BRANSON, MO — Every Sunday morning, while the congregation files in and adjusts their bulletins and debates whether the sanctuary is too cold, I am at the altar with a brass lighter the length of a scepter, doing what I have done since the second Sunday of October 2009: making sure those two candles are lit before the first note of the prelude.

No one has asked me about it. Not once. Not a deacon, not a pastor, not a visitor, not the woman who makes eye contact with me every single week from the third pew on the left. The candles simply appear lit. I have become, functionally, invisible. I am the infrastructure of worship.

“I assumed it was automated,” said Gerald Finch, 61, who has attended First Presbyterian of Branson for fourteen of my sixteen years of service. “Like a timer or something.”

There is no timer, Gerald.

“The candles don’t light themselves. I want that on record. Somewhere. Anywhere.”

I also extinguish them. The candle snuffer is a different implement entirely, and learning to use it without creating a visible smoke plume took me the better part of 2011. No one noticed that either—not the struggle, and not the eventual mastery.

I am not bitter. I am simply a woman who has spent sixteen years tending a flame that points toward something eternal, and I think that is probably enough. The Light of the World did not require an audience either.

At press time, the candle lighter for the 8:00 a.m. service, a man named Doug, had been doing it for twenty-two years and could not be reached for comment because no one had his phone number.