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A better message
Originally published in The Christian Science Monitor’s Christian Science Perspective column July 18, 2025.
I was startled awake at 3 a.m. by a loud screeching sound.
After hurtling out of bed and doing some sleuthing, I discovered one of my son’s old electronic toys intermittently malfunctioning in the closet. After trying to open the battery case for a while, I realized the screw had been stripped, so, short of throwing the toy in the woods or bundling it in a blanket until morning, I was liable to hear it go off again.
But then I realized that it was the kind of device that records the sounds of what the user was doing. My son had been playing with his friends, and the last recorded sound bite was them screeching into the microphone. That’s when I got the idea: Replace the noise with a better message ... Aha. So I pressed a button and recorded several seconds of peaceful silence. Done.
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