Funny Church Signs to Make Your Day Suck Less
Time to shift gears and make people feel good instead of depressed for once.
This week the Wise Wolf published a piece making the following observation: the Transportation Security Administration, which is the federal agency whose entire job is preventing terrorists from bringing explosives onto airplanes, cannot get paid, but the United States government somehow located several billion dollars to help fund Israel’s war with Iran. Wolf presented this as a problem.
Thirty paid subscribers presented it as a reason to cancel.
I want to be clear that I am not going to argue with those thirty people, partly because Wolf already made the argument very thoroughly and partly because I am a journalism student who depends on this newsletter to pay my rent, which they are not currently doing because thirty people just cancelled. What I will say is that if you ever find yourself on a plane that does not explode because a TSA agent caught something at the security checkpoint, maybe think about that for a second. Maybe think about whether that person went home and paid their rent. Maybe think about the fact that we apparently have strong opinions about which government agencies deserve to get funded and which ones do not, and maybe consider that the agency responsible for not letting bombs onto planes might reasonably appear on the “deserves funding” list. Maybe. Just a thought. I’m just a college student.
What do I know?
Wolf was pacing. I know he was pacing because he texted me 5 times in a row about the ‘Satanic, Babylonian monetary system’, which is the textual equivalent of watching a man pace, and I texted back “take a Benadryl and go to sleep.” He argued for about four minutes, which I know sounds like not very long, but Wolf is a man who will debate the provenance of a biblical manuscript for six hours and still think he was just getting warmed up, so four minutes of argument followed by silence means I won decisively. He went to sleep.
This left me with a Friday deadline, a blank document, and the creative pressure of knowing that whatever I wrote needed to be good enough to make our remaining subscribers want to share it instead of also cancelling. No big deal. No pressure. I do this all the time.
(I have never done this before.)
I had absolutely nothing. I sat with the blank document for a while. I made coffee. I looked at the coffee. I thought about how Wolf gets to travel around the country as a transient journalist looking for quirky things to write about and theoretically a woman willing to lower her standards far enough to go on a second date with him, and I thought about how I get to take the bus to class, and I thought about how neither of these situations was currently helping me write a funny article.
Then I thought about the other day my friend Cassie drove me home from class and we went past a church on the corner and the sign out front said:
‘HOW DO YOU MAKE HOLY WATER? YOU BURN THE HELL OUT OF IT.’
I told Cassie to slow down. I wanted a picture. And then it happened: I saw the sign and it literally opened my eyes.
The point is, I saw the sign. And I realized that was the article.
Here is the thing about church signs that I have been thinking about ever since Cassie’s car. Somebody has to make the call. There is a moment, presumably happening in churches all across America right now, where a real human adult stands in front of a box of plastic letters and decides what message they want to send to the people driving past on a Tuesday. This is a real decision. It has real consequences. And the range of decisions being made is genuinely staggering.
Some churches go with dignified. “His grace is sufficient.” True. Classic. Nobody is going to slow down for that, but nobody is going to have to explain it to their grandmother either.
Some churches go with threatening. I have driven past “Turn or burn” at forty miles an hour and still felt personally implicated. Those signs are working hard. You have to respect the commitment even if you are not entirely on board with the marketing strategy.
And then there is a third kind of church, and this is the kind I want to talk about, which is the churches that decided the whole operation needed some levity and just went for it. These are the churches run by people who believe that if God has a sense of humor, which I personally believe He absolutely does because have you looked at a platypus recently, then the sign out front should probably reflect that.
These are my people.
I spent way too much time looking at church signs on Google images instead of doing literally anything else I was supposed to be doing, and I want to share the best ones I found, because we have had a rough week and you deserve something that will make you want to text the link to your cousin in another state. Not because it will get us new paid subscribers, although it might, and if it does please know that the money goes toward things like my bus pass and Wolf’s ongoing refusal to address his health situation, which he handles by simply not thinking about it, which is a strategy I am told is common among journalists and not great for longevity.
But mostly because somebody out there is standing in front of a box of plastic letters with a very specific idea, and they deserve an audience larger than the people turning left on a Tuesday.
No geopolitics. No bloodlines. No central banking. No subscribers cancelling because arithmetic made them uncomfortable. Just church signs from people who figured God could take a joke.
What a wonderful feeling to wake up and see my intern actually published an article without me having to tell her twenty times to publish an article!
Hopefully this one doesn't lose us another 30 paid subs...
I think the Wise Wolf is wonderful . You are funny Lily . Long may you both flourish . Discerning readers will never leave . Sincere good wishes and thank you for sharing your thoughts, knowledge and wisdom.