Somebody Changed the Sign Again: A Year of Plastic Letters and Drive-By Grace

It’s 7:35 on a Tuesday morning, and Doug Fenner is already on the third rung of a fiberglass ladder, holding a plastic W like it might dissolve if he grips it wrong.

Most of us who drive past Faith Alive UMC during the week only see the finished product — white letters against maroon, a message that either lands or doesn’t. What we don’t see is the ritual behind it: the thermos of coffee wedged into the cupholder, the alphabetized letter tray in the maintenance shed, the ongoing disagreement about whether “soup” should be capitalized (it should), and the small stack of index cards in the office drawer marked, in Marlys Pearson’s handwriting, Sign Notes.

That drawer is the reason for this article.

Four People, One Tray, and a Lot of Opinions

The sign crew is technically a volunteer rotation. In practice, it’s Doug, Marlys, Marlys’s grandson Eli (17, licensed driver, unimpressed by everything), and Teresa Okafor, who took over scheduling in March 2026 after a mild but real dispute about whether the sign should ever say anything longer than five words.

“Four words,” Teresa said. “Six if it’s scripture. People are going forty-five miles an hour. They’re not reading a devotional.”

Marlys disagrees. Marlys has always disagreed. Marlys once fit an entire quote about mustard seeds onto the sign, and the word SEED ended up on the second line by itself, which she insists was a design choice.

The whole thing takes about twenty-five minutes. Some weeks it takes an hour, because someone always drops an M behind the shed.

The Typo Hall of Fame

Every congregation with a roadside sign has a legend. Ours is not one story; it’s a collection, and the crew keeps them the way some families keep report cards.

• April: “CHRIST IS RISEN” appeared for four full days as “CHRIS IS RISEN.” Eli took the blame. Eli was not on the ladder that week. No one has confessed.
• September: “SOUP SUPPER SAT 5PM” became “SOUP SUPER SAT 5PM,” which several people argued was more accurate anyway.
• February: The M behind the shed was missing for a stretch, so “ALL ARE WELCOME” read “ALL ARE WELCOE” for one entire week. Marlys left it. “Nobody complained,” she said. “One man honked. I choose to believe he was delighted.”
• Last November: Someone put the T and the H in the wrong order on THANKFUL, and the sign spent Election Day announcing that our congregation was “THNAKFUL.” Honestly? Fair.

There’s a running joke that the sign is the most-edited publication at Faith Alive UMC, and the least proofread. There’s also a running truth underneath the joke: nobody has ever stopped coming because of a typo, and a surprising number of people have started paying attention because of one.

Accidental Theology

Here’s the thing about plastic letters and gravity. Sometimes a letter falls, and the message gets better.

One morning in June, the crew arrived to find the previous week’s “GOD LOVES YOU” had lost its Y and its O. It read: “GOD LOVES U.” Teresa left it up for eleven days.

Another time, a windstorm knocked half of “YOU ARE NOT ALONE” into the bushes. What remained was “YOU ARE NOT.” Doug was halfway up the ladder to fix it when a car pulled into the lot and a woman rolled down her window and asked him please, please leave it, because her son was in the hospital and it was the funniest thing she’d seen in a month. He left it until Thursday.

The crew has learned to ask a question before every change: is this message true, and is it kind? It sounds simple. It is not always simple when you’re standing in the cold with a tray of letters and a limited supply of vowels.

What Comes Back in the Envelope Slot

Beside the sign, mounted low so it’s reachable from a car window, there’s a small metal slot meant for the sign’s spare letters. It has become something else entirely.

The office keeps what comes out of it. Not everything — people leave a lot of junk — but the index cards go in the drawer.

A man whose wife died in February wrote that he drove past every morning on the way to the hospital and read “YOU ARE NOT ALONE” so many times that he started saying it out loud to himself in the parking garage. He has never been to a service. He included a five-dollar bill and apologized for the amount.

A seventh grader asked, in careful pencil, whether the church would put up “HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM, YOU’RE 50 AND THAT’S FINE.” The crew did it. Marlys added exclamation points. The mom cried in the pickup line.

Someone once wrote a three-paragraph letter about the Oxford comma. Doug framed it.

The Witness of Small, Public Things

It would be easy to make too much of a sign. It’s not a sermon. It’s not a mission trip. It’s a $14 box of letters and a ladder that needs a new foot.

But there’s something to the fact that it shows up every week, whether or not anyone is watching. No one claps. No one fills out a connection card. There’s no budget line for it and there never will be. It’s just a handful of people who decided that a small, repeated, slightly imperfect act of public kindness is worth doing on a Tuesday morning when the ground is still cold.

At Faith Alive UMC we talk a lot about faith in action, together in community. Sometimes that action is a casserole or a ride to dialysis or a folding chair set up for a stranger. And sometimes it’s a plastic U, left up on purpose, for a woman driving to the hospital who needed to read it that week.

You Don’t Have to Climb the Ladder

If you’ve got a message worth putting up — a birthday, a thank-you, a verse that got you through something — drop a card in the slot by the sign, or in the basket at the welcome table on Sunday. The crew reads every one. They won’t promise to use the Oxford comma. They will promise to read it.

And if you’re the sort who likes being outdoors before the sun is fully up, the Tuesday rotation has room. Coffee’s on Doug. Bring gloves. Watch out for the M behind the shed.