It sounds like a rock group, doesn’t it--“Noah and the Robots?” Some of you probably think the title of my message is a bit frivolous. It may be, but the subject matter we are going to discuss today is not frivolous at all.

I read something interesting about the famous novelist Charles Dickens. It seems that Dickens wrote all his great stories in installments. Week after week, Dickens would spin out his tales and the English public would breathlessly wait to see what was going to happen next to such characters as Oliver Twist, Pip, Miss Havisham, and all the other great characters Dickens created.

Dickens used to say that when he began a novel, he really had no idea how the story would end. He said that his characters, which began as figments in his own brain, quickly assumed a life of t…