When COVID-19 hit, Vickie Brown knew sewing wasn’t her gift. But she wanted to help people in any way she could, so she reached out to Jean Caldwell, a friend who was making masks by the dozens for people in the community.
“I’d never sewn before, but she got me going,” Brown said.
And it wasn’t long before that seemingly unrelated ministry circled back around to something she was gifted in — Deaf ministry. She made some masks for the employees at Alabama Sunshine, a sauce company in Fayette.
“David Smith, the co-owner, is deaf, and he’s a member of our Deaf ministry at church,” said Brown, a member of Calvary Baptist Church, Tuscaloosa.
And after that first round of homemade masks, Smith’s sister Julie Madison, the other co-owner of Alabama Sunshine, sent Brown a suggestion and a pattern to go with it.
She’d heard of someone in Kentucky who had found a way to make masks with a clear panel so that the Deaf and hard of hearing would be able to read the wearer’s lips.
People in different parts of the country had started replicating the masks, but as far as Brown knew, no one was doing it in their part of the state.
So she tried making some for Alabama Sunshine, and from there, “it just mushroomed,” she said. An article about the masks ran in the Tuscaloosa News, and she started getting “orders” for the masks from individuals, school systems who wanted them for their students in speech therapy, even a wedding in North Alabama.
“We don’t charge for it; it’s our ministry,” Brown said. “I think God gives you ministry and things to do and opportunities to serve. That’s been our way of serving the community during COVID-19.”
For much of her life, Brown has looked for where God might be providing opportunities. When she was a student at Troy University, she remembers wondering where God might have gifted her for his purposes. Then while working at a summer camp, she saw deaf campers speaking in sign language and wondered if that might be something she could learn.
Soon after, she moved to Tuscaloosa for graduate school at the University of Alabama, and on her first Sunday visiting Calvary Baptist, she looked down from the balcony and saw someone in the front interpreting the service through sign language for the deaf members of the congregation.
“I called the next day and got involved,” Brown said.
That was in 1976. She’s now been involved in Deaf ministry for more than 40 years. In 1977, she and her husband moved to Pell City, where she started a Deaf ministry at First Baptist Church. Then they moved to Brent, and she was the sign language interpreter at Brent Baptist Church from 1979 until 2007, when they moved back to the Tuscaloosa area and Calvary Baptist.
Watching a little seed grow
On Sundays now, she’s back at the church where she first started learning, doing sign language interpreting with her homemade mask with the clear panel.
“When COVID-19 first started, I thought to myself how hard it was going to be for the Deaf community to read lips, but I had no idea that through her sending us that pattern that it was going to become such a big project for us and such an area of focus,” Brown said. “It’s amazing how God has a plan and orchestrates things. Sometimes a little seed is planted and it’s amazing what grows out of that little seed.”
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