For a couple of summers during high school, I sprayed insecticide for a mosquito abatement company. The days were long and unglamorous, and most included the breathing in of what had to be unhealthy doses of chemical fog. My buddy and I would reward our exhausted selves by goofing around after hours and doing any number of foolish things. One less-than-innocent prank involved tailgating cars in residential neighborhoods, flipping on the yellow oscillating signal lights atop the cab of our truck, and then laughing as drivers anxiously pulled over while we sped off.
I don’t mean to suggest that my life as a teenager was unusually errant or unfocused. Pranks hardly constitute a directionless existence. But it doesn’t take much to turn the symphony of a God-created life into ugly music. I think of the Princeton student who took a vinyl record of a Beethoven sonata and, as an experiment, bored a hole a half an inch off-center. When he played the LP, the beautiful music suddenly sounded like a clowder of wheezing cats.
We all know what it feels like to be off-center even the tiniest bit. A joke we think is hilarious doesn’t carry well in the setting where we tell it. We dress excitedly for an event only to realize, upon looking at the other attendees, that we underdressed or overdressed. We speak what we believe is an encouraging word to someone who doesn’t hear it that way at all. Sometimes we’re just a tad off center, and the music of our lives ends up sounding chaotic.
