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They facilitate the flow of ideas and connections and signs among others, sometimes just by being in the right place at the right time, sometimes by bringing their unique skills and gifts to a certain situation. Just as the Other Side sends us all kinds of signs and messages, sometimes the Other Side sends these light workers into our lives.
Who are these light workers?
They are us.
Each of us has the potential to be a light worker. We can all be used by the Other Side to make things happen for others, and we often are, even if we’re none the wiser about it.
There are some people, though, who seem to have an advanced ability to play this role. People who always seem to be in the right place at the right time to play a part for others. They function like old-time telephone operators, sitting at switchboards and slotting phone plugs into phone jacks and making connections happen! They are souls that have entered into a spiritual contract with the Other Side—unbeknownst to them—to do the Other Side’s bidding.
They are what I call connectors.
Let me tell you about Jill, a friend who is one of the most magical connectors I know.
Jill is one of those special people who is very comfortable in her own skin. She is kind and quirky and funny and completely open to the world and all its possibilities. When she was twenty-five, she met an Indian guru and had a spiritual awakening. The guru gave her a meditation practice, and Jill went on to travel throughout India having experiences that challenged her notions of how the world works. “I felt my heart opening up and I felt the limits of time and space expanding,” Jill says. “I was open to new dimensions of reality.”
Eventually, Jill’s friends began noticing that wonderfully strange things seemed to happen when they were with her.
For instance, one of her good friends recently lost her husband.
Before he crossed, her friend’s husband had been reading a book
called Just Kids by the iconic singer Patti Smith. “So my friend decided that she wanted to meet Patti Smith,” Jill says. “She believed meeting Patti Smith would be a sign from her husband.”
Not too much later, they took an Amtrak train from D.C. to New York—it was her friend’s first trip since her husband’s passing. “All of a sudden she came up to me on the train, shaking,” Jill remembers.
“She said, ‘Patti Smith is on this train.’ I said, ‘You’re hallucinating.’ ” But Patti Smith was on the train, and Jill and her friend got up the nerve to approach her. “I ended up explaining the whole story and told her, ‘You are my friend’s sign,’ ” Jill says. “And Patti Smith said, ‘I am so happy to be her sign!’ ”
“I don’t know why,” Jill’s friend told her, “but whenever we get together, signs come.”
When another friend’s father, who was a well-known actor, passed away, Jill was there to help her through the grieving process.
“I noticed all these weird things started happening, with TVs and phones and electronics,” Jill says. “I told Susie, ‘This is your father’s way of communicating with you.’ ”
Photos of her father that Susie hadn’t taken began popping up on Susie’s cellphone. When Susie and six friends gathered in her home to reminisce about her father, the windows inexplicably rattled whenever his name came up, then stopped when the conversation was about something else. The song “I Will Survive” kept playing on Susie’s car radio. Her cellphone’s autocorrect kept changing “does” to
“dies” and the name “Alita” to “aorta,” which made her think of her father, who died of a heart condition.
“All of this weird stuff just kept happening,” Jill says. “I told her to start keeping a list, because this was her dad trying to connect.”
Jill drove Susie to her father’s funeral, but they got lost on the way back. They drove down unfamiliar streets and finally stopped so they could figure out where they were. They found a street sign—and the name of the street was Susie’s father’s last name.
“It was very comforting for us both,” Jill says. “I’d say, ‘You are getting these signs!’ I just felt like I knew what they were, and when
you know something, you know it. People can believe what they want, but beliefs don’t matter as much as experiences do. And all of these things that were happening were direct experiences of connection. They were real.”
Jill’s friends began to describe her uncanny ability to make signs happen around her. They called it manifesting—as in, Jill manifested Patti Smith for her friend. Jill seems to invite vivid, powerful signs from the Other Side for those around her.
Jill’s personal spiritual journey has changed the way she sees the world and made her an ideal accomplice for the Other Side. Her intense meditative experiences, she says, “have allowed me to have different kinds of relationships with people who have passed on. And because of that, I do not see death as an end. I always say, when a good friend is traveling somewhere far away and I feel sad that I can’t physically interact with them, that I don’t have their physical presence. And that’s what I feel death is like. It’s like the people we love aren’t gone forever, they’re just away somewhere far away. Like Thailand!”
Jill devotes a great deal of energy to activism and is a powerful champion for social justice, sustainable development, and education for all. As a friend of hers says, “Jill has tapped into her life’s purpose, and through her work she lives in this sweet spot of being a connector, moving forces toward the greater good of humanity. She thrives in all of these worlds, and the connections between them come naturally and effortlessly for her. Synchronicity has become the currency of her life.”
Here’s just one example of how that synchronicity works:
Recently, Jill got a call from a friend involved with a human rights organization. The group had had a really challenging year financially, and they were struggling to meet their operating budget when an urgent humanitarian situation arose. The situation needed their immediate help. The friend asked Jill if she knew anyone who might be willing to step up to help them generate resources. Jill told her friend, “Let me see what I can do.” And then, as Jill puts it, “I kind of sent the message out to the universe.”
Within just a few hours, Jill got a phone call from a different friend who wanted to know what they could do to make an immediate impact and help children in need.
“As a matter of fact,” Jill said, “I may have just the place.”
Jill made the connection, and within just a couple of days an airplane was hurtling through the skies, delivering essential supplies to some very grateful children.
When I heard that story, I marveled at how quickly the universe used Jill to make something magical happen. She is a true light worker, contracted by the Other Side to make vital connections here on earth.
And yet, aside from her heightened sense of spirituality, Jill doesn’t possess any superpower that is unique to her.
On the contrary, the abilities that make her such a powerful connector are abilities that we all possess.
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Just as we can all receive signs and messages from our Teams of Light, we can all be connectors for the Other Side.
Sometimes—as is the case with Jill—we will be aware that we are serving as a kind of conduit for signs and messages. But many times, we won’t be aware of it—it will just happen. All our paths extend beyond our own lives and intersect with other people’s life paths, creating endless opportunities for us to play meaningful roles in the journeys of others. Our lives aren’t just about us—they are also about our connections to other people.
We need to understand that we can meaningfully affect others’
lives by simple gestures—a smile for a stranger can have far-ranging consequences. I recently read a story about a woman who stopped by a Dunkin’ Donuts, saw a homeless man, bought him a cup of coffee, and sat and talked with him for five minutes. That was it—a cup of coffee and five minutes.
She then went to place an order to go, and as she was getting ready to leave, the homeless man pushed a small, crumpled note into her hand, then walked out. The note said he’d been planning to kill himself that day, but their brief conversation—a simple acknowledgment of his existence and his worth as a human being—
had changed everything for him, and kept him alive. I have heard many, many other stories like that. Stories about how simple acts of kindness can have consequences far beyond what we can imagine. A smile, a word, a gesture, a gift, can change everything.
And, yes, they can save a life, if they haven’t already.
We cross into one another’s paths for different reasons. If we approach these moments of connection with open hearts and minds
—with the understanding that what we say and do may have an exponentially larger impact on someone’s life path than we can even know—we will better honor our roles as connectors for the Other Side.
It has been said that people cross our paths and enter our lives as either a blessing or a lesson. Often, it is both. Either they have something to teach us, or we have something to teach them, or, at best, we have something to teach each other. That is how this great chain of light and interconnection works.
And here is one of the most beautiful things about signs and messages: The Other Side needs our help to make them strong and powerful. Our Teams of Light need us to be aware and open and receptive, not just for our own signs, but also to help facilitate signs for other people. We are meant to live lives of interconnectedness—
put simply, we are all in this together.
“We belong to each other,” as Mother Teresa said.
My friend Jill is a remarkable expression of this. But the truth is that we can all be light workers and connectors. The universe is ready to use every one of us. We just have to be ready to join one another’s Teams of Light.
Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.
—ANATOLE FRANCE