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Joy Snell – Ministry of Angels

Of the many deaths I have witnessed that of Mrs. L___ afforded the most striking and beautiful example of the triumph of faith over the “grim terror.” It is one of the most precious of the memories that remain to me of my experiences as a nurse.

Mrs. L___ had been a noted professional singer, to whose gift of song charities never appealed in vain. She was a good woman and a most loveable one.

She was afflicted with an internal disease which had been pronounced incurable. I had seen the dark form with the veiled face at the foot of the bed and knew that the end was near. For twenty-four hours she had been so weak and exhausted that she could scarcely speak above a whisper, and was quite incapable of raising herself in her bed. Two angels became visible to me, standing on either side of the bed, and I knew they had come to conduct her glorified spirit, whose new tenement would soon take shape above the out worn physical body, to the sphere where peace and joy abide and suffering is unknown.

Suddenly she opened wide her beautiful eyes. She gave no indication of having recognised the angels, but raising herself in her bed, her face illumined by a joy that was not of this earth, she sang, from beginning to end, that magnificent anthem, “O, rest in the Lord!”

Her voice rang out as clear and strong as when in concert halls, in years gone by, hundreds had listened to it enraptured. 

There are some spectacles on earth, it is good to know, which gladden the angels. And this was one of them. For the radiant faces of those two by the bed glowed with a holy delight as they watched and listened to the singer, who was soon to join the heavenly host.

When the song was finished she dropped back in the bed and expired.

Then I witnessed her birth into the deathless life, and, as an angel, her departure accompanied by the other two angels, to where rest in the Lord is found always.