Changes

On Friday, my husband painted the church sign.

Ya gotta understand that his congregation is accustomed to having a pastor for 2-3 years, then having a vacancy for 1-3 years, and then having a pastor for another couple of years. That's been pretty much all they've known. By the time my husband had been their pastor for five years, they knew he was way overdue on his time to hightail it outta here. (By the way, he's been here more than 16 years now.)

Back to the story of the church sign. The sign was parallel to the highway and the letters were tiny. When memorial money was given for a sign, high priority was given to making it easy to read as cars flew past at 60 mph. Minimal information could be included: name of church, phone number, service time and day, and pastor's name. The decision was made to not have the pastor's name engraved on the sign with the other information, but to have it on a separate plaque that would hang on the sign. After all, pastors come and go. No sense mussing up the sign with Pastor's name.

A few years later, the church's phone number changed. Okay, that meant a plaque had to be made for the sign, correcting the phone number. In our household, we found it rather amusing that the same pastor's name was still on the sign, although the permanent phone number had changed.

A few years later, the congregation decided to go to an earlier service time during summer. So the time of Service changed from 10:00 to 9:00. Oops. Another change to the sign had to be made.

They've always had a summertime non-weekend service here. This year, they decided to change from Thursday night summer services to Monday night services. So the pastor spent his so-called day off making a plaque to hang on the sign, covering up old information, declaring to the world the new day of midweek services.

And I couldn't help but giggle as he hauled out his power saw and his paint. The pastor-dude they all thought was temporary -- the guy whose name they refused to engrave on their church sign -- is the same guy who keeps making changes to the sign's "permanent" information. Can you say "irony"? I wonder if anybody besides me sees the beauty in God's faithfulness to them in their pastor's longevity in this place?