A non-LDS experience with angels?

Last updated on: February 4, 2020 at 11:30 pm by Dan Peterson

A non-LDS experience with angels? 2020-02-04T23:30:55-07:00 Dan Peterson

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“The Angel Moroni Appears to Joseph Smith in His Room”
(Tom Lovell, LDS Media Library)

Here are some new items on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:

Come, Follow Me — Study and Teaching Helps: Lesson 6, February 3 – 9: 2 Nephi 1-5

Audio Roundtable: Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 6 “We Lived after the Manner of Happiness” 2 Nephi 1-5

This Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Book of Mormon Lesson 6, “We Lived after the Manner of Happiness” on 2 Nephi 1-5 involved Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and Kevin Christensen. It was extracted from the 12 January 2020 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show. The complete show has been stripped of commercial interruptions and archived, and it may be heard at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-january-12-2020/. The Interpreter Radio Show is broadcast on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640, or you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

***

Last night, I began to read Marvin J. Besteman, with Lorilee Craker, My Journey to Heaven: What I Saw and How It Changed My Life (Grand Rapids: Revell, 2012). In it, the late Mr. Besteman, a Calvinist banker in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who died at about the age of 78 in 2012, recounts a near-death experience that he claimed to have had while hospitalized for a serious illness a few years before. I was struck by his description of the angels that he claims to have seen:

Suddenly, two men I had never seen before in my life walked into my hospital room. Don’t ask me how I knew, but immediately I had a sense that these men were angels. I wasn’t the least bit anxious, either. (13)

Don’t ask me how I knew the two strangers who had just walked into my hospital room were angels; I just knew they were. Beyond any doubt, these were angelic visitors, come to take me home. (31)

Plainly, in his account, they didn’t look like a different “species.”

My angels looked like regular guys, except regular guys usually don’t wear white robes. Both looked in their mid-forties and stood about 5’8″ to 5’10”. One had longish brown hair, and the other one had shorter hair. . . . Everyone has a mental picture of angels, and so did I. When I had thought of angels before I actually met one, I pictured them as younger than the beings I saw. I also thought angels were men and women both. . . . And no, actually, neither one of them had wings. (I know that’s what you were wondering, because that’s one of the top questions I get about my experience: Did my angels have wings?) (31)

My angels looked like men I might see on the golf course, or at a hockey game, except of course they were wearing long-sleeved robes. Their clothes were white and gauzy, almost filmy, but not quite see-through, and they hung about two or three inches from the floor. Both angels wore ropes or long rags belted around their waists. (38)

near-death experience

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