Timothy's Thoughts

I t’s that time of the year when people start making up resolutions for the new year. I don’t do resolutions, because I can never keep them. But I do have some goals for 2016. Goals are easier to keep because you can catch up after you get behind. Here are my goals (in no particular order): Write a Book It’s been a while since I’ve done any significant writing, but I intend to set aside more time for that in 2016. Just making it a goal while probably be enough to convince me to watch less Netflix and play fewer games, so that I can complete my task. Ride a Bicycle 4,000 Miles That’s nearly 500 miles more than I rode in 2015, but it’s doable, if I don’t injure myself again. Ride a Bicycle to Church at least 10 Times When you think about it, it is a little silly that I live less than 2 miles from church and I use my truck to cover that distance. I probably drain more energy from the battery starting the engine than is replaced in the length of time it takes me to get to church. I’m not r...

W e’re beginning to see a push for walkable cities. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, a walkable city is one in which an automobile is not a requirement. You can walk (or ride a bicycle) to the store. You can walk to work. You can walk wherever you want to go. It turns out that walkable cities are healthier cities, which is due to residents being more active and because of better air quality. Walkable cities are less stressful. Apparently, they are also cool. Walkable cities have more young people than other cities. The cool factor of walkable cities got me thinking. There are a number of churches that structure their worship services around being cool. The preacher is more likely to have a tattoo than to wear a suit. The music is new. Their praise team uses lighting that would make a rock band envious. They offer classes focused on things that interest young people. But for all that these churches are doing to look cool, I don’t recall seeing any that are trying to fit within the wa...

A lone. I spend most of my time alone. There are a number of people who assume that I prefer to be alone. I do not. I was at a wedding and an acquaintance asked me, “Do you wish it were you up there?” I responded in the negative, at which time he said, “I suppose you probably decided what you want out of life some time ago.” I didn’t correct him, but he didn’t get it. My answer had nothing to do with a lifelong decision. When he asked the question, my mind went to the woman who as getting married that day. She was the type of woman that I know I would butt heads with daily. If the guy she was marrying wanted to put up with her, I was happy for him, but I wanted nothing of it. I haven’t found many women I thought would be an acceptable match. Those that I thought might be didn’t agree. So, I am alone. There is more than one way to not be alone. When I go to church, I am not alone. When I visit someone, I am not alone. Sometimes, just getting out in my neighborhood, I encounter enough pe...

X -mas was a term we didn’t use at our house. I remember asking my mother about it when I saw it on some wrapping paper she was using to wrap someone’s gift. She told me that some people use X because they don’t want to write “Christ” and she made it clear that leaving Christ out of “Christmas” was something I was never to do. Since that time, all this talk of leaving Christ out of Christmas has much more vitriol. Try saying “Happy Holidays” to someone and you can expect a lambasting on Facebook. When a manager at Walmart told a Marine that he would have to stand outside to collect Toys for Tots, the Internet lit up with people angry at Walmart. When I made the comment that Marines are trained to dress for the weather conditions, strangers began to call my intelligence into question. Another person, commenting on the same post, used a made up word to describe the people at Walmart that is a cross between a word meaning to have sexual intercourse and to have a mental disorder. These are...

W ithin our society, we have certain groups of people that we revere more than others. Right up there at the top is the American soldier and the veterans, especially those who fought in a war. We revere policemen, who risk their lives on the streets each night as we sleep soundly in our beds. We revere firemen, who brave the flames. We revere teachers, who have committed themselves to teaching our youth. You need not look far on Facebook to see someone praising one of these people for their sacrifice. We see people highlighting our failings at supporting these people at the level we should and expressing a desire to help them before we help anyone else. As the most revered of all of these, let us consider the American soldier, who has signed his life over to Uncle Sam, who may be called upon to die in order to protect American ideals. Of all the good things that a person might do, what could be better than sacrificing one’s life for the good of others? There is no doubt that we owe a g...

W hat are you willing to do for Jesus? That’s a question that I’ve heard many preachers ask during the last forty years. Of course, growing up in a preacher’s home, I quickly learned that the only correct answer is whatever he asks me to do. We agree that when Jesus said, “Take up your cross, daily, and follow me,” he was speaking of dying for him, or at least being willing to die for him. We agree that it is within his right to ask us to move to a foreign land, or take a job that doesn’t pay as well as we would like. He might call us to “labor unrewarded” as the song “So Send I You” suggests. But there in the back of our mind is that thought that we really hope he doesn’t. In time, when we haven’t heard his call to the foreign mission field or to pastor a church, we tell ourselves that he must have called us to something normal. Perhaps to give money to support others. “Whew! I was worried he was going to ask me to do something hard.” But in recent days, I’ve been reminded of that cal...

L ast Sunday, Dr. John David Smith reminded us that the gospel advances only in the face of hardship. The gospel is spreading in parts of the world where Christians face hardship, but in countries like the United States, where it is easy to be a Christian, it is on the decline. Why? What is it about hardship that causes Christianity to grow? I can think of a few things that might cause this. For one thing, uncomfortable people are more willing to work. Suppose you wake up and hear it raining outside. The covers are nice and warm and there’s nothing requiring your attention. It would be so easy go back to sleep for a while. But suppose you wake up and feel droplets of water landing on your forehead. You can feel that the pillow is wet. Within moments, you are out of bed and looking for a bucket to catch the water. Discomfort causes us to take action. But churches in the United States are often quite active while still not seeing many people saved. Hardship also provided contrast. I enc...

H ave you ever stopped to think why you are friends with the people you are friends with? And why was it so much easier to make friends when you were in school than it is now? It is sad, but one of the reasons many Christians struggle with the idea of soul winning is because they don’t know any lost people. O, sure, they might know their lost neighbors (they might) or they might encounter a lost person working the checkout at a grocery store, but what are the chances of success with people who are barely more than strangers? I’ve been thinking about the concept of repeated spontaneous contact . It seems that friendships are not particularly mysterious; we make friends with the people we spend time with. Those people you hung out with in the hall in college before class? It wasn’t hard to be friends with them. If you want to make friends, you need repeated spontaneous contact. But how do we do that? Some people are looking into changes in the way we do housing to achieve this. Maybe th...

O ctober, that wonderful time of the year when people feel the need to post about how they’ve studied their Bible and come to the conclusion that they shouldn’t celebrate Halloween. I must not be studying my Bible enough or something, because I love Halloween. While there are thing about Halloween that I don’t think Christians should be involved in, the same can be said of Christmas. In fact, I believe I can make the case for Christmas being the most wicked of all holidays . There are plenty of things to love about Halloween. For one, it happens in fall. Not in winter when the cold air keeps you inside. Not in spring, when everything is covered in mud. Not in summer, when the sun burns you to a crisp. Halloween is at a magical time of the year. Halloween is the only holiday in which everyone goes and visits their neighbors. Think about that. There are preachers who stand in the pulpit every Sunday and say, “You should visit your neighbors.” Well, on Halloween, they do. Halloween remind...

H ave you ever noticed how many bicycles appear in car commercials? Here is an example: Of course, car commercials are fiction, often showing us cars doing things that we shouldn’t try doing with a car and would void our warranty if we did. But the goal of many car commercials is to sell this idea that, if you buy this particular car, life will be fun. You won’t have to mess with traffic. You’ll have three friends riding with you. You’ll be able to go places and do things that you couldn’t do without it. The image that sells that idea the most is…a bicycle. The fact is, the car they show you in the commercials doesn’t exist. I don’t mean because it is loaded with all the options, but because you won’t find a car to give you the feeling of excitement that they promise in the ads. Not in the city anyway. Sure, you can load up your car with a bunch of friends and drive through downtown, but instead of looking at the city lit up at night, you’re busy watching for pedestrians, or for the t...

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not. As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith. - Galatians 6:9-10 G alatians 6:9-10 is an interesting passage. It is translated as “let us not be weary in well doing,” but I don’t think that’s the way many people read it. Instead, they read it as, “let us not be weary of well doing.” Two little letters can make a world of difference. To be weary of well doing would mean we just don’t want to serve the Lord any more. We would rather go do other things, like go fishing, or attend a ball games, or whatever. But to be weary in well doing means that the well doing is what is wearing us out. During the past couple of weeks, I’ve experienced that. Our church website has been down and the hosting company couldn’t figure out how to fix the problem. They closed the trouble ticket without fixing the problem, so I decided the best thi...

P artly because I’ve grown bored with riding circles in my neighborhood and partly because I don’t like loading my bicycle into my truck so I can go for a ride, I’ve started looking for places I can go by hopping on bicycle and just going. It got me to thinking, what are some of the things in Fort Worth that it is better to do by bicycle than by car? Of course, there are plenty of things you can do on a bicycle, but many of those things could be more easily done by car. Who, for example, really wants to carry their groceries home with plastic bags hanging from the handlebars? What I’m interested in are those things that might give people reasons to oil the chain on a rusty old bike and air up the cracked rubber tires, because it’s that much better to do it by bike. Explore the Trinity River The Trinity River, with its branches and tributaries runs through the heart of Fort Worth. You can’t go from one side of the city to the other without crossing it at least once. You can see it by ca...

I heard on the news this morning that Toyota has the goal of getting out of the gas powered automobile business in favor of electric vehicles. This is hardly earth shattering, since the date they have set is 2050. But they have a desire to reduce emissions of their vehicles. That is an admirable goal, but when it comes to reducing emissions, bicycles are the gold standard. To put it in terms of miles per gallon of gas, a bicycle has a mileage rate of about 1150 MPG. And if we were to put it in terms of money, people who get rid of their cars and travel primarily by bicycle save about $10,000 per year. So, why don’t more people ride bicycles? Time As a person who loves to ride a bicycle, but has only ridden to work one time on a bicycle, I can say that one reason is the time required. It takes about thirty minutes for me to drive the fifteen miles to work. It would require about three times as much time for me to travel by bicycle. To reach work at my normal time, I would have to leave...

G eneral Custer was known as an Indian fighter. He died fighting. The story is told that he and his men found themselves surrounded by a large number of Indians. One of his men said, “General Custer, look at all those Indians we can kill!” Though that attitude didn’t serve him well at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, it is the same attitude that David had when he face Goliath. “Who is this uncircumcised Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” If not for the fact that David won his fight against Goliath, we would say, “That’s awfully foolish of him,” just as we would say it would be foolish for General Custer to be thinking about how many Indians he could kill when he was out numbered. But hasn’t our God called us to foolishness? “God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27). We’re facing our own Goliath right now in the form of Islam. To hear a lot of my friends talk, Islam is the scariest thing there ever was. We dare not ...

W hat do we do with Psalm 109? You may have seen posts on Facebook suggesting that we should pray for our President by praying Psalm 109:8, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” Of course, verse 9 gives us a clearer picture of what the psalmist means, “Let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.” While it might seem funny to tell people that we’re praying Psalm 109:8 for our President, Psalm 109 is nothing to joke about. These are the words of a very downtrodden person, desiring the death of his enemies. Some people, such as C.S. Lewis, have suggested that it is best to leave Psalm 109 and other similar psalms alone. That seems to be the wrong approach when you consider that Peter didn’t stay away from these psalms when he quoted the book of Psalms as saying, “Let his habitation be desolate, and let no man dwell therein: and his office let another take.” He saw it as the inspired word of God and so should we. He saw it as something to use for guidance and so ...

T he picture shows what one of my favorite gifts of all time. It helped shape who I am today. I spent hours with this thing, running wires from one component to the next, first following the schematics in the book and then trying out different things. By the time I was working on similar project in college, I knew enough to teach some of the other students in the lab. What could I do with this thing? Well, I would make some lights turn on and off. I could make a radio. And yes, I could make a clock. If you’ve been watching current events, you probably know where I’m going with this. A fourteen year-old kid took a prototype clock to school to show an engineering teacher, but the kid was arrested and suspended because another teacher thought it was a bomb. There have been mixed responses. Oddly enough, some of the same people who cried foul when a kid got in trouble for shaping a Pop-tart to look like a gun are saying, “It looks like a bomb to me; he should have been arrested.” Some are...

A n atheist asked me, “So, the people in India, who don’t get the gospel, are doomed, because that’s part of [God’s] plan?” Though an atheist asked the question in an effort to shake my faith, it’s a question that many Christians have asked as well. What about those who have never had the opportunity to hear the gospel? Paul seems to address it in Romans 2. In Romans 2:12 he declares, “For as many as have sinned without law shall also perish without law: and as many as have sinned in the law shall be judged by the law.” He goes on to say in Romans 2:13, “For not the hearers of the law are just before God, but the doers of the law shall be justified.” He also explains that even the Gentiles do the things contained within the law, proving that the law of God is written in their hearts. The lie of Satan is that if a person sins without knowing it is a sin, then they shouldn’t be held accountable. We get this idea that these people in India or Africa or South America or New York City or Fo...

L ast week, I attended a youth meeting at which there were no youth. It was a church association meeting and the attendance was fairly good. There were elders who filled every position that the youth would’ve filled, so the meeting went so well that you wouldn’t even notice that there weren’t any youth present. I think it is worth noting that we met in a building that was once a two room school house, until the little farm schools were consolidated and the Missionary Baptists took possession of the building. The more I think about that, the more it disturbs me. When I was a teenager, I was the president of that same youth organization, so I speak of it fondly. Since I was the only youth at our church that was the only “youth group” I had. That’s probably why local associations started having youth meetings in the first place. The association of churches could provide something for youth that a tiny church could not. Isn’t that why we have SOAR in the BMAA? No one BMAA church would put ...

F ourth grade. 1984. Wednesday. Sunshine. The day I got caught cheating. We had these desks with four legs and separate chairs. Not the kind where the books fit under the seat. I’d figured out that you could take the list of spelling words, hide it just inside the front and if you pushed back just enough, you could see the words as the teach called them out. I’d done it a couple times before, but this time I leaned back a little too far or something and she cause me looking. It really upset me when she caught me at it, because I really liked my teacher. I never cheated on a school test again. Oddly enough, the Wednesday test was just a practice test. The real spelling test was on Friday each week. But the people who made spelled all the words right on Wednesday didn’t have to take the test on Friday and they got to chew gum in class on Friday morning. I cheated, just so I could chew gum. It seems like such a little thing now. My mother would’ve bought me gum, if I’d asked, but that w...

politically correct agreeing with the idea that people should be careful to not use language or behave in a way that could offend a particular group of people I ’ll admit it, I’m politically correct. There’s this thing in politics right now where the politician comes out and uses crude language to talk about some group of people, in an effort to show that he is willing to say things that aren’t politically correct. There are people just eating it up. Which is ironic. But it’s made me think about what it means to be politically correct and what I’ve discovered is that I’m politically correct. Let me give you example. I have some friends who are, let’s say, quite rotund. You might say quite round. Oh, let’s just call it what it is. They’re fat. I have some fat friends. I’ve been there myself. But I wouldn’t walk up to them and say, “How ya’ doing fatso?” If we have potluck at church and I see them with a plate piled high with food, I don’t go up to them and say, “Don’t you think you have...

W hat would I say if I were running for President? Not that it would do me any good to put my hat in the ring, but I look at that big long list of names and see their different ideas about things and I don’t know if I agree with them or not. I think some people choose one they like out of their favorite party and then look for ways to defend whatever nonsense their candidate is saying. And every one of them says nonsense part of the time. I got into a discussion about illegal immigration. It started because some people in the Republican party have this idea that we don’t have to apply the 14th Amendment to the children of illegal immigrants. Ann Coulter has tried to say it doesn’t apply the Supreme Court ruled that it didn’t give citizenship to Indians. As true as that is, people at that time didn’t see Indians as people, so to apply that same rule to the children of illegal immigrants would require us to believe that they aren’t people because their parents are here illegally, but bla...

I can’t forgive Josh Duggar. As you may know, Josh Duggar issued a statement admitting to viewing pornography and to marital infidelity. (The statement about pornography was later removed.) This was on the heels of the data from the Ashley Madison website revealing that Josh Duggar had paid a significant amount of money for access to the site. The news media and the pro-homosexuality crowd were quick to jump, saying, “And these are the people who criticize us for gay marriage.” Their quickness cause some people to question why they had singled him out when there are thousands of other people, and likely other second string celebrities who are in that data. It doesn’t a matter why they latched onto him so quickly, the fact is, they did. And who can blame them? Here is a Baptist who is going around telling people that their sin is wrong, while doing things that are equally sinful. We may say, “A Christian is just a sinner who has been forgiven,” but a lost person hears that and sees a...

T he theme for this week has been adultery and pornography. We learned that former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle was taking a plea deal for his involvement with child pornography and having sex with minors. Then the Ashley Madison data breach resulted in us discovering that Josh Duggar has been involved in similar activity, though it isn’t clear whether his was criminal or not. I hadn’t heard of Josh Duggar or the Duggar family until a few weeks ago, when it was revealed that Josh Duggar had fondled some of his sisters. But this thing hits close to home, because the Duggar family looks very much like the families of some of my friends with a house full of kids, home schooled, strict beliefs about modesty, and Baptist. It’s the kind of family that I look at and think that I would have a hard time keeping to the standards that they maintain, but it feels like that, even if it is overkill, the strictness of the rules would prevent this nonsense. But just as the Law could get no one into h...

W here do you draw the line? In recent months, we’ve heard stories of business owners with homosexual customers. They served them like they would any other customer, but then they came in and said, “We would like a cake for our wedding.” The business owners replied, “Gay marriage is against our beliefs, so we can’t do that.” Rather than just going down the street (or I should say, in addition to going down the street) to find someone who would supply the cake, the homosexual customers got mad and sued the business owners. Regardless of where the chips settle in court, where do we Christians draw the line on this? Let’s suppose we design a cake. It is seven layers with white frosting. We put it in the window of the shop and a customer walks in and says, “I want a cake just like that.” Even though we intended it to be a wedding cake, we don’t know what they’re going to use it for, unless they tell us. It’s a little different if the cake has a man and a woman on top and they say, “I want ...

W ho would’ve guessed that you could be kicked out of a church for not tithing? That seems to be the general sentiment of the comments concerning a news story titled 92-year-old Woman Kicked out of Church for Not Tithing . I really have no way of determining whether this was an appropriate action or not, so I won’t address that, but what I find interesting is so many people were quick to criticize the church for this action. Here are some examples: Dennis A. Gauger - money grubbers, go to another church Brenda Meggs Turner - That is why Jesus kicked the money changers out of the temple for charging people to worship. This is not God’s Church!!! Read your Bible people!!! Carolyn Guffey Crain - She doesn’t need that Church’…..A real Bible believing Church would not do that …. Colbey Newsom - Nonsense!!! No one should ever be kicked out of church..that’s prolly not a Christian church then Natalie Tabor McPherson - I believe that pastor needs to be removed because he is not a man of G...

Y ou’ve probably heard by now that Target is rethinking some of its in-store signage, removing gender based distinctions from toy aisles and children’s bedding. Men’s and women’s clothing will still be separated. It all seems to have started with a Tweet from Abi Bechtel about an aisle that Target labeled as “Building Sets/Girl’s Building Sets” rather than just labeling the aisle “Building Sets.” But now, my Facebook account is all lit up with posts from friends who are infuriated about what Target is doing. They see it as an affront to Christianity, akin to Bruce Jenner asking a church to let him speak from their pulpit. I’m likely to upset a few of my friends by saying this, but I’m not convinced that this is a battle worth fighting. I don’t agree with self-described feminist Episcopalian Abi Bechtel, and I don’t like it that Target said, “We heard you” when they didn’t even ask me what I thought about it. But in the end, what can we hope to accomplish with this battle? If Target ha...