She was right. The woman was as alone as Maxine, and was delighted to begin attending church again when we provided her with a ride. We communicated by notes, and my wife, Judi, learned and taught our members the basic hand motions for the ABC’s of sign language for rudimentary communication. As I manuscript my sermons, our deaf visitor was able to follow along. She sat on the back row with another of my members (who had been a prostitute in her youth, though that is another story) who pointed to the place on the extra copy of the sermon I ran off for her, so our deaf visitor could follow along with the rest of us.

This went on for some months.

Then one day when I arrived at the facility to visit Maxine, her adopted “son”, a young man with one leg who was quite a good golfer, saw me coming down the hall toward her room. First time I’d seen him coming down the hall on one leg and two crutches, I blurted, “Hey, that’s no fair! You’ve got three legs and I’ve only got two.” Fortunately, he had a sense of humor. We’d been friends since. He looked worried.  “Maxine is very sick,” he said. ”She’s in the hospital. I came in from golf yesterday afternoon and found her on the floor. They took her away. Can you go and see her?”

So I did. Maxine was on a ventilator, with tubes in her arms, and her vitals beeping and blinking on the monitor in the intensive care unit. She was extremely ill, but still awake. I took her hand and said, “Maxine, this is Pastor Skip.” She nodded her greeting around the ventilator as she struggled to breath. I said, “You asked me a while back why God still kept you alive. Well, I baptized your next door neighbor last Sabbath. She’s renewed her covenant with God and with His people.”

Maxine glowed like a light bulb, beaming for joy. She died the next morning.