In and Out of Sync

Once when we were making a video of a important visiting lecturer at St Johns-Trinity in the 1980s we had a microphone failure and the entire tape had no sound on it. We did have an audiocassette of the same lecture so we put the sound from that onto the video. In the trade they say, “Oh, we’ll just fix it in post”, i.e. post-production in the studio after the shoot. Easy enough, you might think?
But in our case, everything except occasional shots of the audience required us to match the sound exactly to the lecturer’s image. It’s called “lip sync”. The problem was that even when we started off with picture and sound exactly “in sync”, the transport mechanism of the audio cassette was less precise than the video system. So, after a few seconds we would have to stop, back up and “get in sync” again. It took about ten hours of intensive work to “fix” this one lecture.
Life in the small church is a bit like that, only much more complex. Indeed the life of each individual is full of issues which have to be balanced and fitted together and made to run harmoniously. And when they get out of sync you sometimes have to start over.
But the great thing about the faith community and people of faith is that you can always stop, re-align everything and start again. That’s what saves the situation. Call it salvation if you like.
I think if my life story is ever published it’s going to be called “In and Out of Sync”.