MILLBROOK, AL — Every Sunday morning at 7:42 a.m., before the worship team has tuned a single guitar and before Pastor Hendricks has located his sermon notes, I am standing at the intersection of Cloverleaf Drive and Route 9, spinning the church’s roadside arrow sign toward Calvary Community Fellowship. I have done this for fourteen years. The sign weighs eleven pounds. No one has ever mentioned it.

The arrow itself is a laminated aluminum A-frame with a hand-painted red chevron pointing east-northeast toward our parking lot, approximately 340 feet from where I stand. On rainy Sundays I bring a poncho. On cold Sundays I bring a thermos of coffee. On the Sunday it reached 97 degrees in August of 2022, I brought neither, because I had not anticipated it would reach 97 degrees. I still spun the sign.

“Every week I watch cars drive past. Some of them turn. I choose to believe they turned because of me, though I accept I will never know this for certain.”

“I wasn’t even asked,” said Harold Givens, 61, who has coordinated the sign ministry since 2011, referring to himself in third person briefly before catching it. “I just showed up one morning and Jim Paulette handed me the sign and got in his car. Jim moved to Pensacola in 2013. I don’t think Jim told anyone.”

The sign has no reflective coating. We do not do Saturday evening services. This is not a problem I have raised with the properties committee, because I tried in 2019 and was told the committee was “not currently meeting.”

At press time, Harold had arrived at the intersection to discover someone had placed a second arrow sign pointing west, origin unknown, ministry coordinator unknown, and pointing in the wrong direction entirely.