The phone rings, and you know who’s on the line. You think about someone and “coincidentally” bump into them the next day. You make a wish or whisper a prayer, and miraculously, it’s granted.
Chapter 2: Sea of Miracles
Happy Weekend, Loves.
I hope this finds you settled inside of your own heart - quiet and calm. I hope you find a moment to curl under a soft blanket with a good book. I hope you eat good food that nourishes your body and reminds you that life is delicious, savory and sweet. I hope you make time to stare out the window and wonder at the mystery.We are on Chapter Two of our project of re-reading my book, Sea of Miracles, together. For me, it’s been marvelous to reconnect with all of these miracles. Even more special to re- encounter the younger me who had the courage to write it. Though she wasn’t sure she could (or should) take the time. Though she wondered who would read it and how in the world she would publish it, she wrote it and made it real.
I’m so glad she did it - and so proud of her.
Here’s Chapter 2. (If you’’re just arriving and want to start from the beginning, go here: Sea of Miracles: Chapter Index. You’ll find all of the chapters, along with my present-day reflections there.)
Now, let’s begin.
There are moments in life when the ordinary world tilts—when something inexplicable brushes against the edges of our reality, leaving us breathless, changed. Maybe it’s a stranger who appears at just the right moment, a hand reaching out when all hope feels lost. Maybe it’s an impossible knowing, a whisper in the quiet, a presence unseen but deeply felt.
These moments defy logic. They challenge our understanding of what is possible, and yet, they happen. Some dismiss them as coincidence, while others feel the pulse of something greater—a force moving through the fabric of life, responding to us, guiding us back to a path we’d forgotten.
This chapter is about those moments. About the encounters that leave us wondering: Could it be? And the journey that begins when we finally hear the answer: Yes.
Chapter Two: The Mystery
The angels showed me:
When you reach out to us, we always reach back.
A woman walks along an empty beach, eyes downcast, shoulders slumped. More depressed than she’s ever been, she thinks of her family, her home, her work. She always believed these things would bring her joy—so she’s done her best, sacrificing and working hard to make a go of it. But no matter how she’s tried, things haven’t worked out that way.
Lost and lonely, she stands at the water’s edge, thinking: Maybe I should just swim out to sea. When everything feels so empty, so meaningless, why go on?
Suddenly, a man approaches. Where’d he come from? she wonders. The long stretch of beach was deserted a moment ago. She’s startled at first, wary. But as the man draws near, she feels the strangest... recognition.
He walks directly to her and invites her to sit on the sand. He’s engaging and interesting, and somehow, she feels completely at ease in his presence.
Somehow, he senses what she’s thinking. She’s never shared her feelings and concerns so easily before. It’s as if he knows her better than anyone she’s ever met—better than she knows herself.
Her heart lightens. Long-forgotten dreams flash into her mind—things she once thought she’d do and see, pieces of a self she left behind years ago. Though she feels shy about sharing these ideas, he seems fascinated, which encourages her to continue.
After a long, full conversation, they part, and she hugs him—she who usually holds back, who feels uncomfortable with such intimate exchanges—hugs him.
“Thank you,” she whispers.
As he walks away, she turns to face the ocean. She feels better than she has in... well, she can’t remember when. She breathes in the fresh salt air, and her body feels alive. Her heart floods with relief.
As she exhales, something shifts. The weight in her chest loosens and, for the first time in a long time, she feels... lighter. Then, unexpectedly, it happens—the thing she thought she’d never feel again: the effervescent sparkle of joy.
Tears streaming, overwhelmed with gratitude, she turns to thank the mysterious stranger one more time... but where is he?
It’s only been a moment. She scans the beach in all directions. She spins around. The vast beach stretches empty in every direction. Even if he had run, even if he had a hiding place among the dunes, there’s no way he could be gone so completely, so suddenly.
She climbs the dunes, eyes searching acres of sand—and the parking lot. But the mysterious stranger is gone.
This story, a composite of many I’ve read, is happening every day. Maybe it’s even happened to you: A stranger appears—on an airplane, beside a hospital bed, in a crowded mall—and offers guidance, a helping hand, or a shoulder to cry on. Then, as mysteriously as they appeared, they disappear without a trace.
Where did they go? you wonder. And who were they? A rush of heat moves through your body (or a chill runs up your spine) as you realize:
My life has been touched by something extraordinary—something I may never fully understand.
You see, touch, and feel the presence of the Divine every single day.
Yet if you’re like most people, you don’t let yourself believe it. But every now and then, you have an encounter you can’t “reasonably” explain, and you wonder: Could it be? But you’ve been trained to doubt your instincts. You edit yourself.
Oh, that couldn’t have been an angel, you say, echoing the voices of teachers, parents, and well-meaning adults who chorused:
“Don’t believe everything you see/hear.”
“Stop telling stories.”
“You must have been seeing things.”
And my personal favorite: “That’s just magical thinking.”
And yet...
You can’t let go of your brush with mystery.
You keep coming back to the memory, rolling it over in your mind like sweet candy on the tongue. Enchanted, you keep searching, keep asking, and keep noticing. You sense that just under the surface of the “real” world, there is a deep flow of mystery.
This curiosity—this interest and awareness—is like a glowing chip of moonlight, cool and luminous, tucked inside the deep caverns of the self where a richer wisdom lives. A wisdom that knows—and has always known—the truth.
Then, something else happens.
The phone rings, and you know who’s on the line. You think about someone and “coincidentally” bump into them the next day. You make a wish or whisper a prayer, and miraculously, it’s granted.
That’s all it takes—your moonlit chip flares with recognition.
This time, or the next, when you can no longer deny that it’s real, something inside you shifts. And this time, when you whisper, Could it be?—you hear an answer:
Yes...
Maybe you’ve already had an experience that deepened your connection to the Divine. Maybe that experience marked the beginning of a journey—through books, classes, and conversations with friends, teachers, or members of clergy.
Maybe, though, you let others talk you out of it, writing off even your own experience as “just a coincidence.”
“Something happened to me... many years ago,” the woman in the café tells me.
She was just a kid, barely twenty, driving on four bald tires on the highway. No one else was on the road.
She heard a loud bang! and suddenly, her car was sailing—out of control—right off the road, down an embankment, where it smashed, head-on, into a tree.
“I really hit my head,” she remembers. “I didn’t realize quite how hard at the time. I was dizzy and nauseated... I had to get out. But when I stood up beside my car, I began to swoon.
“Suddenly, this man was there... a tall Black man. He was driving a truck—a huge 18-wheeler. It was right there, beside the road.
“I kept telling him, ‘I don’t know what happened...’ over and over.
“‘Your tire blew out,’ he explained. ‘See?’ He showed me the tire fragments on the blacktop beside my car. And I understood then.”
That’s when she passed out cold. Five hours later, she woke up in the hospital.
“Where’s the man who brought me in?” she asked the doctors, nurses, admitting staff.
But there was no record of how she had arrived. No ambulance, no good Samaritan. Just her, alive and patched up, with no one to thank. Whoever had brought her in was gone.
I tell her this is typical of angelic experiences. The angels arrive, lend a hand at an accident scene or hospital bed, then disappear without a trace.
“That doesn’t make sense,” she says. “It’s too...”
“Bizarre? Incredible? I know,” I say.
“It’s just that... I’ve always wondered who he was.” She pauses. “I’ve wondered about all of it. I mean, how did I see the shreds of tire on the road at all? When he came, I was standing beside my car—down at the bottom of the embankment. How did I even see his truck?”
“The angels can transcend space and time,” I say. “Every day, I read a story like yours—if they need a truck, they can make one. They could probably move us through space and time if they had to.”
“If I believe this,” she says, “it becomes a life-changing event.”
“You don’t have to believe it right away," I urge. "Just stay open. Test it a little - maybe ask for a sign—a gentle nudge, a moment of recognition. See what happens.”
“I’m afraid to,” she shudders. “It’s too huge. Too big. If I believe this, it changes everything.”
We’re like castaways.
This woman has wondered about that event all her life. For years, that chip of moonlight in her heart has been glowing, pulsing her question into the universe: Could it be?
I am absolutely certain that God has been answering—pulsing back response after response. But her doubt and fear made it impossible for her to receive any of it.
That’s why, this time, the angels sent me.
I hope that doesn’t sound arrogant. It’s just that after all I’ve witnessed, I can no longer pretend this kind of meeting is coincidental.
For me, that kind of denial would be a far greater arrogance.
Our meeting was guided—and, as always happens in angel-guided encounters, it rewarded us both.
As the angels have shown me, they are constantly guiding us, gently and with great love, back to the path that was always waiting for us. And as the woman in the café observed...
That changes everything.
End of Chapter Two
Prompts for Your Own Reflection
What if we stopped dismissing these encounters? What if, instead of editing out the extraordinary, we leaned in?
The mystery is always with us, just beneath the surface of what we call real. It waits in the spaces between moments, in the knowing glance of a stranger, in the hand that steadies us when we think we might fall. It is in the questions we can’t shake and the answers that come when we are ready to receive them.
Take a moment to remember.
Make a list of any moments that felt magical or even miraculous at the time—those times when something unexpected or impossible happened, only for you to later write it off as coincidence.
Recall moments of intuition that led straight to discovery. Times when a hunch or a gut feeling turned out to be exactly right.
Think about the stories you’ve heard—like the one the woman in Panera shared with me. Has someone ever told you about an encounter they couldn’t explain? Have you ever had one yourself?
Write them down. Hold them up to the light.
What if these moments were not accidents? What if they were invitations?
The angels reach for us in ways we may never fully understand. But when we choose to believe—even just a little—we begin to notice the pattern, the weaving, the invitation.
And from that moment on, the world is never quite the same.
Next up: Chapter Three: My Early Encounters with Angels
(A two card reading with the Soul Call Cards: A new way of divination, given by the angels.)
I’m really enjoying reading your chapters. And I’m excited that your putting this body of work “out there in the world” once again. 💜 😇