I came into my office one morning to hear a whining, grinding sound.  “Now what?” I wondered. But a quick check revealed the source of the noise. It was the clock on the wall, howling in discontent over long years of thankless service. 

     I unplugged it and resigned myself to purchasing a replacement. But a friend’s advice interrupted that plan. “Turn it upside down for awhile,” she said. So I did. The clock began to grow quieter. Soon it was purring along nicely. 

     All of which is a roundabout way of pointing out that people, too, sometimes need to be inverted in order to be returned to a peaceful, normal life. Born upside down, in sin (which we also call self-centeredness) we tend to live our lives that way, regarding everything from 180* off center. Even God’s smiling face looks like a frown to someone looking at it from this topsy-turvy position. We need to be returned to a right relationship with God and the world before we can appreciate either one.

     The Greeks called the turning metanoia.  We can call it repentance. 

     The clock was howling. I suppose in a way it was expressing its discomfort at the poor lubrication it had received. It was the discomfort that resulted in the turning and the correction of the problem.  Theologian Joe Sittler once described himself as “a rascal kept alive and kicking by the church to stimulate its own discomfort.”  Maybe we should keep someone around to stir things up for us, every once in a while. As a prod. As a stimulus to repent, to get right side up again. 

     One fellow said,”I don’t need to repent.  I already did that a long time ago.”  

I gazed deeply into his shoelaces as he spoke.  They were at eye level. And they were untied.