Today is Vince’s birthday. I want a church sign to send a dart of healing to my heart like it often does, but it seems you have to get out of the house to read church signs, and I am just not feeling it today.
Somebody asked me recently why I chose to write about church signs. As I have said before, church signs to me are the elevator speech of Christianity in the middle of God’s creation. When used well, it will reach readers right where they are, right when they need it. I have no doubt that God is as proud of the person who created church signs as he is in any missionary in a foreign land living out their ordained purpose to spread His message. The short, targeted messages that church signs provide are like Twitter on a metal sign without the added threads, convoluted comments, and retweets that often get out of control. If you want to make a comment on a church sign, I guess you just need to start a blog post.
The best thing about church signs is that they are outdoors. The sign may have barriers, but the platform doesn’t. One of the most beautiful things to me about the church signs are the color and depth of the landscape and little churches behind it. When I went to art school, they taught us that the artist had to concentrate as much on the background as they did on the foreground. The artist just has to work the design to pull the eye to what they want the viewer to see. The words and meaning of church signs pull me to the forefront, where the background is laced with the color and lines of trees, sky, steeple, and building.
Church signs are a reminder of God’s meaning and handiwork in the middle of what often seems to us as chaos. Words of truth in the middle of a broken world—our little biblical cheat sheets across a variety of landscapes in little towns and side roads. The most frustrating thing to me is that when I take the pictures I can’t fit everything I see into the images. Sometimes, just the scene of the sign on a hill, with a little country church behind it to me is the most breathtaking visual and even more of a reminder that God authored it through someone who was listening.
The last trip that Tommy and I went on last year during this time was out west to Arizona. (It was on that trip that my anxiety of traveling flew into overdrive, but that is another story.) We flew there and drove Route 66 and then sidetracked to Vegas, got back on Route 66 and then drove to the end in Santa Monica, California. I was so excited to get more pictures of church signs in front of churches scattered amongst the desert and western towns when I planned the trip.
We didn’t see ONE church sign. NOT ONE. All that opportunity and not one metal church sign with vinyl black letters. Sometimes I just want to scream and knock some Christians upside the head and say “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!” You have this GREAT opportunity to reach people’s hearts with meaningful, uplifting messages without seeming like judgmental, self-righteous jerks and you ARE MISSING IT. You are MISSING IT!” Church signs are disappearing. Uplifting messages are disappearing, so the chaos in the background is coming into the foreground of people’s hearts and no one is speaking truth into all the noise.
God’s message cannot ONLY live in churches. It needs to be painted across the landscape, with broad strokes of love and encouragement instead of judgement and the desire for vindication or punishment. Sadly, social media is only proving to steal people’s joy by comparisons between their own lives and others. It isn’t improving their lives. I have read church signs that made me laugh, made me think, and made me pull over and cry. But I have never read a church sign that made me feel like other people’s lives were better than mine.
Today is Vince’s birthday. I miss him. I miss him making fun of me for making too big of a deal out of birthdays. I miss him with every single breath I take. But I will write about church signs because it is a way for me to long and reach for where he is rather than focus on where he isn’t.
