“It’s time. Before you spend it, you need to know about the bell.”

That’s how the letter started. Just those two sentences at the top of a single folded page, handwritten in the same pencil as always, that same slightly shaky print I’d seen on the front of the envelope every single Monday for twenty-four years.

I sat there at the counting table in the back room of the church, the one with the folding chairs and the coffee maker that’s been broken since 2019, and I read those two sentences probably four or five times before I kept going.

I should back up a little, because if you don’t know the whole thing, the letter doesn’t make sense.

I’ve been counting the Sunday offering every Monday morning since the fall of 2001. It started because our previous treasurer, Dot, had a hip replacement and needed help temporarily, and I guess I just never stopped. It’s not glamorous work. You sign in, you open the lock box, you separate checks from cash, you log everything into a ledger that we’ve now moved to a spreadsheet, and then you deposit it by noon. Most Mondays it takes maybe forty-five minutes. I’ve done it through three head pastors, two associate pastors, one very dramatic split in the congregation over the renovation of the fellowship hall, and a pandemic. I don’t say that to make myself sound important. It’s just accounting. I happen to be good at it.

The envelope started in, I want to say, 2001 as well. Maybe 2002. Honestly I don’t know exactly when I first noticed it because for a while I assumed it was someone’s regular donation and they’d eventually put their name on it. The envelope was always plain white, the kind you buy in a box of a hundred from the dollar store.

Cash inside, always two hundred dollars in the same mix of bills, usually two fifties and five twenties. And on the front, in pencil, just: “for the bell.”

The first time I asked Pastor Gerald about it, he was getting his coat on to leave and he kind of waved his hand and said just put it in general fund, Maureen. And I started to. I really did. But I sat there for a second and something felt wrong about that. We didn’t have a bell. There was no bell project, no bell fund, no mention of a bell anywhere in any budget meeting I’d ever attended. Putting it in the general fund felt like ignoring something on purpose, and I couldn’t do it. So I made a separate line in my own personal notebook. Not official. Just mine. I wrote “bell fund” at the top of a page and started logging it.

I told myself I’d tell the next pastor and let them decide. Then I told myself I’d wait until the amount was notable. Then I just kept going.