After the benediction, Darryl stood up in the fellowship hall and said, Terrence, since you asked about the phones, there is somebody here I would like you to meet, and the woman sitting alone by the coffee urn stood up with her little girl on her hip and a folded piece of paper in her hand, already crying.
My husband has been a 911 dispatcher for Lee County for twenty years, the voice people hear on the worst night of their lives. And four years ago, on one of those nights, he took a call from a young woman alone, in labor, snowed in, no way for an ambulance to reach her in time. He stayed on the line and talked her through delivering her own baby on her kitchen floor, and then he kept her talking until the paramedics finally got there, and he saved two lives with nothing but his voice.
The man Terrence mocked for answering phones had, four years earlier, delivered a baby over the telephone and kept a terrified young mother alive through the worst night of her life, and she had driven to Tupelo to find him and say thank you in person.
She had spent four years trying to find the dispatcher whose voice got her through it. The county does not give out names. But she never forgot it, and when she learned the church homecoming was open to the public and that a Lee County dispatcher named Darryl might be there, she came, with the little girl he helped bring into the world.
The folded paper was a drawing. Her daughter, four years old now, had drawn a picture of a telephone with a heart around it, for the man who was there the night she was born.
Terrence, who pastors a big church with a jumbotron and a Bentley in the lot, who joked that the Lord uses even the switchboard, stood there with his sweet tea and watched a young mother put her living, breathing daughter into my husbands arms. The fellowship hall was dead silent, and then it was not, because everybody was on their feet.
Terrence came over after. He did not make a joke. He said, cousin, I answer to a lot of people, but you answered when it counted, and he meant it. My husband just held that little girl and could not speak. Twenty years of the worst nights of other peoples lives, and one of them walked into a church in Tupelo to say thank you. The Lord uses everybody, Terrence had said. He was right. He just did not know he was standing next to the proof.