Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life.

In the time it takes to get to work.

I'm Jeff Parrott.

One of the most uncomfortable feelings comes when we expect harmony, but experience dissonance.

In my senior year of high school, our choir teacher recruited a group of young men who were

not part of the formal choir to participate in a rag-tag group of voices just to see if we

could somehow compete with the really good singers, the people who are actually in choir. It was a gracious

and ambitious endeavor. Eventually, our brave teacher decided that we were good enough to

participate in a local choir competition. It was time to stack us up against the true vocalists

and see how we did. I remember the setting of this competition vividly. We entered the room of a

high school full of judges and volunteers. We held our sheet music with tight grips, and we started

singing together. And that's when everyone in the room started laughing. We somehow managed to sing our entire song for that competition for the judges

out of tune. I mean, each guy was belting out his own version of the music on the page.

Now, I know you think you can imagine how bad we sounded, but I assure you, it was worse than what you're thinking. We were so out of

tune with our dissonance that one of the volunteers in the room had to physically turn away from us

so that we couldn't see her tears of laughter. It was honestly such a relief to get out of that room.

I know that all of us felt like we were done with choir performances for good.

I'll never forget how uncomfortable and out of place I felt getting through that song.

See, the thing is, each one of us carried the potential for harmony with our voices,

but we ended up creating nothing but dissonance.

There's a good chance that you've been in a situation when you expected harmony, but

experienced dissonance. It's an unsettling, a strange, and sometimes embarrassing feeling.

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