{"id":1262,"date":"2016-06-08T01:45:30","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T05:45:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/wp\/?p=1262"},"modified":"2016-06-08T13:58:17","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T17:58:17","slug":"tom-fear-not-your-prayer-is-heard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/2016\/06\/08\/tom-fear-not-your-prayer-is-heard\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom: Fear Not, Your Prayer is Heard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thomas Morra’s tattoo of the angel Gabriel was done by Dave Peavy of Federal Hill Tattoo<\/a>. We had just around 15 minutes to do our photo shoot, and, yet, somehow, shot after shot worked out for us. I’m always thinking, “i don’t quite know where it comes from, how it all comes together.” The story behind Tom’s tattoo is of the mystery of resources hidden from plain sight. He begins<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

It was May of 2010, and I was sick as a dog. I had been down with bronchitis for 5 weeks, in and out of work, barely able to function, barely able to sleep. At just about 40 years old, I\u00a0had never really been sick before… Maybe a one day flu a couple times, so I had no idea what this was, other than X rays with\u00a0spots all over\u00a0my lungs, horrible chest pain\u00a0and the diagnosis of ‘bronchitis.’ No medicine or herbal remedies worked; I honestly thought it was something worse that the doctors\u00a0were missing.
\n
\nAs the illness was coming up on six weeks, one night (morning) at around 3AM, I lay awake\u00a0in bed, as I did pretty much every night. Completely depressed, thinking I was going to die,\u00a0contemplating nothing,\u00a0as one does when they are awake at 3AM. It’s hard to say how it started, but I felt and perceived a black sheet being pulled off of me, maybe out of me… It was being slowly and methodically\u00a0pulled up and away\u00a0to a vanishing point just out of my view.\u00a0I\u00a0swear it was just like the scene in ‘Ghost’ with Patrick Swayze where the evil\u00a0spirits get yanked off\u00a0into the shadows. No shit.<\/p>\n

Anyway, at the ‘vanishing point’ where this black stuff disappeared, I could see this\u00a0really angelic\u00a0face, lit up and\u00a0framed by a delicate, complex pattern. It was a youngish man’s face with long hair, sort of androgynous.\u00a0I know I said it was just\u00a0out of my view, but somehow I could still see it. I couldn’t move or adjust my view, but I could see it.\u00a0In my head I simply heard one word. Gabriel. I was completely awake for this whole experience, just frozen there in bed. It was very strange. At some point,\u00a0I must have fallen asleep after that, and when I woke in the morning I was no longer sick. I had awoken completely healthy.\u00a0I felt like a kid again. I was elated.<\/p>\n

In full disclosure, I was raised Catholic, but basically kicking and screaming\u00a0under protest. I do not\u00a0consider myself Catholic by any means.\u00a0Although I knew that Gabriel\u00a0was a saint or an\u00a0angel or something, I really\u00a0had no idea who he\u00a0was or what his deal was. I didn’t say anything to my wife at first, but after I got it a little straighter in my head I asked her if she knew anything about Gabriel. Nope. So I googled him.<\/p>\n

What I found totally blew me away. This basically sums up the first thing I found about him that morning:<\/p>\n

“The Archangel Gabriel will come to the aid of the living when they are in need and\u00a0it is not their time to leave the earth. He communicates without speaking, and he is\u00a0the only Archangel that will come to one’s aid without being summoned.”<\/p>\n

So, yeah. I have a Guardian Angel. Pretty cool, huh?<\/p>\n

The tattoo design is a photograph of a statue that stands in Budapest, Hungary in a place called Hero Square.\"Gabriel<\/p>\n

\"Tom32_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom30_w\" <\/a> <\/div>
\"Tom24_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom22_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom20_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom8_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom7_w\" <\/a> <\/div>
\"Tom6_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom2_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom18_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom1_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom5_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom14_w\" <\/a> <\/div>
\"Tom12_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"Tom11_w\" <\/a> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thomas Morra’s tattoo of the angel Gabriel was done by Dave Peavy of Federal Hill Tattoo. We had just around 15 minutes to do our photo shoot, and, yet, somehow, shot after shot worked out for us. I’m always thinking, “i don’t quite know where it comes from, how it all comes together.” The story […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1249,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/Tom20_w.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6wDJO-km","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1262"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1266,"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1262\/revisions\/1266"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tattoomacro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}