Thirteen years ago, homeowner Jerry Lynn was trying to figure out where he should put a hole in his wall for a TV wire. He went up to the second floor of his house and lowered his wife's alarm clock on a string through an air vent—according to a story from CNN, he "thought he could listen to the alarm, which he set to go off after 10 minutes, and know where to put the hole."

But then the string broke. The clock fell. Lynn was still able to use it, though; when the alarm went off, "[h]e could still hear where he needed to poke a hole in the wall."

And then the alarm kept going off every night at the same time—for 13 years.

Lynn had figured the batteries in the clock would likely die soon, but each night he and his wife would be treated to about a minute of beeping that could be heard "from any room on the first floor."

Lynn told CNN that they don't mind the beeping: "It's kind of cute." But NPR reports that recently, the nightly alarm became "too much to bear," and the clock was removed from the wall.

Rather than throw it out, though, "[t]he clock now sits on their mantle, still set for 7:50 p.m."

Potential Preaching Angles: What do we have in our lives that we've just learned to "deal with," to ignore or sweep under the rug? What can we instead ask God to transform as we move away from "conform[ing] to the pattern of this world" (Rom. 12:2)?