Olive's Angels

This is a very brief excerpt from a book I am writing about angels. This book has been in some measure of progress for thirteen years or more. I was never certain I would publish it, but that all changed after the death of my senior daughter. Now I know I will publish it soon. I must complete a small part of it that is in progress at this time. I hope you enjoy the idea of my book on angels and want to read it when it is completed.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My sister Trudy approached me one day after my first two fiction novels had been published. She asked me if I would be interested in writing a book that would become a collection of angel stories, stories she would collect for me at the angel store that she and her daughter Leisa owned together, Olive’s Garden of Angels, the store named in Mom’s honor. After some limited conversation on the topic, I agreed to at least think about it, but only if she would start collecting a few stories for me to analyze and see if it was something I could actually get into. She agreed to do it, and eventually she sent a handful of angel stories for me to work with. These stories were from customers of her store, and some of the people who submitted the stories were from Mom’s town of Decatur, Illinois, which is my birthplace and the birthplace of my seven siblings. Some other angel stories came to me from Iowa and other points through my daughter, Tara, who owned a web-based scrapbooking business at that time. She had solicited the stories from her customers over the web. After I read a few of the personal stories, I thought it would be appropriate for me to do some research about angels and try to gather enough information to write a short introduction to this book.

I realized I didn’t know a lot about angels when I started writing this small book containing some true-life stories of peoples’ encounters with angels, or in a few cases, just simple stories of faith. But I thought I had a basic knowledge of angels. I decided to get my Bible out and see what it had to say on the subject of angels. I quickly discovered I had something close to zero knowledge about angels, which surprised me in a way. I always thought, for some strange reason, that I had a reasonable amount of knowledge regarding angels, but as I delved into the depths of the Bible to find out where and how angels were mentioned, it surprised me how little I actually knew about them. In one respect there were so many references about angels, but in another respect, there was very little information on the classifications of angels. I learned a lot more than I ever thought I would by the time I completed my study. A good portion of my study involved research on the Internet. While I cannot vouch one hundred percent on the validity or accuracy of what I discovered on the Internet, I will say that I was able to corroborate most if not all of it from more than a single source. I will share some of what I discovered here. In honor of my mother Olive, I am naming this book, Olive’s Angels.