CEDAR FALLS, IA — My name is Doris Havercamp, and for fourteen years I have been the woman at the end of your row holding the small wooden collection tray while you stare straight ahead as though I am not there.

I want you to understand what I know. I know who drinks theirs and who sets it down full. I know who takes two cups — I see you, Gerald — and I know who palms the bread and disappears it into a pocket for reasons I have chosen not to investigate. After fourteen years, I have developed a working theology of the human condition based entirely on what people do with a one-ounce plastic cup when they think no one is watching.

“The cup is not the point. I know that. But how you treat the cup after the moment has passed — that tells me who you actually are.”

“I once found a grocery list tucked inside a cup,” said Havercamp, 61, who has served at Cornerstone Fellowship since 2011. “Eggs, bread, lunch meat, Tums. I have thought about it every Sunday since. Whoever wrote it was communing with the Lord and planning dinner at the same time, and I’m not sure that’s wrong.”

Pastor Glenn Abernathy, 54, confirmed that communion cup collection is “a valued and essential ministry,” adding that he had never personally thought about it before being asked.

I do not need recognition. I need you to stop stacking them.

At press time, Havercamp had discovered a folded bulletin, a breath mint still in the wrapper, and what appeared to be a Cheerio in the third-row collection tray, none of which she considered out of the ordinary.