I like Greg Townson very much! He's a guitarist who's been around for a while, but is now a leading member of Los Straitjackets. He combines that great Rockabilly sound of theirs with some really lyrical passages. Townson's track "Speed Bump", an excerpt of which begins this cast, got me started on the theme.

It's a familiar theme, especially with Mockingbird; but should never be foregone. A speed bump is when an obstacle or blockage on the road on which you are traveling causes you -- if you are going too fast or not looking where you're going -- to crash, or at least shock you out of yourself.

In regular life, a speed bump is the unexpected loss or blow or intrusion that makes you stop. "Hey, what's that sound/Everybody look what's goin' down" (Buffalo Springfield, 1966). It can be the illness of your child, a sudden catastrophic interruption/lurch in your marriage, a notice that you've been fired, a pandemic (to say the least), or one's nervous collapse into absorbing anxiety.

Ideally -- and this is the Christian point of the cast -- your biggest speed bump should cause you to stop and re-evaluate, "Stop, Look, Listen (To Your Heart)" [The Stylistics, 1971]. The old word for this is Repent. And always with a view to a fresh direction and a new beginning.

At a key moment in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, something happens -- a proposal of marriage goes terribly wrong -- which causes both the heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, and the hero, 'Mr. D'Arcy' individually to re-evaluate their whole lives. The "speed bump" of that catastrophic conversation causes each of them and both of them to see themselves in a new light -- really, to humble each of them in their own eyes. The result of their speed bump is lasting good and great blessing.

What has been your biggest speed bump? Where are you with it now? Tell me.