From the Introduction to my as yet unpublished autobiography, the story of my involvement with angels during my life:
-An Introduction-
I have been a reluctant Dragon Slayer most of my life. The “Dragon” I speak of is of course, Satan. I was thrown into the fires of spiritual warfare, long before I had even the most remote clue as to what this type of supreme warfare is all about. In my grown life I realized what exorcism is, and as one who has been labeled a “Master” Dragon Slayer, I have put the hard-earned lessons I have learned to use in assisting others in their spiritual struggles, to put it lightly. I have fearlessly put Satan in his place on several occasions, but only after I personally witnessed how my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, dealt with the evil one.
As a child, I had little understanding of what was happening to me. My life was bombarded with many life-threatening events nearly simultaneously until I was grown to manhood, and even then, although these events had slowed significantly, they still occurred. I am only able to speak about them now through a strength that comes from far beyond any martial arts level I have achieved, or experiences I’ve gained as a Police officer, Emergency Medical Technician, Chaplain or Theologian. This type of strength knows no fear. The enemy cowers in its presence. The mighty dragon of the Bible was taken down by the sword of a heavenly angel. Do you think Michael, the Archangel, was afraid of this dragon? This is the kind of strength I am speaking of: Divine strength, as well as Divine courage.
I am not an angel by any means, but I have been in the company of angels on several occasions. My guardian angel’s name is Gideon. We met and conversed in 1967 while I was in a coma after shattering my skull in an early-morning High School gymnastics practice session in Marshalltown, Iowa. He and I spoke, without uttering an audible word, about whether I would continue on my stellar journey to heaven or return to my earthbound life. I wanted to live, and I told him that I wasn’t finished yet, not realizing what it was that I had yet to do in my lifetime.
I met a beautiful young female angel immediately thereafter, as I slipped out of the leather bed restraints I was secured with, to walk down the hospital hall to a restroom after I slowly began to regain consciousness. Of course no one believed me in the least until I described the tile pattern in the hall bathroom in great detail. They said I couldn’t have done this thing because I still had a catheter in my bladder and it was firmly attached to the drainage bag on the side of my bed. Besides, there was no Candy Striper there that met the description I gave them of the most beautiful young woman I have ever met. She showed herself again while I was wheeling myself out of my room when I was released to go home. We smiled at one another momentarily as my family was walking alongside of me, but I decided not to ask anyone if they too saw her. It was to remain our “special” secret until now.
These two angels were not the only angels I have met in my life: I saw a group of several females dressed in white (like hairdressers, for example) at the scene of a motorcycle accident I was involved in about three years later where I split my helmet down the middle after moving a car two feet across dry, hot pavement, from the impact of my head striking the left rear quarter panel of a Corvair in Garland, Texas. One of these women reached down and touched my right shoulder to ask me if I was okay, then went to check on my fiance’s condition. Of course when I asked what had happened to those nice ladies in white, none of the many witnesses knew who I was talking about. They hadn’t seen anyone like that.
I met the Angel of the Lord when I was a Police Officer, on duty and in uniform, in Buffalo, Oklahoma, a good many years after that motorcycle accident. This angelic encounter occurred around the time I received the initially undetected, but eventually tragic, spinal injuries during the high-speed chase of a local drug-dealer. He (the Angel) literally took me in His arms during one of the most turbulent periods of my life, and reassured me that everything was going to be okay. I know this to be a true event since this conversation was the same type of unspoken conversation that I had with my Guardian Angel, Gideon, so many years earlier. This was a divine confirmation, as far as I was concerned, but no one else could personally share my conviction. The woman I was dating at that time pulled her vehicle into this roadside park where I was standing in awe with an obvious glow about my face. She asked me what was the matter, while at the same time she couldn’t help but fixate on my eyes. I was unable to explain what had just happened. All I could do was look at her and smile and cry tears of joy. Later on that evening I had gathered my senses sufficiently to write a poem about the experience. It is included in one of my poetry volumes, and entitled “The Arms of Christ.”
As a full-grown man in my middle-age years, I was Chaplain of a large motorcycle ministry that met one summer day at the State Capital in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a few years ago to pray for the State government as well as the city. Others of like affiliation also met with us, and at one point during a joint prayer on the Capital grounds, I was led to open my eyes momentarily. As I looked around I saw two unassuming young ladies in motorcycle apparel that I hadn’t noticed before the beginning of the prayer. I assumed that they were late-comers, and I was glad to see that they had made it, even if they were a bit late. To my pleasant surprise, when I asked about them later, I realized that only my wife and one other woman had also seen them. Out of the forty or so people who had congregated for this event, only three people witnessed these two women, who, quite coincidentally, were no longer present when the prayer came to a close.
Others who have seen or heard angels involving me, include my brother Tim, who saw an angel at the foot of my bed when we were children and my Mother hearing an angel’s wings above my hospital bed while I was in a coma. Before I became a Chaplain, my former Pastor laid hands on me and asked for divine healing of my lung disease. A woman in the congregation told me that she saw a large hand reach into my chest cavity to pull out the disease.
My life has never been destined to be a “normal” life, as you will see, for if my tragic head injury in 1967 wasn’t bad enough, there have been numerous other near-fatal events that have somehow entered into the picture. I write this introduction now, while I am also considering an entirely different “battle” that I am currently involved in. My wife, Marilyn, chuckles as I explain to others that: “I have been terminal for years!” And I have been. Don’t worry, I will die soon enough, but I am not about to let the many chronic medical ailments I have, interfere with the glorious battle I have been blessed with in disarming and defeating the beasts in my life and the lives of the others that have been placed in my path. I am a man of God, if you haven’t realized by now, but this only comes about after years of living a life of human errors, until the Lord nailed my feet to the floor so I could finally hear His voice clearly over all the other noise surrounding all of us. I hope you enjoy this book, and invite you to read all of the others that I have been blessed to live and record. I have also authored eight volumes of poetry and several Bible commentaries and Bible studies. This work is my legacy to you, my children, and to anyone else who might be searching. Within this book are the answers to the questions that I have asked of God about my purpose in this life. He alone has the answers concerning that which He has created. Anything else is merely mortal speculation and is consequently of little or no interest to me.
Be on your guard and stay awake. Your enemy, the devil, is like a roaring
lion, sneaking around to find someone to attack. But you must resist the
devil and stay strong in your faith. You know that all over the world the
Lord’s followers are suffering just as you are. But God shows undeserved
kindness to everyone. That’s why he appointed Christ Jesus to choose you to
share in his eternal glory. You will suffer for a while, but God will make you
complete, steady, strong, and firm. God will be in control forever! Amen.
1 Peter 5:8-11 CEV
During the most tragic and lonely moments a person could ever encounter, the Lord persuaded me to document those events. At those times I had no idea what reasoning God could possibly be using, because it truly seemed to me, to be intensifying the pain. Little did I know that in the midst of all of my troubles, the Lord was building me up. He was strengthening my resolve. He was “girding my loins” as it says in the Bible. Did the Lord cause all of my hardships? No. They were most likely brought on by my own actions, or inactions. The ancient Chinese philosopher made a profound point in saying: “To take no action, is an action.” Therefore, my failure to act when I could have may have indeed created more problems, at times. There are likewise times when my actions were not necessarily the wisest reactions to another’s actions. I could have realized much sooner in life that I was heavily engaged in a spiritual battle with the evil one, if I had the spiritual maturity then that I have now come to be blessed with over these many years. I should have realized this internal battle by all of the many, many times that God spared my life whether it was by a literal, physical resuscitation, or by His placing me in a “safe place” when all I seemed to do was be mysteriously drawn to someplace far from His safety. I am talking about one man that was “dead” or “near-dead” at least a dozen times:
1) hydrocephalic at birth;
2) severely burned at one year old;
3) involved in a rollover auto accident on his fourth birthday (without a scratch);
4) nearly drowned in an incident at a nearby lake soon after;
5) actually drowning a couple of years after that, which did require resuscitation by an unsuspecting young YMCA lifeguard;
6) shattering the base of my skull in high school gymnastics (resuscitated at least twice) and being in a comma for two weeks, to only recover completely and miraculously, after being in a “guarded” condition and expected to only possibly live as a “vegetable” if indeed, I did live;
7) next I was involved in a head-on collision a year later with some friends and myself, and my best friend and I escaped unscratched, with the only injuries being a minor cut on the shin of my young girlfriend and a potentially sprained wrist on my buddy’s girlfriend;
a near-fatal motorcycle collision a couple of years after that with my ex-wife, which split my helmet down the middle after I moved the side of a car 2 feet with my head;
9) an accident with my patrol car as a police officer in a small Oklahoma town, which most likely fractured several of my vertebrae (the E.R. Doctor failed to even x-ray);
10,11, 12) and three more motorcycle accidents several years later, which occurred almost simultaneously, the most recent of which literally crushed my chest as I was run over by my own Harley-Davidson Road King, and caused what they call a “Flail Chest” and several other injuries; all of this, while I was suffering also from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and too many other illnesses, literally, to mention, but I will try:
Currently I am dealing with multiple fractures of my spine, which increase my shortness of breath and create intense pain, along with stage four gold COPD, asthma, HLAB27 syndrome, ankylosing spondylitis, nystagmus, profound osteoporosis, Schmorle’s nodes, fibromyalgia, vertigo, latent TB, spondyloarthropy, B12-deficient, disseminated histoplasmosis, and a few other less life-threatening illnesses like rheumatoid arthritis and prednisone-induced type II diabetes, a basal skull fracture that resulted in a TBI (traumatic brain injury), and a flail chest to name a few.I recount these things not to complain, but to show how much Divine Shepherding the Lord has blessed my life with. For years, the doctors have been amazed at how well I deal with the intense pain I must be encountering. They asked me on one occasion almost twenty years ago: “Mr. Brown, what do you take for the pain?” And I smiled and replied in response: “Faith, just faith.” When they looked at me in surprise, I further stated: “They don’t teach you doctors much about the Great Physician in your medical schools, do they?”
To summarize, my wife chuckles when I say that “I have been terminal for years!” But it’s true, and I also say: “I haven’t died yet, because God is not done punishing me.” This I say in jest, but it is ironically true. I do have a “penance” to pay for the sins I have committed. Christ died for my sins, so I know I have been forgiven, but my body suffers the consequences for the choices I’ve made in my life. That is my penance. These pages to follow document many of my trials and tribulations, and also the wonderful shepherding that my Lord and Savior has done in my life…a life that I am overjoyed to have lived. It could have had a little less pain in it, but then the joy I have had would never be appreciated as much as it is. Thank you, Jesus, for my life and for all of my children and all of my loved ones, especially the love of my life, my wife, my Marilyn, my “woman of dignity” as the Proverbs say. Lord knows, I tried to do things my own way and in my own strength for far too long, and I suffered dearly for it. This book will show you how Jesus has always been with me, even though I thought He would rather be somewhere else. Had He not always been there, neither would I be here now, nor the words that He gave me to write…for you. –SCB.
