on angel mothers

I've been thinking a lot about what to write on a day like this. I always have something drafted, and then my heart always feels differently, and I end up writing something completely opposite.

This Mother's Day, my heart feels like saying this:

In times of special need, {God} sent angels to bless His children, reassure them that heaven was always very close and that His help was always very near... Usually such beings are not seen. Sometimes they are. But seen or unseen, they are always near.

Not all angels are from the other side of the veil. Some of them we walk with and talk with - here, now, every day.  Indeed heaven never seems closer than when we see the love of God manifested in the kindness and devotion of people so good and so pure that angelic is the only word that comes to mind.

Always there are those angles who come and go all around us, seen and unseen, known and unknown, mortal and immortal.

I testify of angels, both the heavenly and the mortal kind. In doing so I am testifying that God never leaves us alone, never leaves us unaided in the challenges that we face. Nor will he, so long as time shall last, or the earth shall stand, or there shall be one man or woman or child upon the face thereof to be saved.

From Jeffrey R. Holland's "The Ministry of Angels," emphasis added

My mom was an angel in life. These pictures are from the last seven brain tumor weeks of her life, and they don't show the amazing person she was, or all the inspiring things she did. Pictures often don't do that kind of justice.

Two years and five months ago exactly, she became a real angel. Angels are real, and she is still real. She's still involved in my life, and she's still my mom. I know that.

Everything I am or ever hope to be, 

I owe to my angel mother. 

Abraham Lincoln