​A certain evangelist in town organized the restaurants into giving the ministers in the area a breakfast once a month at a different restaurant. Of course, they had to be big enough to seat about a hundred people, but he pulled the plan together. At one of these breakfasts I sat next to a man I had never met. He had his notebook open to a page where he had written the initials S.I.D.A. This is French for A.I.D.S. I leaned over and told him I knew French, so if he ever needed someone to speak to a French person, I’d be happy to help him.
 
He whispered back that S.I.D.A. is Spanish, and he didn’t know either French or Spanish. We laughed, but he took down my phone number. This was my first encounter with the possibility to speak French to someone, and I wondered if this was why I had taken the intensive French classes just before moving back to the States.
 
I also learned from this minister that he was the head of the A.I.D.S. program in town, and that he was not only gay, himself, but he also had A.I.D.S. My only encounter with someone H.I.V. positive had been a young woman in France who came forward for prayer during one of my prayer lines. She sent word back to me some months later saying she was completely healed, but the doctors didn’t believe her about the prayer line and were insisting her original diagnosis had been false.
 

​A friend of mine looked at Noelle one day and said, “You would be perfect for my son. I’m going to have him write to you.” He did. He returned home from the Orient with his Marine unit, came to see Noelle on Valentine’s Day, and soon after they planned a wedding.
 
Between the wedding and a heavy counseling schedule for Dan, I gave up all efforts to minister or to raise money. It seemed prudent since all the doors I opened slammed in my face. I wrote, instead, working away at J.J.’s computer, as we gave him a new one for graduation, an upgrade he needed for law school.
 
Noelle chose a cowboy theme for her wedding and reception, as that’s what the groom fancied himself to be. He wore a black cowboy hat and black boots; she wore white cowboy boots under her stunning white gown. The last good thing that could be said about their marriage happened to be the fun wedding and reception. It ran downhill from there. The groom turned out to be a woman-hater too, not a homosexual, but a decided enemy to Noelle, despising everything about her.