Timothy's Thoughts

A co-worker and I got into a discussion the other day about the value of unions. He was very much against them because of experiences with union workers taking much longer than is reasonable to do their job and not being able to do it himself because the task fell under the union contract. My position was that while I don’t desire to be in a union, I support the concept and I think there are a few unions that still serve a good purpose. I gave the Actors’ Guild as an example, because they use their collective power to help persuade movie producers to provide actors with better working conditions. Many of these actors work so infrequently that they would take any part, without consideration of some of the things the Actors’ Guild has taken into account. What surprised me was my co-worker’s response. Rather than mentioning the role of the government (which may or may not apply depending on the country a movie is being filmed in), his response was that he didn’t see the Actors’ Guild a...

S ome people really don’t like the idea of writing the same plot over and over. They say things like, “Publishers just want to force us all into the same genre. They won’t even look at something new.” But look at how many times Cinderella has been told. There must be thousands of variations on that story. And look at the Romance genre. Forget the strict rules about what makes a book romance novel, most books in the genre follow the same plot. Two characters with problems meet. They are soon at odds with each other. But as they discover that they need each other and that they are better together than apart. But that plot isn’t limited to the Romance genre or characters who fall in love. In spite of the evidence we have a tendency to think that if we could just come up with a plot that no one has ever done before then it would shake up the literary world. People who try that end up with is a poorly done variation of an existing plot. What do we make of all of this? First, people lik...

“ W hy do you want to know?” Most people try to read between the lines and most people are bad at it. That’s what happens when you try reading something that isn’t there. But that doesn’t keep us from trying. I got involved in a conversation online recently in which several people read a lot more into my comments than what I had actually said. At one point in the conversation I said, “I wasn’t saying anything against romance. (Why is it that everyone seems to think I am?)” To this Steve Laube replied, “Agreed. You did not mention romance specifically. But there have been comments on other posts where the genre was mentioned by you.” I suppose I should be grateful that people remember what I’ve said (apparently better than I do), but you would think I have a vendetta against romance or something. That is not the case. For some reason, people are most interest in our motive for saying something or asking something than they are in the words we use. “How is your mother?” we might ask...

H ow much money should you make? The question came up on Steve Laube’s blog Goodbye to Traditional Publishing? . Apparently, Ann Voss Peterson (no, I don’t know who she is either), is upset because she only made $20,000 on 170,000 copies of a book. That is roughly 12¢ per copy. The cover price is $4.50. So allowing for the store to get 40%, the publisher gets $2.70, so Ann Voss Peterson receive only 4.3% of what the publisher received, or 2.4% of the cover price (by her figures). Sounds terrible, doesn’t it? Okay, backup. I think you missed something. Ann Voss Peterson made $20,000 from a book she wrote. Given that an author writing full-time can crank out four books a year, that is the equivalent of $80,000 per year. You won’t get rich on that, but I know a lot of people who think that is a good salary. We usually measure what we consider to be a good salary by what other people are making. If someone is making $50,000 a year but he sees a co-worker making $60,000 a year, he ...

A proximately 1.7% of Americans describe themselves as homosexual. Now that means that roughly 2 out of every 100 people you encounter are gay. That’s not that many, but it is enough that you are likely to find some among your friends or at the very least you know people with them in their family. Being the nice person that you are, you might not see anything wrong with gay “marriage”. After all, it isn’t like it will change anything for you. If they want to get married, what’s wrong with it? As long as they keep what they do behind closed door—and isn’t that true for heterosexual relationships also? So what’s wrong with gay “marriage”? For the sake of argument, let’s forget what the Bible says about homosexual relationships. The thing is, every sin that exists manifests itself in the form or something harmful, so if there is any merit to what the Bible says, then there ought to be a harmful manifestation. If that isn’t the case, then maybe the Bible isn’t right. As an example, con...

The book of I John was written for the express purpose of helping us determine whether we are saved or not. Here are some of the tests: Do we walk in darkness? (I John 1:6) That is not to say that we do not sin because John tells us in I John 1:8 that if the say we don’t sin then the truth isn’t in us. Rather, we should ask ourselves whether we desire to do good or not. Do we keep his commandments? (I John 2:3) People who are saved are no longer under the law, but they have a desire to do what God has commanded anyway. Do we lust for the present world? (I John 2:15) What is important to you? Do you want to make lots of money so you can buy a nice home, have the latest technology, go to all the parties, or would you rather be serving the Lord? Do we believe that Jesus is the Christ? (I John 2:22) Are we trusting Jesus and Jesus alone for our salvation or are we relying on things like the money we give to church, the number of times we read our Bible, the things we do for the poor, eve...

N o one deserves to die,” or so is the claim made by a television show I watched recently. The series is based around a man who was once a hit man. His then boss and father figure in his life taught him that it was okay to kill the people they were hired to kill because they deserved to die. But then he was given the assignment of killing a woman whose only fault was that she had witnessed a crime and those who had done it didn’t want her to testify against them. That was the turning point that caused the main character to begin a crusade to protect the innocent. But is it true that “no one deserves to die?” It sounds good. With that battle cry we would have reason to protect both friends and strangers. Instead of saying, “no one deserves to die,” how different it sounds when we say, “everyone deserves to live.” They are both saying exactly the same thing and yet, with the second, we aren’t as quick to agree. Life is a privilege, is it not? It is a thing of great value. It is so val...

T here are some people who will take every opportunity they can find to criticize the Bible. On one of the Amazon.com forums, someone asked the question “What is the most overrated novel of all time?” Among the divers answers, someone wrote, “The Bible.” Someone else wrote, “As a NOVEL, the Bible is actually quite good. It’s just a shame that people waste time reading it as nonfiction.” It should come as no surprise that people hate the Bible, and Jesus, and us; Jesus told us it would be so. But why is it people hate it so much? With most books, if the topic came up, someone might say, “I didn’t really care for that book.” Even with the Koran, even though some Muslims think we’re out to burn their holy book, people who don’t see it as a holy book mostly ignore it. They don’t go on a forum that is discussing another topic to talk about how much they dislike it as a book. The same is true of the Book of Mormon. There’s plenty of people who have taken the time to state what is wrong wit...

It would cause so much less pain if more women were to see Jesus as their true Husband. W hat?! I saw this statement on another blog. I’m purposefully leaving off the name of the person who said it. If you really want to know, Google it. Women are supposed to see Jesus as their true husband? Do people even take the time to think about what they are saying? First, where does the Bible say that Jesus is to be women’s true husband? It doesn’t. What it does say is that the church is the bride of Christ. Now right now, that applies to each local individual assembly that can rightly be called a church. By the time we get to the marriage supper, there’s only going to be one assembly. The church is the first and the only bride of Jesus. Second, if Jesus is a woman’s true Husband, that makes her a bigamist. Third, if Jesus is a woman’s true husband, then what is Jesus to a man. Is Jesus the man’s true wife? Is the man also the wife of Jesus? The whole thing breaks apart when you try to ma...

T he other day, I got into a discussion about women under appreciating the contributions of their husbands. It started with Kristin Billerbeck saying that many housewives see their life as not far from slavery. I’m sure she meant that tongue in cheek—at least I hope she did—but it highlighted an attitude that I don’t believe is beneficial. I do think that some women have the attitude that because their husbands aren’t helping with the housework that they aren’t doing anything. I’m reminded of my mother telling me that she had to resist the urge to dump us kids on Dad when he got home. Here, he’d been at work all day, he comes in the door ready to sit down and read the newspaper, but what she wanted to do was pass us kids off on him because he hadn’t been around all day. Now, in some cases, women are working outside the home. My grandmother was a schoolteacher and my grandfather was a carpenter. Some women in that situation think that it isn’t fair that they still end up taking care ...

O ne of the banks I do business with tells me that if I will sign up a certain feature, they will plant a tree in my honor. This is one of those things that looks good on paper, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. As I stated on Facebook, since they aren’t going to plant it in my yard, I don’t see the point. Now that might upset some of you green hugging environmentalist types, but have you really thought about it? Suppose for a moment that I signed up and sure enough, they plant a tree in my honor. Now, you realize that banks don’t have workers who plant trees. So to plant my tree, the bank will pay someone to plant a tree. That’s what makes it sound so great. We need trees, don’t we? The more the better, right? But who are they going to pay? The stated goal of the bank is to plant 25,000 trees. If they are planting the trees 12 feet apart, they will need about 83 acres for the trees. I very much doubt they are planting them on the lawn at corporate headquarters. Instead, I su...

Y ou’ve probably already heard about high school students walking out on a lecture by “anti-bulling expert” Dan Savage when he launched into a diatribe against Christians and the Bible. In fact, his remarks are quite viscous and were aimed at the Christian students who were in the room. This from someone who has been described as “President Obama’s anti-bullying czar.” Obviously, President Obama would do well to try to distance himself from Dan Savage. This type of thing is what has bothered me since the beginning of this emphasis on anti-bullying. The problem I see is that people are not as concerned about bullying as they are about someone disagreeing with them. Also, there is the problem that bullying is not clearly defined. I’ve read that 71% of people believe Dharun Ravi using a webcam to show Tyler Clementi involved in homosexuality is bullying. That’s what the news media called it from day one, so that number doesn’t surprise me. But how many of those people would be able to s...

H ere’s a shocker. When Steve Laube posted the list of Christian Book Award winners on Tuesday, I saw the names of nine authors only two of which were women. And one of those women was the last of three names that co-authored a children’s book, the other two were men. That works out to be 22% for the women and 78% for the men. The thing that makes this a shocker is that to hear a lot of people tell it, Christianity is dominated by women. Some people seem to think that it’s the women who go to church. It’s the women who work in Sunday school and youth ministry. It’s the women who sing in the choir. Why without the women, the churches would fall apart, or so I’ve heard. (Perhaps they would.) Then look at all the Christian writers conferences. There’s no question that those are dominated by women. Women easily outnumber the men there by a margin of ten to one. I really don’t believe Christianity is as dominated by women as some people think. That certainly isn’t the case at our churc...

S ometimes we see discussions about things that some churches call sin and others do not. It often centers around how much involvement a church allows people involved in that sin to have. Often we see churches trying to be more accepting of people, no matter what sin they might be involved in. I was thinking about one of these discussions. In this case one well known preacher was criticizing another well known preacher for not speaking out against one sin that it has become taboo of late to speak against. I think you know which one it is. In fact, the pastor had no problem with two men of that persuasion to serve in the church, except one of them was still married to his wife. Rather than try to sort through that mess, I’ll leave it at that. I’ll just say, the pastor mentioned above has said that people of a particular persuasion have stated going to his church because other churches are not accepting of their lifestyle. As I thought about it, I began to think, you know, I have no ...

“ D on’t judge,” the world says, but the fact is, we don’t always have that luxury. At church, we do background checks on our leaders. Why? Because we’re trying to protect the children from wolves in sheep’s clothing. That requires judgment on our part. Parents judge their kid’s friends. People who are dating, are judging the other person to see if they are the kind of person they think they can spend a lifetime with. Let’s admit it, judging is a part of life. But here’s the real question: What should be our basis for judging? And don’t say “the Bible.” Of course it should be the Bible, but what should be our basis for disqualifying someone? When dealing with the issue of marriage, we usually pull out 2 Corinthians 6:14 . A believer shouldn’t be unequally yoked with unbelievers. But that applies to more things than marriage. It applies to churches. A church has no business having unbelievers within her membership. It applies to business. Don’t go into a partnership with an unbeliever...