punctuation matters

I was driving down the road yesterday when I passed a church and noticed the sign outside:

spring gods greeting cards.

Cool! I thought to myself. I wonder if the cards are hand-made? I started to visualize beautiful artsy greeting cards, each a one-of-a-kind treasure. Hand-made paper perhaps? Dried and pressed flowers? Colored pencil drawings… maybe swatches of cotton fabric glued to the front…

Then I started wondering about the spring gods. Who are they anyway? Venus the sun god? Maybe there is a god of sweet aromas or a god of colors. These spring gods pricked my curiosity as I have never heard of spring gods before. (And believe me, I’ve heard of most of the gods around here.) I picked up speed as my enthusiasm grew – I’ve got to see those spring gods greeting cards!

I was several miles down the road before reality hit me. I could see my teenagers roll their eyes and hear their exclamation “DUH!” that tells me they can’t believe how naïve I can be. Wait a minute, I said to myself… that was a conservative Christian church back there, they would never use new-age verbiage referring to “gods”. No! they meant the ONE and ONLY, all Omnipotent, GOD Almighty!

OK. So I had to rethink it and interpret that sign for its intended message. They meant GOD: their God.

So the subject must be SPRING. Yes, and because spring is full of a multitude of blessings, the word “cards” was plural. I’m getting it!

The sign meant that Spring is God’s way of sending us all kinds of really cool greeting cards! Yes!

I’m not always so literal, but that one took considerable time and mental energy on my part to get the message. If only they had used punctuation.

A couple of capitol letters

A colon

An apostrophe

An exclamation mark

Spring: God’s greeting cards!