Writings
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.
Somewhere on God’s green earth lives a lady named Runa Ware, who has written a book entitled All Those in Favor, Say Something. I have not read her book, but Kline Roberts has. And he has shared with me this little slice of her story. She begins:
In the midst of researching a sermon on the relationship between forgiving and forgetting (which I have yet to preach, because I have yet to figure it out), I stumbled on a sermon with the fascinating title, “Forgiving Your Ex”….as in “former spouse,” “prior partner,” that kind of“ex.” Since I have no “ex” to forgive (or forget), I was able to read the sermon with more curiosity than passion.
More and more of you have been telling me about a radio station on the AM dial (580 by number), where they play “oldies from the fifties.” So on days when I am feeling my age, I give a listen and am amazed at how many tunes and texts I can remember. Why just the other day I joined the Kingston Trio wondering “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” crooned with Patti Page (in 3/4 time, no less) about that “Beautiful Tennessee Waltz,” and then gave full-throated support to the lyric that begins: “There’s a pawn shop on a corner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”
