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WHETHER ANGELS OR SAINTS, EVERY SINGLE DETAIL OF OUR LIVES IS UNDER THEIR WATCH

Intriguing it is how angels intervene in our lives and our families. They watch over entire households. Last December was an account of a mysterious stranger who knocked at a door in the middle of the night to alert a Virginia family of a fire.

The family "could have been trapped inside had a woman not knocked on her door at four a.m.," said the news item about "a mysterious woman" who "alerted Trecika Dunlap to a house fire."

After they were safe, the woman had vanished.

This is often reported too in car accidents: a mysterious, consoling person, perhaps holding the hand of the injured.

It is precisely how many angelic interventions occur.

Angels can help in human form, visibly -- or invisibly. "It's what I do," said one such other mysterious stranger who came at a critical moment.

"A couple of years ago there was a TV weather warning and I saw outside a growing storm," a woman named Elaine wrote us. "I was alone and the storm windows were not up yet and there was no way I could put them up because I was physically limited, for I had suffered from a stroke  a few years before.

"But I thought: I'll pray and somehow I would be able to do it. I was 84 at the time but at least I thought I could get the windows in the kitchen because it was so drafty there. At other times one of the men from my community would do this for me and he would have to push the windows from the outside to get them to fit tightly or one could see an opening from the inside and feel the air coming in.

"Well I put in the windows but couldn't get them to close no matter how much I prayed. Finally, I turned my back on them in disgust -- and suddenly in my head I heard a voice that said, 'ask your guardian angel,' and I angrily shouted that I already had!

"Behind me I heard a shhhhhing sound and I turned around and to my amazement the windows were now tightly shut.

When one looked at it closely, there was the outline of an angel playing a trumpet.

"I was leaving Halifax, Nova Scotia, in June of 1973, after turning down an invitation to renew my contract for another year with the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra," wrote Brian Taylor of Toronto. "My intent was to leave early in the morning, just after breakfast, for the trip to Toronto, but it just didn't happen that way. I ended up getting in my car after lunch, around 1:00 p.m. At 1:00 a.m. I was still behind the wheel, westbound, on the western side of New Brunswick. The road there was one lane each way. I felt three taps on my shoulder ... and I woke up.

"I knew that I had left Halifax alone -- that I hadn't stopped since dinner, that no one had got into the car with me. Still, I looked over my shoulder, and of course there was no one there. So I simply negotiated the curve -- about an 80-degree turn -- avoiding a sudden drop into a forest and only to see a man in the middle of the road in front of me, waving down the oncoming traffic.

"Behind him, there was a motorcycle accident all over the road. Even if I had gone around that curve in my sleep, I still would have ploughed my Volkswagen Beetle into the accident at highway speed."

Saints function similarly -- tapping us on the shoulder and raising a question:

Are some "angels" humans who are on the other side and helping us?

We certainly know that certain saints are unusually responsive -- especially St. Joseph.

Recalled a viewer who got into a serious accident on the way to meet her biological father (whose name is Joseph):

[resources: St. Joseph novena and The Holy Cloak]