Stumped. How about a story, then?

Stumped by the day's scriptures, (and pleased with Steve's thoughts as enough for the day), I've retreated to another chapter in the retirement of Frank and Ralph, Jesus' guardian angels.

Retired angels aren’t supposed to get bored. Or, so it seemed to Ralph and Frank. No one really knew. They were the first two retired angels in angelic history, after all. They’d decided after several years of just hanging around doing nothing that boredom should have set in by now. It hadn’t.

“That’s a long time,” Frank said. 

“What is?” Ralph asked. They’d been walking along the dry bed of Fountain Creek within eye and earshot of highway 24 for almost two hours. Ralph figured Frank was either thinking of their retirement or their hike.

“Angelic history,” Frank answered. 

“Oh, boy,” said Ralph. “You’re not kidding. I think it must have been about twice the time as creation until now.” 

“We go way back,” said Frank. 

“Way back. But, …

“Yeah, Ralph … not all the way back.” 

“Still,” Ralph said.

“Yes,” Frank agreed. “Pretty dag-nabbed long.”

The last hour and a half neither of the two had left any boot prints in the sandy soil. They swung their arms and whipped their legs forward to make it look like they were two old men walking. Since they made the turn away from the Walmart there was no need to press into the red dirt. They floated just above the earth like proper traveling angels. Except for being visible. Thus, the waggling of their limbs to appease nosy, vigilant humans on the lookout.

The two reminisced and pondered and wandered down the creek bed because their lives had changed drastically a few hours ago. They needed to catch some air, so to speak.

Earlier that morning a young boy walked up to them as they stood in an aisle at the hardware store. They were reading the labels on cans of stain. Taken by the clever concoctions of chemicals, Frank pointed out an anomaly. The actual ingredients of a Bombay Mahogany mixture were measurably, and considerably, off the percentage amounts identified on the label. Frank’s thumb dripped with a dab of the stain, which he’d sampled by sliding his finger through the steel and sucking up a bit of the liquid under his fingernail before removing it through the undamaged, unblemished can. Angels, of course, can do stuff like that.

“See?”

“Well, I’ll be,” agreed Ralph. “I think they’re either mistaken or they’ve got a hole in their alcohol dropper.”

“You think they use droppers?” asked Frank.

“I would.”

The boy had waited patiently. He stood about half their height. Expecting a pause in the two angel’s conversation he finally tapped on Ralph’s right arm. Blond hair hung long off his head. He wore a jacket that covered his entire body, and his bare feet stuck out at the bottom.

“Sir,” the boy said in an ancient language, faintly familiar to the two angels. He pointed at Ralph’s arm. “You’re wrist is golden.”

Frank didn’t look at Ralph’s arm. He looked at the boy. “He can see that?” he whispered to Ralph. 

Ralph’s eyes darted back and forth from his wrist to the boy’s face. “I believe so, Frank.” The boy smiled at them. “Isn’t that Adamic Aramaic? I haven’t heard that spoken in thousands of years.”

Surprised at first regarding the inter-spacial capabilities of the young boy, and hearing his many-millennia-old speech, the two angels calculated that he must not be from around here. That is, from creation’s realm. No human, or any creature actually, no matter what language they speak, can see the golden appendages of an angel. It’s impossible. Only angels can see the angelic yellow tinge of illumination produced at a spectre outside of human sight.

“Where are you from?” Frank asked. The boy turned and pointed to a spot between the trays of hex bolts and eye bolts in the row just beyond the traffic path down the middle of the store. A woman lay flat on the linoleum, like she’d fallen. A few people attended to her.

The angels realized what must have happened. The boy’s jacket was a woman’s coat. Underneath the coat stood a bare boy, but not really a boy. 

“Uh oh,” Ralph said. Frank nodded. The boy might be a new angel. Brand new. 

“Are they making new angels?” asked Ralph. If so, he was created in the machined screw aisle at a hardware store. “He probably frightened that woman half to death!” She had her wits about her enough, though, to drape her coat over the naked boy before she fell in a faint.

“She must’ve seen him and covered him up,” Ralph said, echoing Frank’s thoughts. The woman was sitting up now, but seemed very confused and groggy. She told a hardware store employee that one minute she was looking for a socket screw and the next thing she remembered was waking up on the floor.

“And where’s my coat?”

Angels have very clever ways to reset awkward situations. In the blink of an eye one of the men assisting the woman on the floor noticed he was holding a coat, and in the next blink Frank and Ralph, and instantaneous angel boy, were sitting in their RV at the vehicle lot buttoning up clothing on their new charge — a smiling, patient, and apparently freshly made angelic being.

“Were we young boy angels in the beginning?” Ralph asked Frank. 

“I don’t remember.” 

They told the boy to lay down and take a nap, and then decided to go for a walk and sort things out. Before leaving, they named the boy a sound that angels make when they appear and need folks to notice— llffftttwwwwsshhhh. “Left Wish,” for short. They explained this to the boy as he nodded off to sleep, murmuring his new name.

Two hours later, they were done with their walk and decided to head back. 

“I suppose Left Wish showed up for us to take care of him,” Ralph suggested.

Frank scrunched up his face. “Could be, but we’d best ask first.”

In the next few seconds one of heaven’s Authority Angels appeared to Ralph and Frank. His name was Heretowit. He readily explained the odd happenings of Left Wish. The boy they’d met that morning was a Nephilim — part human and part angel. He’d been missing for thousands of years, dating back to the time of Noah. Only that morning did the mystery of his whereabouts get resolved. 

“He popped back into creation from a rather obtuse section of the netherworld,” Heretowit said. Left Wish didn’t have a name, not one that anyone could remember. “Left Wish will do just fine.”

Heretowit nodded to Frank and prepared to vanish. “We’ve got him, now. He’ll be fine,” he said turning away.

Frank grabbed the angel by the arm before he could extricate himself. “Well, I’ve got a few questions first.”

Frank got his answers without having to list the questions. Authority Angels grasp wondering thoughts rather quickly. 

Coincidentally (and there are no coincidences), Frank and Ralph were made purposely invisible to the denizens of the dark when they retired. They lived in a true state of rest, unbothered by evil’s chaos. “That’s the primary bit of information that you need to know,” Heretowit told them.

“So,” Heretowit then told the tale of the Nephalim boy.

Not long after Left Wish was born, before the Flood in Noah’s days — the offspring of a weak angel and a beautiful woman — demons stole him away to a time-warped hovel in the netherworld. They wanted to study him. After a very short time, frustrated by the boy’s strangeness, the demons deigned to destroy him. They flung him through the air, aimed to crush violently against a rock wall.

“Miraculously, he disappeared from their sight,” Heretowit said. “But now we know in the Holy Spirit’s wisdom that the boy/angel was hidden in a time rift. Several thousand years would seem like just a few minutes. Until now, that is, when he was returned to the present earthen time.”

Left Wish’s escape, orchestrated by God himself, flew him from his hidden place into the present and presence of angelic space. Frank and Ralph’s space, that is. The bubble around Frank and Ralph that hid everything from the reach of Satan and his minions could also hide the boy. 

“The boy, safe in your retired angels care, could finally return to space and time, hidden from all form of devilish creatures,” Heretowit said, smiling.

“Uh, how big is our bubble,” asked Frank.

“Well, of course, when you two went off for your walk the veil was lifted.” 

The wide-eyes of Frank and Ralph aptly portrayed their horror.

Heretowit held up his hand in reassurance. “Fortunately, we were there and took him with us.” The Authority Angel shrugged as if that would calm the worried pair of retired angels.

“Oh, my,” Ralph said. “When we walked away he was no longer hidden, … or, under our protection.”

“Sort of,” he told them. The angels looked stricken. “Look, we were coming to get him anyway. He was napping. No big deal, really.”

And that was that.

“So,” Ralph asked Frank, back at the dining table in their RV. “Angels can have kids?”

“Looks like it,” Frank answered.  “I don’t think we’re supposed to, though.”

“Not a good idea,” nodded Ralph.

They felt pleased to be included in the boy’s retrieval from a limbo in time. And yet, the seriousness and perilous consequence of a creature like Self Wish must have pushed God’s merciful nature to the limits.

“Nice kid, though,” Ralph said.

“Very trusting,” Frank added, and then looked over at Ralph. “Just another boring day in retirement.”

“True dat,” Ralph said. He stretched out his golden arms as far as he could, the space underneath them quivering the air, which appeared like he sported two giant wings. “If we waved these babies out in open we could make the whole town faint.”

“But, we won’t,” Frank said.

The two of them looked at each other and said at the same time, big smiles on their faces, “Not yet, that is!”

“They have no idea what’s coming, do they?” Ralph said, more than asked. 

“You mean the creatures, or the dark ones?”

“Both,” Ralph said emphatically.

“Actually, after today, I don’t think we do either,” Frank said. 

For the next few hours the two of them flapped their golden arms around the RV, huffing and giggling and messing around. Underneath the frivolity, though, they knew somehow they were practicing. God had been yanking the innocent away from the demonic for a long time. This was the first time they’d heard of something like the salvaging of Left Wish, though. 

They continued their angelic revelry, preparing themselves. For what, they weren’t quite sure. One thing was sure. God must have something in mind for them.

Left Wish was no accident.