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what I did or how I perceived the world. Jake had appeared in my life on the heels of my leaving the church after having become a born-again Christian. I had been raised mostly Lutheran with a sprinkling of Pentecostal whenever my mom got bored of singing tired hymns at our Lutheran church. When she was in the mood for a foot-stomping, Bible-thumping, Holy Ghost–filled service, she had dragged me to whatever Pentecostal or Baptist church she could find.
    My father, however, being more sedate and perhaps a bit more conservative, had avoided the loud, high-octane, fashion-driven services and relegated himself to the silence and serenity of his church of forty years. With my diverse upbringing serving as the foundation for becoming born-again, I can’t say that I was ripe for paranormal activity to return to my life. According to Christianity, interacting with such things as ghosts was not only seen as taboo, but was considered something that could very well jeopardize one’s salvation. Ghosts and things such as spirit guides were considered harbingers of evil, messengers of Satan. And depending on whom you spoke to, angels fell into that category as well, since the belief was that one need only speak to Jesus and God.
    My real-life experiences would seriously challenge those beliefs. I struggled and warred with them, so much so that it nearly led me to suicide … twice . I was so tormented and confused that I wanted to throw everything out of my life, leave college, and become a Catholic nun. I thought that if I could sequester myself in a sacred place of worship and live every waking hour on holy ground, then the ghosts, premonitions, and everything else considered unholy would stop.
    Bouncing between belief and non-belief—with the discovery of non-Christian religions, the guilt of pondering their validity, and my desire to learn more about them—was a vicious cycle of psychological and emotional anguish that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy … if I had one. After hours of kneeling in tear-soaked prayer and begging for God to make sense of the insanity that was my spiritual life, I slowly came to the realization that Jake wasn’t an agent of evil, nor were the angels. Years of fighting against my belief in them ceased when I took on Archangel Gabriel—the angel of the Annunciation himself—and lost.
    A Growing Acceptance
    Jake had seen me through the death of my father and then my mother four years later. I wasn’t even thirty and here I was alone in the world. Completely alone. As the only child of parents who had no close ties to their own siblings and distant relatives, I had no family to turn to when they left me.
    Blessedly, in my continued quest for spiritual understanding—a quest that had been an obsession of mine from the cradle—I found family I didn’t know I had.
    One Saturday afternoon, I was sitting in a local diner trying to finish a screenwriting project for film school. Thanks to Jake, I had acquired a near-obsessive passion for the craft, but I was exhausted. The diner was open twenty-four hours a day, and I had been there all night and all morning, which wasn’t unusual for me. The lunch crowd was starting to fill the tables. With Mom and Dad gone, the family home seemed cold and unwelcoming, not to mention the last things I wanted to talk to were the resident ghosts that had haunted the house since we moved in when I was four.
    For months since I had begun film school while juggling a full-time, overbearing corporate job, the diner had become my home. I was subsisting on a mere four hours of sleep a night and eating all the wrong foods. But I really didn’t care. Being at the diner surrounded by the chatter of its patrons was infinitely better than sitting at home alone. Besides, I had befriended one of the waitresses there. She was the only staff member who didn’t seem to care if I rented one of her tables all night. I’d arrive around nine in the evening and hang out until her shift