The Boy Beside the Angel

For much of my life, I believed that if I made good choices, worked hard and treated people kindly, I could protect those I loved from pain.

It was an unspoken bargain I had made with life.

Be good, and life will be good in return.

But life makes no such promises.

I understand that now. I also understand that wisdom does not always arrive before the difficult moments. Sometimes she meets us within them, offering not an escape, but a way to walk through what we cannot avoid.

Nearly thirty years after the night the angel appeared in my bedroom, another Epiphany was approaching. As I returned to the journal I had written that night, I found myself drawn again to one particular image.

Beside the angel stood a little boy.

He appeared to be about three years old. I did not know who he was, but something within me recognised him.

In my journal, I wrote:

I think this is a son we are meant to have.

My husband was booked to have a vasectomy the following morning.

When daylight came, I told him what I had seen. I expected disbelief, or at least the puzzled silence that often follows when we try to give words to something beyond ordinary understanding.

Instead, his face changed.

He told me that he, too, had awakened during the night. He had heard the voices of two children.

I told him about the little boy beside the angel.

“There was a girl here too,” he said.

Neither of us knew what it meant. We only knew that the appointment could not go ahead that morning.

So he did not go.

At the time, I had never heard anyone speak of meeting a child before that child was born. I learned to be careful about whom I told. Some experiences feel too fragile to place in the hands of those determined to explain them away.

I carried the image quietly.

Three years later, our son’s expected due date was 6 January 1995—Epiphany.

It was a date we could not have planned.

His name was Caleb. In Hebrew, the name carries meanings of faithfulness, courage, loyalty and wholeheartedness.

He would grow into every one of them.

He was also determined, adventurous and wonderfully headstrong.

When Caleb was four, we were raising four children and caring for our teenage nephew, whose father had died by suicide. Our home held love, noise and grief in equal measure.

Caleb adored his older cousin and wanted to follow him everywhere. If his cousin went to the skatepark, Caleb believed he should go too. The fact that he was only four seemed, to him, a minor and unnecessary detail.

I tried to reason with him.

He resisted.

I set boundaries.

He pushed against every one.

One day, exhausted by the battle between his fierce independence and my responsibility to keep him safe, I cried out for help.

Show me how to parent this child. I do not know what to do.

The answer came as an image.

I was a lioness, and Caleb was my cub.

He wanted to run ahead, beyond the reach of my shadow. But he was still too small to see the dangers concealed in the landscape before him.

I understood that until his shadow grew longer than mine, he needed the shelter of my strength.

The vision did not ask me to diminish his courage. It asked me to protect it until he possessed the wisdom to carry it safely.

Suddenly, the boundaries I had been struggling to hold felt different. They were not walls built to contain him. They were the shadow of the lioness—the place where he could grow until he was tall enough to see the path for himself.

That image remained with me through the difficult days of parenting him. When I felt worn down or wondered whether it would be easier to give in, I remembered the cub running towards the unseen crevice.

I remained the lioness.

Mothering Caleb taught me that love is not always soft. Sometimes love must plant its feet firmly on the ground and withstand the anger of a child who cannot yet see what lies ahead.

I had once believed that my role was to protect my children from every experience of pain. In time, I learned that I could not.

They would each meet life in their own way. They would experience loss, disappointment and choices I could not make for them. Their journeys would ask something different of each of them.

My task was not to clear every stone from the path.

It was to walk beside them while I could, to listen when something deeper stirred and to trust that the Spirit of Wisdom would accompany them beyond the reach of my shadow.

The mind wants certainty before it acts.

The soul sometimes knows only that it must listen.