Friday 16 January 2009

Earlier this year I was struck by the story of a small town in America and its musical road. Perhaps I should explain. The makers a car commercial came up with the clever idea of cutting a series of grooves, very carefully spaced, into the surface of the road. The result was that if the right kind of car was driven across them at exactly the right kind of speed, the tyres would play the first few bars of the William Tell overture. Brilliant! And what's more - it worked. Admittedly it didn't always work perfectly. The wrong car or the wrong speed gave a distinctly wonky rendition of Rossini's notes- but basically it was a hit. Long after the commercial was filmed, people came from miles around just to try out the musical road. And then some nameless official in the local council decided to tarmac over the grooves and return the road to its former silent self. What a spoilsport!

Mind you, that easy for me to say isn't it, especially when I live thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. Local residents complained of being woken up at all hours of the night by the sound of people trying out the road 'for fun'! I guess the novelty wore off after a bit. They might have longed for someone to 'change the record' - but it was cut into the road, so they couldn't.

So often one person's fun is another person's annoyance. Teenagers who are just 'hanging out' feel that's all they are doing - not intending any harm to anyone. To others, though, it feels menacing. A bit of innocent fun ends up as a real cause of distress. Anyone would think we weren't all the same!

Sometimes I wonder why God lumps so many peculiar people together in the church since they seem just bound to rub each other up the wrong way. Have the wires got crossed somewhere in the heavenly planning department? I think not. In fact, I think God does it deliberately - just to teach us how to get on. Maybe we all need to rub shoulders, and temperaments - just to knock off the rough edges.

Musical roads and non-musical people - these things are all sent to try us. But as for how the trial is going - well you'll just have to ask the boss on that one. I suspect that no matter how many trials God sends me, there's one heck of a way to go before he makes me perfect. Then again - life would be so dull with perfect people - so perhaps its best just to put up with the imperfect ones instead!