The organizer of the event I was covering rushed over when I entered, and said one of the students there claimed to know me.

“She says you changed her life,” said Debra Kennard, a board member of the Scholarship Foundation of St. Louis, the nonprofit hosting the event. About 300 people had gathered to recognize students who had benefited from the organization’s work.

I had no idea who Kennard was talking about, but followed her through the crowd. As soon as I saw Andrea Perez and her mother, there was no hesitation.

“Oh my God!” I shrieked as I threw my arms around the mom. (Perez asked me not to use her parents’ names.) It had been several years since we’d seen each other. When my children were younger and needed constant chauffeuring, she would come over once a month to help me keep up with household chores. Over the years, we developed a friendship. Her children were only a few years older than mine, and she reminded me of my own mom: an immigrant woman working incredibly hard for her family.

Her English was still improving, but we spoke that common language of parental worry and angst. She was particularly concerned about Andrea, then a junior in high school. Her daughter was smart, but more interested in her boyfriend and friends than in her schoolwork, she told me. My eldest child/auntie instinct kicked into overdrive.

“Let me talk to her,” I said. Her mom promised to bring her over soon for a heart-to-heart. True to her word, she showed up with a teenager who seemed mildly annoyed at the prospect of being lectured by a stranger.

Fair enough. What teenager wouldn’t be?

I told Andrea that I was also the oldest child of working-class immigrant parents, and that I knew how hard it was growing up in a nearly all-white, affluent community. Andrea’s attitude immediately changed.

“That was the first time I talked to someone who I could relate to like that,” she said. Looking back, she admits that she had been far more concerned with fitting in with her white peers than her education. Her GPA from her first couple of years of high school was around a 2.0. I told her she was capable of better.

It’s funny how the teenage brain will reject this kind of feedback from a parent, but is willing to consider it from an outsider.

I advised Andrea to ask the school counselor if she could enroll in Missouri’s A+ Scholarship Program, which gives qualified students an opportunity to earn two free years at community college after graduation. She took our conversation to heart. She ended her senior year with a 3.5 GPA and met all the requirements for the scholarship. She would be the first person in her family to go to college.

A month before her classes were scheduled to start, the community college contacted her and told her she was not eligible for the grant because of her DACA status. Republicans in the state passed legislation that required public colleges to charge DACA students international student fees. She had to come up with $4,000 to attend that semester. Her mother picked up more houses to clean in an already packed schedule, and her father took on additional hours of lawn care.

Andrea studied hard, applied for scholarships and transferred to Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, which allows DACA students to pay in-state tuition. She plans to graduate next year with a degree in sociology and apply to law school.

I was touched that Andrea remembered that conversation in my living room from nearly six years ago. But we know who and what really changed Andrea’s life.

Her parents, with their sacrifices and love, changed her life. A scholarship changed her life. Her own persistence and hard work changed her life.

“Can you imagine how proud I am?” her mom asked me as we hugged, that night I unexpectedly reconnected with her.

Yes, I can imagine.

When a public official takes issue with something I’ve written, they might email, call or contact an editor if they feel particularly aggrieved.

Missouri’s Health Director Dr. Randy Williams took a more unusual approach. Last year, I wrote a column criticizing his department’s effort to track the menstrual cycles of women seeking services at the one remaining Planned Parenthood in Missouri. After reading it, he dropped off a book and a handwritten note for me at my office. It’s a book written by a conservative Republican about loving your enemies.

I’m not going to get into the merits of the book. Suffice it to say that the author wrote a 217-page manifesto decrying the contempt in political rhetoric and never once mentioned how the current occupant of the White House has taken nastiness in public discourse to new lows. It’s kind of like writing a book about the obesity epidemic and leaving out the role of sugar.

At any rate, I read the entire thing.

Since Williams never specified what he found objectionable in my previous column, I’m going to assume by his choice of book and the note quoting Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate,” that perhaps he confused my criticism with hate or contempt toward him personally.

Rest assured, Randy, I don’t hate you.

I do, however, hate what you have been trying to do to women in this state.

When I think about the repeated attempts by the Republicans in Missouri to take away a woman’s legal right to an abortion, I also think about the sanctity of life.

I think about the life of the college student who called me to take her to the hospital after she had been raped multiple times during a spring break trip. I think about standing by her hospital bed and seeing the fear in her eyes that one of her rapists might have impregnated her. I think about a friend who had a pregnancy scare involving a man from a very conservative family. I remember her shock when his vocally “pro-life” parents offered to pay for her abortion. I think about the young woman who told me she had to leave her parents’ house after she found out she was pregnant. The condom her boyfriend was using had broken, and he offered no help to her. She became homeless -- going from one friend’s house to another -- working a minimum-wage job trying to save up money for the abortion she needed to have any kind of chance at escaping extreme poverty.

These women’s lives matter.

I teach my children the importance and universality of the Golden Rule. If it was your daughter or wife in such a traumatic and difficult situation, how would you want her treated?

Many of us are horrified that our daughters might grow up with fewer rights over their own bodies than we had.

Like you, I’m a person of faith. But I would never seek to impose my religious beliefs about a theological issue on women whose own lives may hang in the balance.

I can respect that getting an abortion is against your religious beliefs.

Thankfully, you will never need to get one.

If I saw the same fervor from state officials toward making sure the 100,000 children dropped from Medicaid in our state had access to health care, it would go a long way toward proving their “pro-life” consistency.

Here’s an area for common ground. Many of us who support a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions also care deeply that all children in our state can go to a doctor, and get medical treatment and medicine when they need it.

I’m all in with you when you want to apply pro-life beliefs there.

You mentioned in your note that you have received death threats and ad hominem attacks in your role. I know how that feels. It’s fascinating to see what the people who call for civility are perfectly willing to overlook from their own side.

If you ever want to discuss the book, feel free to stop by and chat.

Walking into Mary Engelbreit’s studio is like stepping into one of her books -- a whimsical, bright space brimming with preciousness and a sprinkle of sass.

Eight decorative birdhouses are perched on top of a short wall by the entry. There’s a checker-print sofa with Scottish terriers on the throw pillows. A cheerful quilt hangs on the wall and a cacophony of dolls, figurines and stuffed animals are crammed on the shelves.

The artist who created this licensing empire -- with more than 13,000 pieces of saleable art, including calendars, books, tea sets, ribbons and fabrics -- is a 67-year-old St. Louisian, and she’s now calling out her own sheltered world of cuteness.

Engelbreit enters her workspace wearing a printed floral scarf and red-framed glasses, appearing every bit the Midwestern grandmother you might expect.

That is, until the conversation gets political.

“Now I’m focused on how many senators are willing to sell their souls to cover up for this moron,” she said during a recent visit. If there’s any doubt who she’s referring to, a scroll through her Instagram feed makes the subject of her ire crystal clear.

“This is WAY more than Democrat/Republican,” she wrote in response to a follower upset by one of her recent posts. “This is moral/immoral. You can be a Republican and not support Trump. But if you do support him, you are a supporting a white supremacist, uneducated, lying, grifting, racist, narcisstic, evil sexual predator, and all of your ‘Can’t we all just love one another?’ is meaningless and insulting to all the people Trump seeks to disenfranchise.”

But tell us how you really feel, Mary.

Her artwork changed forever the day police fatally shot teenager Michael Brown in 2014.

The morning she heard about the shooting, she felt compelled to draw. Years earlier, her son Evan had died of a gunshot wound when he was near Brown’s age. She and her husband adopted his biracial daughter as their own. Brown’s death triggered those painful emotions -- and her anger.

The image that emerged that day was unlike the lighthearted drawings for which she’s known. A black mother held a black child in her arms, a tear falling from her eye. She looks at a newspaper that reads: “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” Mother and child are framed by Engelbreit’s stark caption: “No one should have to teach their children this in the USA.”

She didn’t tell anyone in her family-run company about the image before posting it on the company’s Facebook page. She was 62 at the time, and until then, she had not faced any serious criticism about her work.

That was about to change.

Her son Will Delano, the president of the company, said they lost 11,000 followers that first day.

“Our key demographic is middle-aged to upper-middle-aged women, who may not have ever had negative issues with the police,” he said. “I’m ashamed to say I was very scared when she spoke out.”

He tried to talk her into toning down her comments for a week or two, and fielded some threatening calls from enraged fans.

Engelbreit was shocked at the ugliness of the comments, and worried about the impact the backlash could have on her employees and her family. She wondered if she had destroyed a 40-year career with a single drawing. But at the end of the day, that fear wasn’t enough to deter her.

After decades of drawing cute, she needed to speak her mind.

“I didn’t care if I lost or gained followers,” she said. “These things were important to me. These were the things I was going to draw.”

Sales from that print ended up raising $40,000 for the Michael Brown Jr. Memorial Fund.

Friends who have known Engelbreit for decades describe her as generous and genuine. But she’s well aware that the world can be far from a bowl of cherries -- or a chair of bowlies, as she famously coined early in her career.

In order to share the snarkier side of her personality, Engelbreit launched an edgier line of black-and-white cards, called “Engeldark,” a few years ago.

“I was a little uncomfortable with that reputation of being a sweet, nice person,” she said. “It’s nice to be able to have it all out there.”

It can be jarring to see these worlds collide on her Instagram. Pictures of her adorable 7-month-old granddaughter appear next to inspirational quotes and colorful drawings, alongside an archival black-and-white photo of children behind barbed wire. Engelbreit posted that picture on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, drawing parallels to the current administration’s policies in her caption: “Children ripped from their families, kept in cages, dying of neglect -- sound familiar?”

If Trump supporters are troubled by her opinions, Engelbreit says they are free to leave her page.

“If you support him, go, because these drawings just aren’t meant for you,” she said.

Her son keeps a close eye on her social media pages, and has read thousands of critical comments since she started speaking out. But he can also recall three instances in which people changed their minds after interacting with her.

That makes him “insanely proud” of his mom, he said.

They may have lost followers initially, but they’ve more than made up for them now.