Patricia Gallagher

Some people say that I tried to pin the world together, one angel pin at a time. What I was really trying to do was pin my own family back together, one prayer at a time. A “team of angels”? Where did the thought even come from?

I began the Send a Team of Angels to Help Movement quite by accident (or was it Providence?) in 1998. During the months prior to my husband’s suicide attempt, I wrote poems. I sat in a church or in my living room scribbling my poems on napkins and scraps of paper. I also kept a notebook in my car, in case I was inspired while driving.

I jotted my thoughts and worries down and rhymed the words into verses, sometimes while watching my kids at sporting events, or sitting in a doctor’s office. That year, I filled several Dollar Store notebooks. I didn’t know much about the computer, so everything was the old- fashioned way, longhand. I called them Team of Angels poems.

I crafted little angel pins from materials I purchased at the craft store. I attached the homemade-on-the kitchen-table angel pins to pieces of cardboard, bearing my poem. Writing the poems and making hundreds of the little pins was my way of coping, with the uncertainty of my own life.

The verses of the poems were little prayers. The first poem was titled A Team of Angels for the Overwhelmed, which aptly described my feelings. I then added hundreds of others such as A Team of Angels for a Troubled Loved One, A Team of Angels for Taking One Day at a Time, A Team of Angels for Depression and A Team of Angels to Protect My Loved Ones. They expressed the confusion and despair in my own life, the anguish of a frightened wife and mother, dealing with a husband suffering with depression.

I never had any intention of “mom’s little angel pins” becoming a ministry or business. Over 100,000 of my Team of Angels pins have traveled worldwide.

>>Visit the Team of Angels Website