I have decided over the years that I must have a warped sense of humour. We came to East Anglia in 2004 for a family holiday and stayed in Great Yarmouth and while we were out and about in the countryside, I spotted a sign like the one above at the side of the road, I thought it was hilarious and assumed that Norfolk people were savages when it came to dealing with the family’s feline pets. Sharing my joy about this sign with a colleague, the following year when I became a minister in Norfolk, they quite seriously explained that I had misunderstood the sign and it was actually warning me that the reflective studs down the middle of the road had been removed. Maybe I should have been offended that they assumed that I was daft enough to misinterpret, but I thought their reaction was almost as comedic as the sign.
Talking recently with somebody about deliberately misreading signs, he said that his favourite was a sign we often see at this time of year “Pick you own strawberries” his misinterpretation is “pick your own strawberries, keep your hands of mine!” which again appeals to my sense of humour. There used to be a sign at the river side in Whitby which read “Fishing for children only” and that always conjured up an image of a fisherman, with a child dangling from his line. Or there was the sign on blue painted garden shed on the beach at Great Yarmouth which boasted “Donkey world!” which sounded like some donkey themed fun park but was in fact a woman with half a dozen donkeys transporting children a hundred yards along the beach and back.
There are signs that I see, and I am never quite sure how to react. I always wonder what I should do when I see the sign warning me about falling rocks, my granny’s reaction many years ago was to put her headscarf on “just in case” at the best, I feel like it is a bit of a disclaimer, if a falling rock should damage my car, the insurance company can say “well you were warned!” When our girls were little, I used to drive around with a yellow sign displayed in my back window which read something like “Baby on board” looking back, I can’t for a second imagine that anybody would read the sign and think “I’ll allow another few yards of braking distance, because the last thing I want to do is hurt this bloke’s baby” and of course the truth is that I drove many miles with the sign displayed in the back window when I was in the car on my own!
The truth is that so much of what we do in life is based on interpretation. I spend a chunk of my working life, reading passages from the Bible and then attempting people to understand how texts written hundreds of years ago can be relevant to us today. I can’t ever remember a time in my life when I have ever coveted my neighbours ox! I can remember times when I have wished that we had a lovely conservatory like next door, or when on one occasion our neighbour’s pair of Springer Spaniels gave birth to a litter of gorgeous puppies. I’m not sure that I coveted to the point of it affecting our friendship, but the point is that something written in a very clear context two thousand years ago might struggle to be taken at absolute face value today.
People will ask me from time to time “what does the Bible say about this?” and I am always careful how I reply. The words were originally spoken to a particular group of people in a particular place at a particular time and to even start to understand what the Bible says about a particular issue, the reader needs to try to understand the context. That is by no means to say that the Bible has no relevance today in the twenty first century, I would not be writing this today, if I believed that it was pointless and outdated. I find that when I attempt to defend the Bible to people, I frequently find that they have never read it. Interpretation is important, if you dare, Google “Cat’s eyes removed” and you will find information about the removal of the reflective studs in the road, and how somebody’s cat has gone on to live a happy life following a surgical procedure. It’s all down to interpretation.