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GREENSBORO — After walking the long aisle to her place among the missionary women on the front row of her church, Darlene East sat down to a standing ovation.

“This is my right hand,” her pastor, Elder Herman Platt, intoned from the pulpit. “This is also the lady we are praying for.”

East is a face of the 22nd annual Prayer and Life Clinic at Wells Memorial Church of God in Christ. The event of continuous prayer, begun under the church’s former pastor, Bishop Ithiel Clemmons, ends with a Saturday breakfast. For a week each year, coinciding with the Sept. 11 anniversary, hundreds of people from across the country gather for the free spiritual retreat. This year’s focus is on how to help other people meet challenges in their lives.

This time, the woman heading the registration desk has one of her own.

“I’m seeing myself as a conduit for someone else who may be afraid of ovarian cancer or any other cancer,” East said of her determination to maintain the work. “I’m on my fourth chemo. We are believing by faith that it’s this one that will reduce the tumor. But you keep moving.”

Some see her as courageous.

“I don’t like the idea that she’s sick, but I’m not going to argue with God, and I’m not going to get upset with life,” Platt would say later. “I do see Sister East going through challenges and I do ask the question about her being faithful and dedicated to God, and then this, but she has … a greater purpose.”

Since 2000, she has also turned Platt’s vision for the conference into reality.

“I don’t have to worry about every detail, every piece of material for every lecture, coming up for strategies, to move the mental picture I have … to something concrete,” Platt said. “She does that for me and she does it well. She is the spark plug. She’s the gas for the engine. She’s the carburetor.”

East’s doctor discovered ovarian cancer last December. In the months since, East has been treated for an aggressive tumor that will not respond to chemotherapy.

East is used to tackling challenges successfully. When her husband, George, died in 2000 she promised that she would complete her undergraduate degree.

“When she graduated from A&T (in 2004) with a B.S. in public relations — I think she was 60,” said Mable Scott, a co-worker and member at Wells Memorial. “She had an almost perfect GPA — all A’s and one B.”

East, who also started a scholarship at A&T in her husband’s name, is the office manager for the A&T’s University Relations department, is on the board of trustees at the church and taught Sunday School.

She previously worked in banking.

“It was never that I wouldn’t be involved, but how to use the time in my sick bed to engage with my pastor and dialogue with him on this series,” East said of the continued work that involves a cadre of volunteers that she credits with the clinic’s success.

“We’ve done it by e-mail, we’ve done it by voice mail, we’ve done it by cell phone,” she said. “We have people who have never come before and this is the first time. Just because you are sick doesn’t mean you just stop. Being a prayer warrior means you go on.”

Contact Nancy H. McLaughlin at 373-7049 or nancy.mclaughlin@news-record.com