In For the Time Being, Annie Dillard writes, “We wake, if ever at all, to mystery, rumors of death, beauty, violence.… We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall.… We miss the angels, we punch the clock, we fetch groceries, we drive, we dry the dishes, and we stub our toes on the curb. We stub our toes on angels.”

Somehow, we lose our capacity for wonder. We stub our toes on angels and don’t even realize it. We no longer merely stand at the edge of the Grand Canyon in stunned silence, but turn away to snap a selfie. We rarely pause our scrolling to glance up and trace a constellation in the stars. We no longer believe we might be surrounded by angels, or if we do believe it, we forget.

I lived for over twenty years in the Horn of Africa, where miracles, angels, and the unexplainable are expected, anticipated even. The idea that the spiritual world intersects with the physical world is a given. Disposing of my clipped fingernails improperly opened me up to being cursed. Not being careful where I stepped in the squatty potty at night might mean stepping on a jinni, a mischievous devil who could give me a rash. The rash could be healed by writing words from the Quran onto a piece of paper, washing the paper in water from the well of Zamzam in Mecca, and then drinking the water under the watchful eye of a sheikh.

Somali babies often have black mesh tied around their ankles and wrists which hold bitter-smelling herbs to keep away the jinn. Mothers draw charcoal lines across babies’ eyebrows, giving them a dark black unibrow to keep jinn from being jealous of a cute baby and harming it. And it keeps people from complimenting the baby, which would also draw the unwanted attention of the mischievous devils. When someone in the house is sick, a family member will make popcorn and coffee and set it on a tray, then slide the tray under the bed and wait for the jinn to be satiated.

Somali herder. Photograph by Eric Lafforgue. Used by permission.

These aren’t considered magical ideas, and they aren’t considered “folk Islam” in the modern theological sense of orthodoxy and syncretism. They are part of the lived religious practices of my Somali friends, who consider themselves faithful and devout Muslims. They live in a world filled with the unexplainable, from miraculous healings to fortune-telling dreams to inexplicable diseases. They also live in a world of profound and treasured convictions about God and how to honor God.

There are underlying questions, though, that hover next to the conviction that angels and devils are real, active, and involved in our lives. Is God as active and involved? Where is God when pain crashes into our lives? Is God close or distant? Knowable and knowing, or obscure and shrouded in mystery? Does God care about us, even while we marvel at the action of God in the world?

I was asking the same questions as my Muslim friends. When the seven-year-old sister of a member of my running club died suddenly, was God close? When my husband’s language tutor died from a curable kidney infection, did God care? When war broke out across the border in Ethiopia and sexual violence became routine, where did the angels go? It felt absurd that humans could live in a world filled with angels and still treat each other so cruelly. I struggled, alongside my Somali friends, to hold such wonder and horror at the same time.

Amina visited her sister Zaynab (not their real names) in the hospital the night before she died. No one knew what was wrong with her. Someone suggested she was poisoned. But by what? Or whom? She was feverish and barely coherent. Did she have AIDS? Tuberculosis? A rare form of malaria undetectable by the available tests?

“I see angels,” she whispered to Amina.

Amina held her thin, damp hand and wondered if she saw demons, not angels. What did they want with her beloved sister? Amina and Zaynab were now young adults, so close in age that people had thought they were twins when they were younger. They had been partners in crime back then. Zaynab would distract vendors while Amina swiped bananas. Together, they picked through the shoes left outside the mosque on Fridays to find each other the best pair, or stretched a string across the road to trip students on the way to school.

Amina didn’t like how Zaynab was talking about these ephemeral angels. Mysterious beings made of light that no one else could see. She didn’t like it, but she believed her, and they scared her. The pallor of her skin and the ragged catch in her throat as she struggled to breathe scared her too.

Zaynab hadn’t wanted her siblings to come to the hospital. She said she had plenty of visitors, people in shining clothes, beautiful and clean, who claimed to be her true brothers and sisters. Of course, Amina had come to see her every minute she could. She watched her grow weaker. At the same time, she sensed Zaynab was at peace, though it was a strange peace because her body and mind were failing. One could credit the food the family brought, except she barely touched it. One could credit the rest, the time in quiet and repose, which she would never find at their chaotic home. Amina didn’t want to credit the shining creatures floating above Zaynab’s bed.

After Zaynab died, Amina’s grief manifested as rage, and she directed that rage at God. Zaynab had said the angels she saw told her God loved her, and that God loved Amina too. Amina hated Zaynab saying that. If God loved them, why did God let Zaynab die and leave her to suffocate in grief? If God loved them, why did their relatives beat her? If God loved them, why did their father insist on appeasing spirits by sacrificing sheep they couldn’t afford while Amina and her siblings went to bed crying from hunger?

There was a time when Amina hadn’t believed in God at all, let alone a loving God. Being born Somali meant being born a Muslim; God had been part of her worldview from early childhood. The first words whispered into an infant’s ears were the shahada, the Muslim creed, and her earliest memories were of the call to prayer, of relatives prostrate on their rugs, of the name of God on the lips of everyone around her. But being a Muslim didn’t mean much to Amina personally; she didn’t know God or experience God as loving. For her, religion was ritual and identity, community belonging and ethical living. There was no way for Amina to not be a Muslim. She hadn’t chosen another path or another religion. Technically, then, she was a Muslim, but it wasn’t a meaningful faith to her. When she thought about God and faith at all, she mostly just felt empty.

Amina didn’t believe in the power of fingernail clippings or the blood of sheep and goats. She didn’t believe in anything, and Zaynab’s death hardened her unbelief. Now, she was more explicit about her lack of faith. The problem with losing even the sliver of a sense she’d once had of being tethered to a benevolent, if absent, God was that fear replaced it.

Where her sister had seen angels, Amina started to see dark beasts. She didn’t know what to call them. They were more sinister than jinn. They hovered in corners of her bedroom at night and waited for her outside the bathroom.

Somali woman. Photograph by Eric Lafforgue. Used by permission.

At work, Amina met a kind woman who seemed to sense her fear and pain. Slowly, they developed a guarded friendship. Guarded from Amina’s side, at least. She didn’t trust or open up easily, but was intrigued by this woman who exuded a gentle confidence unlike the nervous pride Amina presented. This woman talked a lot about Jesus and seemed fearless. Eventually, Amina summoned the courage to ask this new friend if she ever saw dark beasts in the bathroom or hovering on the rooftop or crouching in corners. “I don’t,” the woman said. “You should ask Jesus to protect you.”

Ridiculous, Amina thought. But the next time the need to go to the bathroom gripped her in the middle of the night, Amina thought about Jesus. She didn’t pray, didn’t ask for protection, just thought about Jesus. She got up and crept to the bathroom with her eyes squeezed almost all the way shut. The lights were out from another power cut, but a golden sliver shone out from under the door. Amina nudged the door open. The sliver didn’t illuminate the entire bathroom, but Amina could open her eyes a bit. She quickly scanned the room for beasts. Nothing.

A few weeks later, another power cut sent Amina to her rooftop to sleep, hoping to catch the slightest breeze as a break from the relentless heat. She crept up the stairs, holding tight to the aluminum banister, afraid she would encounter a beast on the roof. She pushed the rooftop door open with her shoulder and blinked from the sudden brilliance.

Glowing beings, taller than any human she’d ever met, stood one at each corner. They cast a light, illuminating the entire rooftop but nothing beyond it. Amina gasped. She couldn’t see them clearly, only the light bursting from their bodies. Instantly, her fear vanished. She curled up on a thin foam mattress and fell asleep.

Her sleep was turbulent and filled with dreams. Glowing beings and dark beasts flitted around her and Amina felt frantic, running from one terror after another. Then a woman appeared, and fear flooded through Amina’s body. It was Dhegdheer, the cannibal woman of Somali folklore. She had one large ear and huge feet, enabling her to hear children from far away and to hunt them down quickly. When Dhegdheer caught someone, she gobbled them up. The woman began to chase Amina. Amina ran. She ran so fast and far her feet began to bleed. She ran all over the city and eventually collapsed, shivering from fear and exhaustion.

She could hear Dhegdheer approach, her feet thudding against the stony ground. Amina dropped to her knees. She was tired. Tired of running. Tired of being afraid. Tired of being angry. Let her eat me, she thought. Then I can rest.

Suddenly, a man appeared. He looked like a Somali shepherd but was dressed all in white. He had a staff, leather sandals, and a goat’s milk bag slung over one shoulder.

“Stop running, Amina,” the man said.

How did he know her name?

“Come to me. I will give you rest. You are safe.”

“But Dhegdheer will eat me,” Amina said.

“Where is Dhegdheer now?”

Amina looked behind her and the woman had disappeared. Instead, there was a flock of sheep. He must be a very good shepherd to keep so many sheep so clean, so clearly well-fed and safe, even from this wicked woman.

“Do you want to be one of my sheep, Amina?”

Amina woke up.

The call to prayer sounded from the mosque nearby. She heard sounds of the neighborhood waking up; the honking horn of the bread delivery truck, the neighbor’s goats and sheep, a rooster, children shouting. The shining beings were gone from the corners of the rooftop. Amina never saw them again. She also never saw the dark beasts or Dhegdheer again. She did meet the shepherd again, in several more dreams.

When people ask my husband, Tom, why he follows Jesus, he tells them about a dream he had when he was twenty years old, before we were married. When he decided to follow Jesus, Tom prayed that God would not allow him to shut the door on faith. He then continued to live the same way he had been before, with little, if any, transformation. One night he dreamed that he was trying to shut a door behind him, but it wouldn’t shut. He kept slamming it and slamming it, to no avail. He turned around to see what was blocking the door and there was Jesus, absorbing blow after blow with his body. Tom believes the dream was God speaking directly to him and when I hear him recount the dream, I think two things.

First, really? Was it really God speaking directly to a twenty-year-old Catholic aerospace engineering student at the University of Minnesota? Or was it indigestion? One beer too many? His overactive imagination? How did he know it was God, and how did he know it was personal, and how did he know what it meant?

Second, why not me? I agree with my husband’s interpretation of the dream, both what the message was and that it was God speaking. I watched his life transform after that experience, and he has not wavered from the initial conviction that he was supposed to follow Jesus in word and deed. But if God speaks through dreams and visions, why haven’t I experienced dreams and visions? It is a selfish question, and theologically limiting, because it tempts me toward skepticism.

Was my husband’s dream God speaking? Job 33:14–17 says:

For God speaks in one way
and in two, though people do not perceive it.
In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on mortals,
while they slumber on their beds,
then he opens their ears
and terrifies them with warnings,
that he may turn them aside from their deeds
and keep them from pride.

If I say that God doesn’t speak this way because God doesn’t speak to me this way, or that God doesn’t do miracles because I have not experienced miracles, I am forcing God into the limitations of my life. I am saying God’s abilities end at my ability to perceive.

When I first met Amina, she hadn’t yet met the good shepherd. She was warm and cordial, but I also sensed a restraint. Her smile flitted away quickly, and her eyes focused somewhere above my head when we spoke. I assumed she was either reserved or distracted and I was wrong about both. What I took for shyness was grief: her sister had died recently, and I didn’t know. What I took as a zealous focus on her task and avoidance of conversation was a pervasive fear that had seeped into her since her sister died.

As we grew to know and trust each other, Amina slowly shared pieces of her story. As with my husband, I watched her transformation over time. It took five years for Amina’s grief to soften and her fear to transform into faith. Comforting words from a coworker may have opened a door, but it also took visions, dreams, a touch of the miraculous. I have learned that faith is not only the assurance of what we cannot see but the assurance of the good timing of what we cannot see, and the assurance that others see what we cannot see. In this way, we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses and faith is bolstered by what the community shares.

The dreams and visions of my husband and Amina are not for them alone. They are for the whole body of Christ. As I learn to welcome the stories of others into my life as part of God’s work in the wide, miraculous world, I am relearning how to wonder, to not insist on the literal and tangible. I am stubbing my toes on angels. God does speak, now in one way, and now in another. Do you not perceive it?