a solid Christian foundation, I wasn’t really taught to believe in angels. I viewed them merely as biblical figures that had gone the way of miracles like the parting of the Red Sea and turning water into wine—they no longer existed.

Now as I look back at my youth, I wonder how it was so easy for me to dismiss God’s messengers when my entire childhood had been riddled with paranormal encounters. I had regularly spotted and interacted with the ghosts in my
very
haunted house. Accurate premonitions were common for me. But into my teens, all the paranormal activity seemed to stop despite my yearning to experiment with it.

As a child, it had all frightened me. As a teenager, I found it intriguing. As a young adult, I simply thought myself crazy and unwilling to let go of an overactive imagination. The world of the paranormal was now affecting my life in a way that I truly wanted no part of. After all, I was burdened enough with my parents telling me what to do and how to live; I sure as hell didn’t want ghosts, angels, or anything else yelling at me.

No, the last thing I wanted was for even more authoritative figures to try to control what I did or how I perceived the world. Jake had appeared in my life on the heels of my leaving the church after having become a born-again Christian. I had been raised mostly Lutheran with a sprinkling of Pentecostal whenever my mom got bored of singing tired hymns at our Lutheran church. When she was in the mood for a foot-stomping, Bible-thumping, Holy Ghost–filled service, she had dragged me to whatever Pentecostal or Baptist church she could find.

My father, however, being more sedate and perhaps a bit more conservative, had avoided the loud, high-octane, fashion-driven services and relegated himself to the silence and serenity of his church of forty years. With my diverse upbringing serving as the foundation for becoming born-again, I can’t say that I was ripe for paranormal activity to return to my life. According to Christianity, interacting with such things as ghosts was not only seen as taboo, but was considered something that could very well jeopardize one’s salvation. Ghosts and things such as spirit guides were considered harbingers of evil, messengers of Satan. And depending on whom you spoke to, angels fell into that category as well, since the belief was that one need only speak to Jesus and God.

My real-life experiences would seriously challenge those beliefs. I struggled and warred with them, so much so that it nearly led me to suicide …
twice
. I was so tormented and confused that I wanted to throw everything out of my life, leave college, and become a Catholic nun. I thought that if I could sequester myself in a sacred place of worship and live every waking hour on holy ground, then the ghosts, premonitions, and everything else considered unholy would stop.

Bouncing between belief and non-belief—with the discovery of non-Christian religions, the guilt of pondering their validity, and my desire to learn more about them—was a vicious cycle of psychological and emotional anguish that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy … if I had one. After hours of kneeling in tear-soaked prayer and begging for God to make sense of the insanity that was my spiritual life, I slowly came to the realization that Jake wasn’t an agent of evil, nor were the angels. Years of fighting against my belief in them ceased when I took on Archangel Gabriel—the angel of the Annunciation himself—and lost.

A Growing Acceptance

Jake had seen me through the death of my father and then my mother four years later. I wasn’t even thirty and here I was alone in the world. Completely alone. As the only child of parents who had no close ties to their own siblings and distant relatives, I had no family to turn to when they left me.

Blessedly, in my continued quest for spiritual understanding—a quest that had been an obsession of mine from the cradle—I found family I didn’t know I had.

One Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in a local diner trying to finish a screenwriting project for film school. Thanks to Jake, I had acquired a near-obsessive passion for the craft, but I was exhausted. The diner was open twenty-four hours a day, and I had been there all night and all morning, which wasn’t unusual for me. The lunch crowd was starting to fill the tables. With Mom and Dad gone, the family home seemed cold and unwelcoming, not to mention the last things I wanted to talk to were the resident ghosts that had haunted the house since we moved in when I was four.

For months since I had begun film school while juggling a full-time, overbearing corporate job, the diner had become my home. I was subsisting on a mere four hours of sleep a night and eating all the wrong foods. But I really didn’t care. Being at the diner surrounded by the chatter of its patrons was infinitely better than sitting at home alone. Besides, I had befriended one of the waitresses there. She was the only staff member who didn’t seem to care if I rented one of her tables all night. I’d arrive around nine in the evening and hang out until her shift ended around dawn, if not later. In between running orders, she would come and sit with me, and we’d chat about everything from men to movies to local gossip and everything in between.

That Saturday, however, the long, sleepless nights, overtime at work, the school project, bottomless cups of coffee, and an endless stream of chilidogs had finally taken their toll. My waitress friend approached my table to fill my coffee cup when she stopped suddenly to stare at me.

“Honey, you look like death warmed over,” she said in a charming, Southern drawl.

“I know,” I groaned as I drew my hands over my face. “I seriously need to get some rest, but I can’t sleep. It seems as if no matter how tired I am, I can’t sleep for more than an hour or so at a time.” I truly felt as if I were standing on the threshold of death, and judging by my friend’s strained features, I must have looked that way, too.

“You need Native American dream tea,” she said as she stood there with the pot of coffee in one hand and her other hand on her hip. Curious, my brow arched as I discreetly looked around to see if there were any patrons within earshot.

“Is it legal?” I whispered. I’d never taken Tylenol, much less experimented with any illegal drugs. Paralyzing fear of my parents if they should ever catch me engaging in anything illicit had kept me on the straight and narrow.

My friend’s eyes twinkled with mirth as she chuckled, “Yes, sweetie, it’s very legal. You can get it at a tea shop up north. It’s about forty minutes away in Canterbury Village, but worth the trip.”

“Ugh,” I said, instantly turned off. I hated shopping, but more than that, I hated touristy places. And with the way I was feeling, I knew I would have little tolerance for driving forty minutes to a place for some novelty tea that may or may not work. “No thanks,” I said as I sipped on my coffee.

“Don’t be so quick to shoot it down, Chantel. I think you’d like this place. It’s owned by an intuitive healer.”

Now
that
got my attention. My bleary eyes shot up again to gaze at the waitress.

“She’s a real sweetheart,” she continued. “And just by looking at you, gal, I think you could use a session or … three with her. You should go.” With that, she left me to tend to her other customers. I remained quietly sitting at the table, wondering if the trip would be worth it.
Intuitive healer, huh?

Nah.
I shook my head and quickly dismissed the prospect of going.

Later that night, I met another friend for dinner. She was bubbly that evening. Well, bubblier than normal. I could tell from the moment we met in the parking lot that something good had happened to her that day, and as weary as I felt, I was eager to hear some good news.

“Oh my God, Chantel. I had the most awesome day today!” She bounced in her seat as we munched on an appetizer. “I think I found the perfect place to have my wedding … well, if I ever get married.”

I chuckled at her exuberance. Both of us were single. And while I was quite content to be boyfriendless, she was ever searching for a man and dreaming of a ridiculously extravagant wedding. I sat and listened as she rattled off every detail of the place she had visited only hours earlier—around the same time I had been sitting at the diner talking with my waitress friend.

After letting her describe every minute detail, I finally interrupted her. “Well, where is this place?”

“Oh, Chantel, you gotta go with me to see it. It’s up at Canterbury Village!”

I dropped my fork onto my plate. I could have easily dismissed this as a coincidence, but neither of my friends knew each other. They didn’t even know
of
each other. And to have them both mention a place I had never before heard of was just too bizarre.

Needless to say, a few weeks later, I found myself driving forty minutes north to visit the tourist attraction. Though I’m sure the restaurants and Christmas store were pleasant sites to visit, I had only one place in mind—the tea shop.

Hesitantly, I entered the quaint little store. Tranquil and homey, it was packed wall to wall with merchandise. From tea cups and accessories to books and jewelry, the store seemed to offer an eclectic line of products for tea connoisseurs as well as spiritual seekers. After making a few rounds of the store, I finally gathered up enough nerve to inquire about the intuitive healer my waitress friend had told me about.

“Um, I’m here to see the healer,” I said as I slowly approached the lady behind the counter. Behind her was a wall of jars, all containing various blends of teas from around the world. (By God, I didn’t know that many different flavors existed!)

“To see whom?” the lady said, peering at me from over the rims of her glasses. She looked at me as if I were an alien. It was then that I thought perhaps I was in the wrong shop.