The Bible School Under the Cottonwood

The Sign-Up Sheet

The Fargo team was a group of college kids who traveled to small churches all summer. Six counselors, a sound system, a printed theme with a jungle on it, and a big vinyl banner for the front of the church.

The cost was $4,000 for two weeks of mornings. Our council had moved money from a memorial fund to cover most of it, and to make up the rest, they set a fee. Sixty dollars a child, two weeks, snacks and T-shirt included.

I am a bookkeeper three days a week for the co-op, so I did the math without wanting to.

Sixty dollars is not much to some people. It is a tank of diesel to others. It is a week of groceries for some families I know.

The sign-up was online, through a link on the church Facebook page, with a printed sheet on the bulletin board for the people who did not do computers.

Spots were capped at twenty-four, because that was what the team could handle.

They filled in nine days. I stood in the narthex one Sunday and read the names on the printed sheet while I pretended to look at the prayer list.

Most of the names were from town, and a handful were from the next town over.

I did not see the Larsons. They have five kids and a dairy, and in June the milk check has not caught up with the feed bill.

Five times sixty is three hundred dollars. My whole old budget, for one family.

I did not see the Pedersons’ grandkids, or the two little girls from the house behind the school, or Logan Brekke, who lived with his grandma in the trailer by the elevator and had come to my basement Bible school for two summers in a row.

Nobody from the farms said anything. That is how it is out here. Nobody complains. Nobody asks for a break.

They just quietly do not sign up, and they find something else for the kids to do that week, and they never mention it again.