… for they are like the angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection …Luke20:36
Easter approaches, so I offer for reflection the articles below and the following testimony, recorded in Natural Mystic which was relayed to me personally by the Rev Tony Bailey when we met in Toronto in 2008 at a prayer conference at which we were mutually ministering.
What Tony calls his ‘Jamaican angel’ encounter is just how he sorts and interprets the reality he experienced.
Tony has the gift of healing. He prays for the sick. They ‘fall under the power’. They get healed. He was doing this one Sunday when he had a massive stroke. He fell alright, but from a massive cerebral ‘power cut’. He had been prepared for the experience by a message from the Spirit that he was about to be tried, but he would eventually prevail, so although the medical prognosis was that he would never walk, talk or preach again, he set his expectations on that Word.
Several months of contending with the medical facts which had him completely immobilized and in hospital was daunting even to his normally strong faith. At the point he would have surrendered his confident expectation of improvement to the ill fate he was beginning to reckon with, a Jamaican doctor confirmed his faith after checking his vitals, by mysteriously reminding him of the words spoken to him by the Spirit before the ordeal. Afterwards, he simply disappeared into thin air.
Both Tony and his wife had a prolonged conversation with this gentleman they had supposed was employed by the hospital, whose English was characteristically stained with Jamaican patois. Not only was he totally unknown to the hospital staff and administration; there was no record of his entry or exit to the hospital floor.
Scores of people have had similar reality-stretching encounters with beings apparently more hologram than human. What authenticated Tony’s account for me was that there was nothing in his Southern USA background that might have predisposed him (or his wife) to expect an agent of God wrapped in Jamaican culture. Tony’s two grandfathers were Klu Klux Klansmen who had tried to convince him early on in life that Black people have no soul, so where on earth….(or in heaven for that matter) would he expect to encounter a Black and very Jamaican angel at that? Nothing in his experience prepared him to process that strange encounter.
Of course, by the time we met, Tony was no longer in a wheel chair. He was very much walking, preaching and praying for the sick; they were falling under the power, receiving their healing and we were having a good old fashioned Pentecostal time.
YeKengalé 