Things that go bleep in the night

For the Thought for the Day today, I’d like to tell you a rather funny story from this time of year a couple of years back.

It was quite late on a summer’s evening, and my wife and I were about to head to bed when we heard a strange high pitched bleeping noise from outside.

It sounded like this, I’ve got a recording….

Well I didn’t know what it was. It was rather annoying and I didn’t sleep that well that night.

The next night it happened again. So I went outside to our bins and I thought, aha, I know what the bleeping is. I had thrown out an old smoke alarm, and when they run down on batteries they give out an intermittent beep.

But the bin men had already been a couple of days earlier to take the rubbish, and the bins were empty, so it couldn’t have that. I tried to investigate.

The strange thing was that when I went outside and the motion sensor light by the side of our house came on, the bleeping stopped. Now that was really annoying, because now I couldn’t figure out where the sound was coming from. How did an electronic device know to stop when I approached?

I never could work it out, until a couple of days later someone said to me, have you heard the midwife toad in the night.

The what? The midwife toad. It’s a really small toad that has a kind of beeping call. Well blow me down. It was the midwife toad keeping me up at night, not an electronic device in the rubbish bins at all. I’d completely got the wrong end of the stick.

Why do I tell the story of things that go bleep in the night? I guess that in life, it’s easy to get the wrong end of the stick. I do that all the time.

Most of the time it’s inconsequential. But just occasionally people get it wrong about really important things like faith. They think that Christianity is something that should be consigned to the rubbish tip- an old unwanted product if you like, when it’s alive and kicking!

So don’t get the wrong end of the stick about Christianity, check it out for yourself, and you might discover it has more life than you think!

Have a great day and listen out for that toad!

Charlie Newcombe 10/08/2022