“Life is uncertain….eat dessert first.” But I seldom do. More often than not, I don’t eat dessert at all. (But if you have smuggled a key lime pie into the sanctuary this morning, I could be tempted.)

One of the things that surprised me, upon moving to Birmingham, was that my backyard was enclosed by a fence. We didn’t have one in Farmington Hills. Neither did we have one in Livonia. I felt like I was reverting to my childhood. When I was a kid, everybody had a fence. In fact, we had three fences. One fence separated us from the neighbor on the left. Another fence separated us from the neighbor on the right.

She stormed into my office, exasperation dripping from her voice, demanding to know whether the Bible had anything to say about teenagers. So I said: “Why do you ask?” One hour later, she was still telling me why she was asking. Eventually, we got around to the matter at hand…. namely, the Bible and teenagers.

I have written in this week’s Steeple Notes of my life-long fascination with rolltop desks. Which are no good for writing sermons, given their scarcity of working space. But which are great for storing stuff, given their abundance of nooks and crannies, slots and drawers, shelves and cubbyholes. For the beauty of a rolltop desk is not in the stuff you can stash there, but in the stuff you can separate there.