An Angel Saved My Life: And Other True Stories of the Afterlife. Jacky Newcomb

       CHAPTER 3 Spiritual Growth

      We cannot pass our guardian angel’s bounds, resigned or sullen, he will hear our sighs.

       Saint Augustine

      The previous chapter was a journey through into my spiritual and psychic adventures. I feel that it was necessary in order for me to appreciate and validate the experiences of others. To assist others with their own angel and paranormal adventures I needed to have visited these inner realms myself. To understand my journey was another thing altogether.

      The full-time angel investigation was beginning. Are angels a spark of the great divine energy we call ‘God’? I wanted to know everything. Quantum physics teaches us that there is no separation between an object and the person that observes it. We and our own consciousness totally affect that which we observe, and I totally wanted to affect my own observations.

      I began spending even more time on the internet. It was the fount of all knowledge as far as I could see, and I realized it was time to create my own website. I wanted to encourage people to write to me about their own angel experiences so I had to try and get my non-technical mind around how to build a website.

      John was by now taking a mild interest and supplied all of the technical knowledge except the creative part, which was up to me. I built my first ever website and I was very proud of it. It was cringingly embarrassing and rubbish but I didn’t realize how bad it was at the time…it didn’t matter. I started inviting people with angel websites of their own to visit mine and before long, I was getting hundreds of e-mails every month.

      To start with, people were sharing mainly their own angel stories – we were all looking for some reassurance. Then later, when people started to ask me questions about their own angel experiences, I was able to help. I’d read so many books by this time and of course I’d had so many paranormal experiences.

      ‘This is the first time I have told anyone about my angel experience,’ they would say, or ‘I told someone about my experience once and they didn’t believe me.’ I believed them. I’d been there and done that. I was the ‘queen of weird’ myself.

      There had to be a book out there which explained things in a down-to-earth way. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I decided to write my own book about angels and I honestly thought that it would be that easy. Everyone gave me permission to share their stories and was happy to talk about how they now worked with their own angels. I wanted to put real people’s stories into a book. Some people had been through amazing things and other people’s stories, although more subtle, were still fascinating.

      We were ready to move house. We decided to downsize and sell off many of the inherited furniture we had around us. It was time to clear our clutter and our relationship. Throwing away hundreds of magazines, wardrobes full of old clothes and duplicates of every single kitchen tool was a very therapeutic thing to do.

      We filled up one of our downstairs rooms with everything which was too good to throw away. This room had previously been my meditating room and it was now so full you couldn’t move in there. A local women’s refuge group came with a massive van and took the haul away, including a three-piece suite, armchairs, tables, an old hifi, lamps, bedding and curtains.

      Clearing the space in our home had a dramatic affect on my depression which still lingered around at this time. Although I was already a lot better, clearing the house made the biggest difference of all. It was now easy to move house – we had whittled down our possessions to half of what we had owned previously so we literally bought a house which was half the size. Throwing and giving things away was amazing. ‘Things’ have a way of weighing you down.

      Moving to our new house created an amazing wave of creative energy. The new place had large, bright windows. Light flooded into the south-facing living room and I began to write. By this time I had hundreds of spiritual books, had experienced so many weird and wonderful things and heard so many fantastic stories. I did feel I was able to help because I could recommend which chapter of which book had similar stories or which book had advice for any particular problem. I could put people with similar stories in touch with each other and was beginning to see patterns between psychic and angel experiences.

      My website letters were fast becoming a kind of ‘agony aunt’ column. I wanted to do something with these letters, whilst I was collecting material for my book. For six months I oversaw the decorators and the carpet fitter and the landscape gardeners. I got away with being at home for six months before John asked me when I was getting a proper job. It was so important for me to write this angel book but I knew it was going to take a lot longer than I had originally thought. Writing the book was my new work.

      It was whilst I was struggling for a way to continue doing what I felt I was destined to do that I came up with the idea of writing for magazines. Again, with perhaps a touch of naivety I decided to become a freelance article and feature writer. I paid a visit to my local newsagents and picked up a handful of magazines. Again I felt I was being guided and brought the magazines home, full of confidence. I poured myself a drink and plucked up the courage to start ringing editors. ‘Hello, my name is Jacky Newcomb and I am a freelance writer…’ I began. Sometimes not knowing that it is possible to fail is a gift in itself.

      The first article quickly followed and others came shortly afterwards. It gave me the experience I needed to earn whilst I learnt, and I had the opportunity to read and study paranormal books for a living. Bliss! It was a massive breakthrough. This is what I should have been doing all of my life. I suddenly understood why I had spent years in a state of depression. With young children, a lot of what you do is a compromise, but now that the girls were older I was able to do more of the things which pleased me. Every day I would e-mail or ring magazines and suggest articles. As soon as an idea was accepted I began the research. I loved reading books about things I was interested in and it was all in the cause of earning money to help the family budget. I continued to collect angel stories and file them away.

      I was still getting stacks of e-mails through my website every month and spent many hours answering them. Sometimes I would spend an hour or more answering just one question. There had to be a better way and I wondered if any magazine would take a regular column from me? After posting out months of queries and ‘mock up’ columns, I finally got my first column, ‘Dear Angel Lady’, in It’s Fate magazine.

      After quite a while I had written several articles in magazines, newspapers and e-zines (internet magazines) all over the world including, one in my local newspaper, but my biggest postbag, for sure, came from my regular magazine column. I began writing for more mainstream magazines as well as holistic, spiritual and paranormal ones. I often sat down at the keyboard to type and words would just flow from nowhere. Was it from nowhere or was it from my own guardian angels?

      I enjoyed reading other people’s work on angels and the afterlife and really anything which related to my own experiences. In my column and articles I had the opportunity to promote some of these books which I had enjoyed. I had always spent a lot of money on books but suddenly publishers were sending me books for free. It really helped financially. These items were necessary for research but I would have bought them anyway.

      I was walking around the local garden