Timothy's Thoughts

L ast week I attended the Cane Creek Baptist Association’s Youth in the Harvest for the first time in several years. I even got to lead the singing, which is always a pleasure. For those of you who have no idea what the Youth in the Harvest is, it is a monthly youth meeting. I assume it’s a Missouri thing, but it’s not unlike youth meetings that other associations have had. It struck me while I was there that it is ironic that healthy church associations are typically made up of small churches. By healthy I mean that the association has frequent meetings that draw several churches. The Cane Creek Baptist Association has two meetings a month. One is the Youth in the Harvest and the other is the Third Sunday Singing. They also have a Fifth Sunday Meeting that meets the weekend of the fifth Sunday. And they have an annual meeting. They have about twenty churches, which is relatively large for a local association, but I’m not sure any of their churches run more than a hundred in Sunday Sch...

I write this from rainy Zalma, Missouri, having returned from a high school volleyball game. Zalma beat Marquand three games to none. Zalma’s volleyball team has been doing fairly well this year. If this game was any indication, Marquand hasn’t been doing very well. It wasn’t much of a game to watch. But I got to see some people I haven’t seen in several years. I saw some of my old teachers and some of the people who were around when I was in school. The old gym looked a lot like it did when I was there. They’ve made a few changes, but mostly it was the same. It’s odd going back to school. I spent thirteen years of my life there and it all seemed so important. These days, it doesn’t seem important at all. There are other students who are there now. They’re walking the same halls I walked and sitting in the same classrooms. They are the ones worried about their test grades. I’m glad I’m not there.

H omeschooling is growing. Texas saw a twenty percent increase in homeschooling last year. Supposedly, it is because of the economy. Parents who were sending their children to private schools are pulling them out and homeschooling instead. Now, I realize that there are some cases where home, private and alternative schooling is necessary, but as a general rule, I think that parents with Christian children are doing the wrong thing by homeschooling their kids. The primary reason parent homeschool is because they want to “integrate their faith” into their children’s education. I get that. Really, I do, but what about integrating our faith into the education of the lost world? Isn’t that what God has called us to do? I hear a lot about prayer being taken out of schools and the Ten Commandments being taken off the walls. I can tell you right now that the courts have done far less to take prayer out of school than what Christians have done by pulling their kids out of the public schools an...

S cience fiction folks like to talk about these other dimensions. Sadly, many of them get the idea wrong. They talk about another dimension like it is another Universe. As you know, we keep track of four dimensions, X, Y, Z and Time. If you were to add a fifth dimension, whatever that would be, it would be possible for something to be at one location and at the same time be at another location. Quite literally, as far as our four dimensional Universe is concerned, that object could be everywhere at once. The comparison is usually made between a two-dimensional space and a three-dimensional space. If a living being could only perceive two dimensions, then a three-dimensional object would appear as the intersection. A cone would appear as a circle or some other conic shape. If it moved along the third dimension through time, it would appear to expand or contract. It could come into existence within an instance and disappear for no apparent reason. The problem with that is that there is ...

T here are several stories that I’d like to be writing right now. And there’s a non-fiction book I’d like to write. Actually, there’s more than one. Funny how I want to work on them while I need to be working on the book I’ve already started. The one I’ve started completes a five book series. I really want to be finished with that series. It isn’t that I don’t want to spend more time with those characters; I love my characters, but I’m ready for a new cover design. That’s one of the great things about self-publishing; you get to design your own cover. Of course you can let someone else do it, but what’s the fun in that. So one more novel and I get to play around with covers again.

I ’ve hard that the best stories come about when you write yourself into a corner that you don’t think you can get out of, but you do. Writing shouldn’t be easy. When you find that a character is doing something without a good motivation, you might decide to quit. You might decide to go on to another story, but if you keep going and work through the problem you might discover that what you have is one of your best stories ever. It might take you a while, but work it out and see what happens.

A lot of importance is placed on an author making a name for himself. How different that is from how television and movies work. You don’t often know much about the person writing a script. You might know something about the actors, but only the stars. You don’t pay much attention to most of the people involved and you may only recognize the actors by the character they play. It may just be wishful thinking, but wouldn’t it be nice if books were that way? Perhaps it’ll get that way. People won’t pay much attention to who wrote the book, just whether it is a good book or not.