One warm afternoon in August a large female deer appeared in my back yard. Given my rather suburban environment, this is an unlikely, but not impossible, event. It was the first one I had seen in the year since moving here anyway. I took a rather nice photo of the muscular hart while it stood looking at me from a distance. I sent this photo to my family and a few minutes later received a call from my mother. She indicated to me that this deer was an answer to her prayers; it was a sign that God would make himself real to me. She told me that she had been praying that God would make Himself real to me and the response she had received was that it would be a deer. I was a bit stunned by this and just verbally nodded to her until my mother asked me again how I was doing regarding God to which I replied that I was still working through it. What can one say to a perceived sign like that? It wasn’t an answer to my prayer but to hers. And for me to argue that this isn’t all that rare or special event just feels like I would be annoyingly pedantic or skeptical. Regardless, this leaves me in a weird place; the anxious thoughts about belief and doubt pushed to the forefront again and the knowledge that the worry (that I might be damned) is on the mind of someone I care about. I wish the sign was meaningful to me.