A different kind of war story for Memorial Day: A newlywed Texas woman reportedly becomes a guardian angel to her young husband during the Vietnam War

In 1970, collegian Jack Wheeler had just married a beautiful Texas coed named Delores when he found out his draft lottery number was four – a grim jackpot whose prize was Nam. Yet, in some strange way, Delores never seemed to leave his side – appearing in ghostly form time and again to save his life on the battlefield. In 1971, near the DMZ, Jack half-awoke to see Delores urging him to flee his cot – just seconds before an explosion that obliterated his “hooch” (hut). Fully awakened by the blast, Jack now realized that his pet dog Midnight had pulled him away from his bed – but had the pooch had help? Later, on a helicopter flight, Jack saw a jungle island below him strangely forming itself into the image of Delores’s face and saying, “Don’t worry, Jack. I’m here to protect you.” As he heard those words, a letter from Delores fell to the chopper floor, and when he went to reach for it, a wind gust blew it farther away. Just as Jack left his seat to retrieve the letter, a series of enemy rounds ripped through the same seat, the bullets grazing his legs. The crippled chopper plummeted, and when Jack regained consciousness, he saw the copter precariously perched on a treetop 50 feet above “Delores Island,” and he heard her say, “I’m here to protect you.” At that moment, the copter plunged from the tree and slammed the ground. Jack blacked out. He found himself in a near-death experience, rushing down a spectacularly colored tunnel, mesmerized by white light and becoming more and more ecstatic as he moved along. But an etheric half-figure of Delores blocked him suddenly: “Don’t leave me. I want you to come home – to have children with you. If you don’t stop, you’ll never see me again. You’ll lose me!” Jack rested himself in her bosom. She held the battle-weary GI like a child in her arms as she led him back out of the tunnel. When Jack regained consciousness, all of Delores’ seven letters that he had been carrying on the chopper were now with him in the hospital – including one letter that had blown out of the chopper just before it had been hit by gunfire. On October 28, 1972, after these and other spiritual interventions, 23-year-old Jack Wheeler went home to his young wife, who was unaware of those life-saving incidents a half world away. The full story appears in the book The Angel Library.

The Angel Library: Free for Two Days on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/johnronner

The Angel Library, a recently published e-book collection of three of my most popular angel books with more than 140,000 copies in print in paper editions, will be available for a free download from Amazon.com for two days this week, Wednesday May 9 and Thursday May 10. Use Amazon's free Kindle software to read it on your smartphone, tablet, PC or Kindle. Since the 1980s, these  books have been featured nationally on The Learning Channel, Sightings, NBC's Angels II, The Phil Donahue Show, Coast to Coast A.M., and on scores of regional and local TV and radio shows. Please share this post with anyone who might be interested. Thanks for your support!

Prophecies Surrounding the Sinking of the Titanic

 

 

Perhaps the one event which has most astonishingly demonstrated the reality of prophecy is the sinking of the ocean liner Titanic, which struck an iceberg off Canada's coast on April 15, 1912.

With the disaster's 100th anniversary coming up tomorrow, consider these incredible facts, among many others, cited in the book Prophecies Surrounding the Titanic (Amazon.com):

• The British journalist W. T. Stead (pictured above), doomed to die on the Titanic, seemed his entire life long to display an unconscious knowledge of his date with destiny in his writing, speech-giving and behavior. As just one example, he wrote an 1892 short story that eerily described the watery demise he would face exactly 20 years later.

• In 1898, ex-sailor Morgan Robertson went into a trance and wrote a "fictional" literary story, The Wreck of the Titan. In amazing detail, the story turned out ot be an unintended script for the events of the disaster, down to the number of passengers, tonnage of the ship, shortage of lifeboats, and many other small details.

• Typical of the numerous strange "concidences" piling up just before the catastrophe: Two hours before the iceberg crash, singing Titanic crew members inexplicably selected the hymn, Hear, Father, While We Pray to Thee, For Those in Peril in the Sea. Thousands of miles away, at that moment, the same hymn was being sung by a congregation in Winnipeg, Canada. Its minister, Charles Morgan had earlier selected the hymn for his flock after hearing the title and vividly seeing the hymn number while in a trance-like state. Although he had never sung the hymn before, he was able to locate the music in his library and include it in his church service that night.

A Question for Valentine’s Day: How do Angels Make Love?

As St. Valentine’s Day draws near, one wonders what would happen if one of those angelic cherub archers were to shoot an arrow into an angel’s heart. Do angels make love? And if so, how?

In fact, the blind Puritan poet John Milton had Adam asking this potentially touchy question of his mentor, the archangel Gabriel, in the Garden of Eden. In the poem Paradise Lost, Gabriel blushed and smiled before explaining the angelic facts of life over supper to the innocent legendary first man and woman. “Easier than air with air, if spirits embrace, / Total they mix, union of pure with pure / Desiring,” Milton wrote. Was Milton saying that angels are making whoopee? The famous British Christian writer C. S. Lewis didn’t think so, according to philosophy professor Geddes MacGregor.  Lewis suggested that Milton’s angels were not being sexually lustful when they intermingled their airy essences. Rather, their lovemaking was a complete spiritual bonding that transcended sexuality. MacGregor quoted Lewis as saying that an angelic act of love is “the satisfaction of love itself, not of appetite.” In his book Angels: Ministers of Grace, MacGregor went on to say that mature humans also have the ability to “engage in a spiritual fusion where spirit and spirit entwine in a love which, rooted though it is in sexuality, leaps beyond into a realm unimpeded by our kind of corporeality.”

The subject of angel love-making brings up another question: do angels even have gender? As a matter of fact, in traditional Judeo-Christian theology, the prevailing viewpoint has been that angels are not split into males and females. Rather, medieval philosophers usually thought of angels as sexless – or in their phrasing “androgynous.” In other words, a perfect combination of male and female sexuality.

This idea probably arose because of a comment attributed to Jesus when he was asked about marriage in heaven. Jesus replied in the gospels that the dead do not marry, because they act “like the angels.”

To symbolize this total blending of maleness and femaleness in an angel, artists have often portrayed angels as effeminate men. Other artists have shown angels as exclusively female, since females are identified with the cosmos’s nurturing, mystical and intuitive side, what the Taoists call the “yin” or “female” principle in nature. This principle stands in opposition to the “yang” or male side of the universe, which represents the rational, physical world.  No wonder then that angels are rarely shown in art as rugged he-men.

In the final analysis, maybe the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth makes the safest observation: “What know we of the Blest Above, but that they sing, and that they love?”

Love, the cement of the universe and often compared to gravity in physics, shatters the illusion of separateness, so that we can feel the warm Unity that hides behind the outer world of differences. Like white light broken into colors by a prism, love transmutes into a spectrum of related sub-emotions such as compassion, empathy and pity.

What we do know is that the higher that humans evolve, the more spiritually loving they seem to become. And, in fact, advanced spiritual “beings of light” reportedly encountered by dying mortals in their near-death experiences are routinely described as overwhelmingly loving and compassionate. Mystics and saints through the ages have provided similar accounts in reporting their visions of angels.

Abraham Lincoln's copper brain

Is our universe an intelligent living organism or a dead machine that came into being by accident with no one manning the control knobs?

To answer that age-old existential question, let's ask none other than Honest Abe Lincoln, our 16th President, who presumably would not lie at all, much less about something as important as this.

Well, we won't actually ask the fleshly Honest Abe -- too late for that -- but rather his copper likeness on the U.S. penny.

The copper Lincoln, of course, cannot speak, but he does have the right moves, so to speak, to give us a suggestive answer.

Flip a penny ten times and you get a totally random heads-tails outcome.

But the longer you stretch out any series of flips, the less randomness you will get in the heads-tails result. Indeed, the longer the series of flips, the closer and closer the outcome will creep toward exactly 50 % heads and 50 % tails.

This will happen in every experiment. Every time. As dependably as gravity or a morning sunrise.

An extremely long series of flips will time after time have an outcome that is virtually exactly 50 percent heads and 50 percent tails. Many flips, little randomness. Few flips, lots of randomness. A middling number of flips, a middling amount of randomness.

Question: How does The Great Emancipator, made of pure copper and no neurons, axons or dendrites, know how to behave this precisely?

Scientists answer blithely that it's the Law of Probability. But why -- we persist in asking. "Just 'cause" is the reply, and the matter is closed.

Of course, to a philosophically inclined person, the matter is far from closed.

The mystery of mindless copper Lincolns behaving so precisely and dependably is a metaphor for the incredible orderliness of this seemingly conscious universe that skeptics dismiss as random and accidental.

Has Science Found God’s Fingerprints on the Control Panel of the Universe?

Have scientists examining the laws of nature found the hidden hand of the Creator?

In recent decades, scientists have discovered a multitude of freakish coincidences in nature which have worked together to bring about a universe suitable for intelligent human life to evolve. And against stupefying, astronomical odds.

Consider: The force of gravity is just what it has to be, with very little tolerance for deviation. But gravity could have had an infinite number of alternative strengths. Or consider the force holding together the nucleuses of atoms (the so-called “strong force”); it has exactly the properties it must have for atoms to form correctly.

In fact, thousands of these so-called “anthropic” (human-friendly) coincidences have been discovered, and more are turning up all the time. Water, essential to life, “happens” to be liquid at temperatures that are most favorable to life.

Had one or another of these natural forces or phenomena varied by even the smallest of margins, a chain-reaction of consequences would have taken place, “fouling up” the requirements for a universe in which intelligent human life could evolve. The cosmos is like an extremely complicated Rube Goldberg machine, where every part must be just so to get the rolling ball from one end to the other.

Scientist Paul Davies commented: “It is hard to resist the temptation that the present structure of the universe, apparently so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather carefully thought out…” Davies adds: “The seeming miraculous concurrence of numerical values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design.”

Indeed, to say that this incredibly fined-turned universe got from the Big Bang all the way to us without a blueprint, by sheer accident, would be like saying that an explosion at an electronics factory could accidentally produce a mistake-proof, functioning circuit board.

Or, would it be saying that, after all? The skeptics, actually, have counter-attacked.

Although scientists all agree that this universe is uncannily human-friendly – against mind-numbing odds, not everyone sees God’s fingerprints on the levers and the buttons of the cosmic machinery.

Among other things, the dissenters argue that our universe is just one of staggeringly many such universes in an inconceivably large “multi-verse.” The forces of nature, some argue, are randomly generated in each universe, and ours happens to be one of the very few universes in which things accidentally worked out just right. (In another universe, for example, the force of gravity may have randomly been generated at 1,000 times the strength of our gravity during that universe’s Big Bang.) Therefore, if we had not won a stupendous cosmic lottery by accident, we wouldn’t be here now to be asking these questions about our shockingly human-friendly universe.

So the debate continues.

Does Abraham Lincoln still walk the White House corridors?

Does the ghost of the Great Emancipator still walk the halls of the White House? It’s a startling question to ponder as the 202^nd anniversary of Lincoln’s log-cabin birth in 1809 comes up this Wednesday, Feb. 12.

Trust-busting President Teddy Roosevelt said in the early 1900s: “I see him in the different rooms and in the halls.” Depression-era President Franklin Roosevelt’s valet fled the White House’s second floor screaming one day after spotting Lincoln’s specter.

The most striking of many stories came from the Netherland’s Queen Wilhelmina: Late one night during a state visit, she heard a knock at the door of her White House guest room. Opening the door, she fainted when she saw Lincoln’s tall frame stooped under the door jamb, wearing his trademark top hat.

Some paranormal observers have wondered if our greatest President might be earthbound by his sudden and violent death or by a deep love for a country he watched over in its time of agony.

White House employees – and President Calvin Coolidge’s wife Grace in the 1920s -- allegedly several times saw the ghost of the 16^th President at a window in the Oval Office, where Lincoln used to look out with concern over the Potomac River to Virginia during the Civil War.

Britain’s famous wartime prime minister Winston Churchill refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom during his many White House visits after supposedly sighting the phantom during the first and only occasion he slept in the room.

President Ronald Reagan’s daughter, Maureen, was quoted in Newsweek magazine as saying she and her husband woke up one morning to see the “transparent figure” of Lincoln standing at a window, looking out. President Reagan’s dog reportedly would not enter the Lincoln bedroom but sometimes stood outside it, barking.

Lincoln supposedly had a premonitory dream shortly before he was fatally shot in the head by assassin John Wilkes Booth in the final days of the Civil War after General Lee’s surrender of the largest Confederate army.

In the dream, Lincoln heard subdued sobbing, left his bed and wandered downstairs, going from room to room, still hearing the sobs but seeing no one. Finally, in the East Room, he saw a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments, guarded by soldiers. The body’s face was covered. "Who is dead in the White House?" Lincoln asked one of the soldiers. "The president,” the soldier answered. “He was killed by an assassin."