The story of Mrs L
On the morning of January 9, 1972, as a senior in seminary, I took my first ominous step into the church where the elder at the door who greeted me prophetically summarized my future as a pastor in churches with the following words, “You have a funeral tomorrow.”
When I finished preaching the morning sermon and proceeded to emerge from the same door I had entered, the same elder again, not realizing he was speaking under the direction of the Holy Spirit and warning me just how serious this was going to be, reiterated his portend with emphasis when he announced, “You now have 2 funerals tomorrow.”
The full explanation of what the above came to mean will have to wait, but some of you who will read this already know.
There are 3 events from this small church that I will never forget. I have related these dramas to people many times. But I have never written them down as I am doing here. Here is the first one.
Although my baptism in a crematorium began on the first Sunday, little did I know that I was sitting in the front seat of an amusement park ride that had just reached the apex of its ascent up a steep incline and was just about to crest over the hump where I would be staring down into a vertical 17-year drop into a love-hate relationship with the pastorate.
The church that had called me was a small congregation of about 100 people just 4 miles northeast of Center City Philadelphia near the corner of G St. and Tioga in the Kensington section of the city. I have attached a picture of the church and parsonage as it is today. It looks the same as it did then. The parsonage did not have a shower, only a bathtub on the second floor, under which was a huge black hole that they had covered with a rug. There were no closets in which to hang clothes. The house had been built at a time when only hooks were installed on walls to hang clothes. The archaic kitchen looked just like it did in the 1920s with a porcelain sink that was surrounded by a cloth skirt to hide all the plumbing because there was no cabinet or shelves to store anything. The basement was a solid dirt floor with rock walls. They later came in and covered everything with concrete. It was a depressing living situation.
My salary was $100 a week. Most of the time in larger churches and denominations a pastor's salary will include a package of benefits such as salary, car expense, book allowance, paid vacation, pension contributions, medical, a parsonage or housing allowance etc. But this one did not. It was $100 a week plus the benefit of living in the manse. Because it was a struggling, independent congregation, Linda and I gave back $20 weekly as a contribution.
Kensington was primarily a working class Irish Catholic community in the city where the K& A Gang (the Irish mob) was founded at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny, the intersection in Kensington where the gang originally hung out. Kensington was a white community. Brick and frame row houses with flat roofs spread out for miles in every direction. Streets were extremely narrow; only one car could be parked in front of one house. Others had to be parked sometimes blocks from their homes. It always amazed me that people would buy brand new cars and park them in this demolition derby. There were no garages. Buses, police cars and fire engines blasting their sirens roared north less than 10 feet from our parsonage many times during the day. The population was lower class and dense. People lived on top of one another and could look down their street for blocks without obstruction since a line of row houses looked like a solid wall for an entire block and had no more than a 3-step stoop at their front door. It was a rough place; people were hard and on edge with jaws locked and ready to meet confrontation. There had been a long chronicle of anti-Catholic sentiment in this place. Part of that was due to the history of Irish Catholics being the most thoroughly stigmatized white men in America a century earlier in order to thwart their progress in the city. Another part came from the Irish reputation for drink. Kensington was saturated with drinking establishments. At one time, one seven-block area had 196 saloons. Tough, working class men frequenting bars made an explosive mix that was passed down to sons.
Lots of stuff was going on that was not so secret. Gossip columns in the local papers whispered in every edition about the hanky-panky going on in every neighborhood. The paper printed the first and last initials of the suspects and hinted at their alleged activity. At one point in its history, Kensington led the city in juvenile delinquency and was second in venereal diseases and tuberculosis. It was out there, and the Around The Town editor culled all he could from reporters who prowled the streets collecting that juicy news. Kensington was a petrie dish of human corruption where every moral variant lurked, festered, and infected its inhabitants.
The Catholic churches in Kensington had an iron grip on their people who were suspicious of Protestant preachers, especially any who tried to curry favor with the diocese' flock. Few people attended college or even could.
Today, Kensington is a hell-hole. Drugs and dope fiends dominate the area, primarily due to the influence of the K&A Gang and the Philadelphia crime family. Methamphetamine and other criminal enterprises like extortion, loan sharking, burglary, and high crime have devastated the neighborhoods along with rampant unemployment. In the 19th century, Kensington had been one of the most industrialized areas in the country with thousands of Irish workers employed. The Salvation Army had at one time established its national headquarters there. Now it is one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, dirty and unkempt, with abandoned and low-rent row houses in poor condition. Abandoned shells where machine works, textile, steel, and iron factories rattled are sprinkled all about. Our particular church was surrounded by enterprises that had gone out of business, railroad tracks (our church was about a mile from where the 2015 Amtrack derailment occurred when the train took a curve at 102 mph), bus lines, elevated trains, and empty lots twinkling with broken glass. The Hispanic population is now as large as the white, and the black folk, who were no where near then, are a good portion as well.
In this Kensington enclave was a couple that was attending our church. I probably would not have even known they were there if one late Sunday afternoon the husband had not called me and asked me to come to his house. I will call them Mr. and Mrs. L. Mr. L was a mild, squat little soul with an altitude of about 5’2” with glasses and a portly carcass. A brown, threadbare carpet covered his head. He always seemed to be covered with a suit and struck me as being hen-pecked. My impression was that he worked in an office.
Mrs. L could not have been more striking compared to Mr. L if she had tried. She was about 5'10", built like a stilt, and towered over her husband. . With a plain, gaunt face that drew her cheeks in, her countenance accentuated her pointed chin. Graying, thin hair that drooped like string from the top of her head framed her visage. Eyeglasses roosted on top of a prolonged nose that came to a point. For some reason, she always looked worried. Together, these two appeared totally mismatched. Regardless, a teenage daughter who would have to be a senior citizen today followed them around when they came to church.
They were only about two and a half blocks away from our parsonage, a 2-story, dilapidated row house which was right next door to the church. I drove over in my VW in less than 5 minutes and parked on the narrow street banked on both sides by brick row houses that were 12' wide and, in this neighborhood, fronted by a porches as wide as the house.
When I came in the door, facing me stood Mr. L in the dimly lit living room, which was the first room in the house followed by a dining room and kitchen that proceeded straight back to a thimble-sized concrete yard out the back door. The depth of the living room was no more than 10 feet. I looked at him, with his daughter standing near and silent, and he pointed to the sofa, which was backed up to the front window and porch from which I had come. On the sofa, stretched out like a corpse with her head on a pillow and her toes pointed north lay Mrs. L, motionless, with her entire length within the confines of the arms.
I asked Mr. L what happened and he said that earlier in the day Mrs L had lain prone on the couch and from that moment had become catatonic. She didn't move. She didn't say anything. She didn’t flinch, scratch, or make a noise. And no manner of stimulation or persuasiveness was able to alter this state.
Having gone through several years of Bible training, pastoral theology, practical training in a pastoral internship, and a lot of pretty wild experiences, this was the first time I had run into anything like this. Mr. L could not recall his wife like this before either. For some reason, I guess he thought I might know what to do.
I walked over to the sofa where Mrs. L lay and stood over her, peering into that blank expression on her face. I leaned down. Her glazed eyes were permanently open and unblinking as if she stared into deep space.
I said, "Mrs. L?"
No answer. I called a few more times. No response.
I put my hand forth and waved it above her head. Nothing. I snapped my fingers in front of her sharply and repeatedly. Not a twitch. She appeared to be dead. Mr. L said that he himself had performed the same useless gestures many times to no avail.
I was certainly perplexed and had no reference to which I could go for any idea of what to do. I was 26 at the time and this was one of those many times with virtually no experience that I felt totally inadequate to help these people. But in an uneducated community, it is very common for people to call their minister, no matter his age, to intervene as a professional and handle situations like this with aplomb.
My mind was racing on how to resolve this dilemma when a remote thought intruded. One of my professors, Dr. Jay Adams, at Westminster Seminary where I was still a student, had written a book on pastoral counseling called "Competent To Counsel." It so happened that he allowed me to sit in on his private counseling sessions as part of my preparation for the pastorate. He listened to the problems that Christian people brought to him and then applied Biblical principles to those problems. In just a matter of 3-4 weeks, I saw Adams use the Scriptures to alleviate difficulties in people's lives and marriages that had become habitual, destructive behavior for years.
Very simply, Adams believed that all human behavioral problems proceeded from the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden, or sin, and were resolved by a solid biblical and theological base rather than psychology or some other disciplines. The application of Biblical principles to those problems was the essence of Adam's skill and teaching. Sin manifests itself in many different ways besides the big sins found in the10 commandments. Just as Adam used fig leaves to cover his sin and guilt and hide from God in the Garden, following generations of Adam's race have devised a million different ways to cover up their sins and avoid facing and dealing with them. Some of these new fig leaf coverings become life-long habits and bizarre behaviors (that many people call mental illness) to hide behind and avoid responsibility. Confronting the individual, especially Christians, with Biblical responsibility to do what God requires is how to deal with these problems.
As I pondered Mrs L, I wondered if any of the principles of Biblical counseling and theology would have any effect in this case. If so, I couldn’t think of any. Though Adams seemed to have Biblical knowledge and wisdom that rectified many human problems, I could not imagine anything that even he might know would apply to Mrs L. But it was worth a try. Excusing myself to the kitchen, I called Adams.
Now Adams did not suffer fools gladly. He was a large, confident, very direct and confrontational, intimidating man that could make you look like and feel like a moron. He had this authoritative way about him, and I had seen him make others cower before his authority in counseling sessions. So when I got him on the phone and tried to explain to him what I had gotten into, he started in on me with this same manner because I had probably interrupted him.
But, he finally relented and intoned, "Go into where Mrs L is lying down and get up into her face. Tell her that if she does not get up off of that couch and start acting normal, taking responsibility as the wife of that house, and performing for her family what she is supposed to be doing that you are going to call the Nut House and have them come down there and take her away. When you have said that, describe for her what the inside of a Nut House is like. And make it bad. Real bad. Then go home."
When he stopped talking, I replied, "I have no idea what it's like in a Nut House. I have never been in one."
Adams said, "It doesn't matter. Make it up! Call me and let me know what happens." Then he hung up.
As I stood there alone in the back of Mr. L's house trying to recall exactly what Biblical principles Adams had just laid out, it all sounded crazy. It would never work. This woman was incommunicado. She could hear nothing. She could be in a coma. I was already into thinking what most other people would have thought. There is something wrong with her mentally and beyond my ability to treat it. She was going to need a mental health expert or psychiatrist with many years of specialized training in psychotherapy. She might even require hospitalization. They would prescribe drugs and medications, maybe even shock treatments. This looked like a tough case, and I could see Mrs L never being right again, suffering from a life of mental problems.
Nevertheless, I was going to do what Adams said. Maybe he knew something no one else did. So I went to the front of the house, strolled over to the davenport, and crouched down over the blank, dead face of Mrs L.
I felt like a fool as I slowly and forthrightly told her, "Mrs. L, here is what is going to happen. If you do not get up off this couch, your husband is going to call me, and I am going to call Byberry Hospital (a Philadelphia insane asylum that was a horror house in the 1940s) and tell them to come down here and get you. Let me tell you what they are going to do. I have been there many times and visited some of the inmates. Two men in a wagon are going to come in here with a straightjacket and strap you into it and carry you away, chained to the back of the wagon. They will put you into a white, padded-wall room with only a single light on. You will only be fed cornbread and water. All day and all night you will hear wailing and screaming people being ignored for days on end and scratching the walls with their fingernails, banging their heads against concrete barriers in desperation trying to get out, but they can't. If the doctors detect that you are not responding to them, they will hook up electrodes to your head and deliver volts of electricity to your brain to try to bring you around. Sometimes they have to do a lobotomy and scrape away most of the connections to the frontal lobes on your cortex and spinal cord, leaving patients with large surgical depressions and scars in their head and walking around like a Frankenstein..." On and on I went. I had no idea what I was talking about.
Had I heard someone say that to me, I would have sprung off of the sofa as if lightning and fire ants were coming up my pants. But not her. Nothing. Not one single reaction. Her eyes did not flutter or widen. Her mouth did not twitch. She didn’t look left or right or try to speak. She didn’t sigh or jerk or look terrified. She was irrevocably unfazed by my rhapsodizing. Had I not detected a shallow lifting of her chest when she breathed, I would have concluded that she had expired and, as in the murder movies, passed my hand over her lids to close them in finality.
I stood back up and turned to look at Mr. L and his daughter who stood there listening to me. It was now dark, and a low light silhouetted their forms. They didn’t say a word. As I turned to go out the door, I said to Mr. L, "If anything changes, call me."
Into my car I went and drove one half block to the corner. I turned left for 2 short blocks, turned left again, drove another block and a half and parked the car in front of our ancient row house. When I came in the door, the phone in the kitchen was ringing. When I picked up the phone, it was Mr. L. He said, "She's been healed."
When I finished preaching the morning sermon and proceeded to emerge from the same door I had entered, the same elder again, not realizing he was speaking under the direction of the Holy Spirit and warning me just how serious this was going to be, reiterated his portend with emphasis when he announced, “You now have 2 funerals tomorrow.”
The full explanation of what the above came to mean will have to wait, but some of you who will read this already know.
There are 3 events from this small church that I will never forget. I have related these dramas to people many times. But I have never written them down as I am doing here. Here is the first one.
Although my baptism in a crematorium began on the first Sunday, little did I know that I was sitting in the front seat of an amusement park ride that had just reached the apex of its ascent up a steep incline and was just about to crest over the hump where I would be staring down into a vertical 17-year drop into a love-hate relationship with the pastorate.
The church that had called me was a small congregation of about 100 people just 4 miles northeast of Center City Philadelphia near the corner of G St. and Tioga in the Kensington section of the city. I have attached a picture of the church and parsonage as it is today. It looks the same as it did then. The parsonage did not have a shower, only a bathtub on the second floor, under which was a huge black hole that they had covered with a rug. There were no closets in which to hang clothes. The house had been built at a time when only hooks were installed on walls to hang clothes. The archaic kitchen looked just like it did in the 1920s with a porcelain sink that was surrounded by a cloth skirt to hide all the plumbing because there was no cabinet or shelves to store anything. The basement was a solid dirt floor with rock walls. They later came in and covered everything with concrete. It was a depressing living situation.
My salary was $100 a week. Most of the time in larger churches and denominations a pastor's salary will include a package of benefits such as salary, car expense, book allowance, paid vacation, pension contributions, medical, a parsonage or housing allowance etc. But this one did not. It was $100 a week plus the benefit of living in the manse. Because it was a struggling, independent congregation, Linda and I gave back $20 weekly as a contribution.
Kensington was primarily a working class Irish Catholic community in the city where the K& A Gang (the Irish mob) was founded at the corner of Kensington and Allegheny, the intersection in Kensington where the gang originally hung out. Kensington was a white community. Brick and frame row houses with flat roofs spread out for miles in every direction. Streets were extremely narrow; only one car could be parked in front of one house. Others had to be parked sometimes blocks from their homes. It always amazed me that people would buy brand new cars and park them in this demolition derby. There were no garages. Buses, police cars and fire engines blasting their sirens roared north less than 10 feet from our parsonage many times during the day. The population was lower class and dense. People lived on top of one another and could look down their street for blocks without obstruction since a line of row houses looked like a solid wall for an entire block and had no more than a 3-step stoop at their front door. It was a rough place; people were hard and on edge with jaws locked and ready to meet confrontation. There had been a long chronicle of anti-Catholic sentiment in this place. Part of that was due to the history of Irish Catholics being the most thoroughly stigmatized white men in America a century earlier in order to thwart their progress in the city. Another part came from the Irish reputation for drink. Kensington was saturated with drinking establishments. At one time, one seven-block area had 196 saloons. Tough, working class men frequenting bars made an explosive mix that was passed down to sons.
Lots of stuff was going on that was not so secret. Gossip columns in the local papers whispered in every edition about the hanky-panky going on in every neighborhood. The paper printed the first and last initials of the suspects and hinted at their alleged activity. At one point in its history, Kensington led the city in juvenile delinquency and was second in venereal diseases and tuberculosis. It was out there, and the Around The Town editor culled all he could from reporters who prowled the streets collecting that juicy news. Kensington was a petrie dish of human corruption where every moral variant lurked, festered, and infected its inhabitants.
The Catholic churches in Kensington had an iron grip on their people who were suspicious of Protestant preachers, especially any who tried to curry favor with the diocese' flock. Few people attended college or even could.
Today, Kensington is a hell-hole. Drugs and dope fiends dominate the area, primarily due to the influence of the K&A Gang and the Philadelphia crime family. Methamphetamine and other criminal enterprises like extortion, loan sharking, burglary, and high crime have devastated the neighborhoods along with rampant unemployment. In the 19th century, Kensington had been one of the most industrialized areas in the country with thousands of Irish workers employed. The Salvation Army had at one time established its national headquarters there. Now it is one of the worst neighborhoods in Philadelphia, dirty and unkempt, with abandoned and low-rent row houses in poor condition. Abandoned shells where machine works, textile, steel, and iron factories rattled are sprinkled all about. Our particular church was surrounded by enterprises that had gone out of business, railroad tracks (our church was about a mile from where the 2015 Amtrack derailment occurred when the train took a curve at 102 mph), bus lines, elevated trains, and empty lots twinkling with broken glass. The Hispanic population is now as large as the white, and the black folk, who were no where near then, are a good portion as well.
In this Kensington enclave was a couple that was attending our church. I probably would not have even known they were there if one late Sunday afternoon the husband had not called me and asked me to come to his house. I will call them Mr. and Mrs. L. Mr. L was a mild, squat little soul with an altitude of about 5’2” with glasses and a portly carcass. A brown, threadbare carpet covered his head. He always seemed to be covered with a suit and struck me as being hen-pecked. My impression was that he worked in an office.
Mrs. L could not have been more striking compared to Mr. L if she had tried. She was about 5'10", built like a stilt, and towered over her husband. . With a plain, gaunt face that drew her cheeks in, her countenance accentuated her pointed chin. Graying, thin hair that drooped like string from the top of her head framed her visage. Eyeglasses roosted on top of a prolonged nose that came to a point. For some reason, she always looked worried. Together, these two appeared totally mismatched. Regardless, a teenage daughter who would have to be a senior citizen today followed them around when they came to church.
They were only about two and a half blocks away from our parsonage, a 2-story, dilapidated row house which was right next door to the church. I drove over in my VW in less than 5 minutes and parked on the narrow street banked on both sides by brick row houses that were 12' wide and, in this neighborhood, fronted by a porches as wide as the house.
When I came in the door, facing me stood Mr. L in the dimly lit living room, which was the first room in the house followed by a dining room and kitchen that proceeded straight back to a thimble-sized concrete yard out the back door. The depth of the living room was no more than 10 feet. I looked at him, with his daughter standing near and silent, and he pointed to the sofa, which was backed up to the front window and porch from which I had come. On the sofa, stretched out like a corpse with her head on a pillow and her toes pointed north lay Mrs. L, motionless, with her entire length within the confines of the arms.
I asked Mr. L what happened and he said that earlier in the day Mrs L had lain prone on the couch and from that moment had become catatonic. She didn't move. She didn't say anything. She didn’t flinch, scratch, or make a noise. And no manner of stimulation or persuasiveness was able to alter this state.
Having gone through several years of Bible training, pastoral theology, practical training in a pastoral internship, and a lot of pretty wild experiences, this was the first time I had run into anything like this. Mr. L could not recall his wife like this before either. For some reason, I guess he thought I might know what to do.
I walked over to the sofa where Mrs. L lay and stood over her, peering into that blank expression on her face. I leaned down. Her glazed eyes were permanently open and unblinking as if she stared into deep space.
I said, "Mrs. L?"
No answer. I called a few more times. No response.
I put my hand forth and waved it above her head. Nothing. I snapped my fingers in front of her sharply and repeatedly. Not a twitch. She appeared to be dead. Mr. L said that he himself had performed the same useless gestures many times to no avail.
I was certainly perplexed and had no reference to which I could go for any idea of what to do. I was 26 at the time and this was one of those many times with virtually no experience that I felt totally inadequate to help these people. But in an uneducated community, it is very common for people to call their minister, no matter his age, to intervene as a professional and handle situations like this with aplomb.
My mind was racing on how to resolve this dilemma when a remote thought intruded. One of my professors, Dr. Jay Adams, at Westminster Seminary where I was still a student, had written a book on pastoral counseling called "Competent To Counsel." It so happened that he allowed me to sit in on his private counseling sessions as part of my preparation for the pastorate. He listened to the problems that Christian people brought to him and then applied Biblical principles to those problems. In just a matter of 3-4 weeks, I saw Adams use the Scriptures to alleviate difficulties in people's lives and marriages that had become habitual, destructive behavior for years.
Very simply, Adams believed that all human behavioral problems proceeded from the Fall of man in the Garden of Eden, or sin, and were resolved by a solid biblical and theological base rather than psychology or some other disciplines. The application of Biblical principles to those problems was the essence of Adam's skill and teaching. Sin manifests itself in many different ways besides the big sins found in the10 commandments. Just as Adam used fig leaves to cover his sin and guilt and hide from God in the Garden, following generations of Adam's race have devised a million different ways to cover up their sins and avoid facing and dealing with them. Some of these new fig leaf coverings become life-long habits and bizarre behaviors (that many people call mental illness) to hide behind and avoid responsibility. Confronting the individual, especially Christians, with Biblical responsibility to do what God requires is how to deal with these problems.
As I pondered Mrs L, I wondered if any of the principles of Biblical counseling and theology would have any effect in this case. If so, I couldn’t think of any. Though Adams seemed to have Biblical knowledge and wisdom that rectified many human problems, I could not imagine anything that even he might know would apply to Mrs L. But it was worth a try. Excusing myself to the kitchen, I called Adams.
Now Adams did not suffer fools gladly. He was a large, confident, very direct and confrontational, intimidating man that could make you look like and feel like a moron. He had this authoritative way about him, and I had seen him make others cower before his authority in counseling sessions. So when I got him on the phone and tried to explain to him what I had gotten into, he started in on me with this same manner because I had probably interrupted him.
But, he finally relented and intoned, "Go into where Mrs L is lying down and get up into her face. Tell her that if she does not get up off of that couch and start acting normal, taking responsibility as the wife of that house, and performing for her family what she is supposed to be doing that you are going to call the Nut House and have them come down there and take her away. When you have said that, describe for her what the inside of a Nut House is like. And make it bad. Real bad. Then go home."
When he stopped talking, I replied, "I have no idea what it's like in a Nut House. I have never been in one."
Adams said, "It doesn't matter. Make it up! Call me and let me know what happens." Then he hung up.
As I stood there alone in the back of Mr. L's house trying to recall exactly what Biblical principles Adams had just laid out, it all sounded crazy. It would never work. This woman was incommunicado. She could hear nothing. She could be in a coma. I was already into thinking what most other people would have thought. There is something wrong with her mentally and beyond my ability to treat it. She was going to need a mental health expert or psychiatrist with many years of specialized training in psychotherapy. She might even require hospitalization. They would prescribe drugs and medications, maybe even shock treatments. This looked like a tough case, and I could see Mrs L never being right again, suffering from a life of mental problems.
Nevertheless, I was going to do what Adams said. Maybe he knew something no one else did. So I went to the front of the house, strolled over to the davenport, and crouched down over the blank, dead face of Mrs L.
I felt like a fool as I slowly and forthrightly told her, "Mrs. L, here is what is going to happen. If you do not get up off this couch, your husband is going to call me, and I am going to call Byberry Hospital (a Philadelphia insane asylum that was a horror house in the 1940s) and tell them to come down here and get you. Let me tell you what they are going to do. I have been there many times and visited some of the inmates. Two men in a wagon are going to come in here with a straightjacket and strap you into it and carry you away, chained to the back of the wagon. They will put you into a white, padded-wall room with only a single light on. You will only be fed cornbread and water. All day and all night you will hear wailing and screaming people being ignored for days on end and scratching the walls with their fingernails, banging their heads against concrete barriers in desperation trying to get out, but they can't. If the doctors detect that you are not responding to them, they will hook up electrodes to your head and deliver volts of electricity to your brain to try to bring you around. Sometimes they have to do a lobotomy and scrape away most of the connections to the frontal lobes on your cortex and spinal cord, leaving patients with large surgical depressions and scars in their head and walking around like a Frankenstein..." On and on I went. I had no idea what I was talking about.
Had I heard someone say that to me, I would have sprung off of the sofa as if lightning and fire ants were coming up my pants. But not her. Nothing. Not one single reaction. Her eyes did not flutter or widen. Her mouth did not twitch. She didn’t look left or right or try to speak. She didn’t sigh or jerk or look terrified. She was irrevocably unfazed by my rhapsodizing. Had I not detected a shallow lifting of her chest when she breathed, I would have concluded that she had expired and, as in the murder movies, passed my hand over her lids to close them in finality.
I stood back up and turned to look at Mr. L and his daughter who stood there listening to me. It was now dark, and a low light silhouetted their forms. They didn’t say a word. As I turned to go out the door, I said to Mr. L, "If anything changes, call me."
Into my car I went and drove one half block to the corner. I turned left for 2 short blocks, turned left again, drove another block and a half and parked the car in front of our ancient row house. When I came in the door, the phone in the kitchen was ringing. When I picked up the phone, it was Mr. L. He said, "She's been healed."