Timothy's Thoughts

I feel sorry for the people in heaven. It’s not because I think heaven’s a bad place or because they’re separated from their loved ones who are still here. But as I was eating a plum the other day (one of the best I’ve ever had), I got to thinking about the tree of life and how it has fruit for every month. And I got to thinking about how good that fruit must taste and how that no matter how good fruit may taste here, it will be better in heaven. And then I thought about how the people in heaven are already there beneath the shade of that beautiful tree. I thought to myself, “they must be enjoying that fruit.” But then I realized, that can’t be the case; they don’t have their bodies yet. So I feel sorry for the people in heaven. There they are, beneath the oldest tree in the Universe, the granddaddy of them all, the tree that other trees can only imitate, and they can’t eat the fruit. Not being there to know what it’s like, that seems cruel to me. So I feel sorry for the people in ...

A lright authors, do you read your reviews? I’ve heard other authors say they don’t and before now, I’ve kind of dismissed that as silly, since reviews are part of how we get feedback from our readers, but I may have been wrong. Someone asked me a question that caused me to look for one of my books on www.BN.com. While there I happened to see that someone had written a review of the book. It wasn’t a bad review, but it wasn’t as good as I might have liked. I understand where the reviewer was coming from, but looking back at the my original goals for the book, I’m not sure I could have produced a book to his satisfaction and met those goals. Here’s the thing: I look at the review on Sunday evening. Sunday was an amazing day. I hadn’t been scheduled to teach our Sunday school class that day, but I got to teach anyway. We have five visitors in our Sunday school class and many more in church. We learned about a member of our youth group accepting Christ while they were on mission trip...

A reader of this blog recently asked me to address the question, “What is it that separates the 1% from the 99%, how does an author by choice, cross over that line?” It was too interesting of a question to pass up, but it’s one that doesn’t have an easy answer. Another way of wording the question is “What’s the magic fairy dust that gets authors published?” I think if someone knew what the magic fairy dust was, they would’ve bottled it up a long time ago and they would be selling it on eBay. But look around; there are people more qualified to answer the question than me who have some good suggestions on what an author needs to do to get published—write better, read agent blogs, attend conferences, write better query letters—but most of the people who do those things still aren’t published. By all means, do those things, but there has to be something more if we’re going to be intentional about crossing the line into the 1%. And what of the self-published authors? That’s actually where ...

W hen I was in college, I decided I would buy a new tool every month. Some I didn't need. Some I did. But now I'm glad I have them and it didn't really cost me that much every month. I don't do that anymore. If I did, I probably wouldn't have room for all my tools. Now I buy tools when I need them, but I've been thinking that it might be good to start something new. Instead of buying a tool every month, I think perhaps it would be good to make an improvement to the house every month. It doesn't have to be something big. This month's improvement was that I put a nicer flush handle on one of the toilets. I'm just thinking that instead of letting the house get in more and more disrepair over time, every month I could fix something or make something better and it will improve over time.

I t's interesting to hear people's concept of heaven. I've got to admit that I wish I knew what we're going to do there and what life will be like there. The Bible gives us some idea, but some people either ignore what it says or they read more into what it says than I think is really there. One idea that people have is that we're going to be spirit beings in heaven. The Stargate television series had this view of heaven with the concept of the Ancients' ascension. Some people have the idea that as spirit beings we'll be in a state of eternal bliss. And even if that isn't how people view heaven, it amazes me that some people think it is obvious that there will be no time in heaven. Granted, I don't have a complete understanding of heaven, but I don't find any of this to be obvious. I realize the Bible uses the phrase "that there should be time no longer" (Revelation 10:6), but the Bible also tells us that we will have resurrected b...

Y esterday, I opened up Google Reader, looked at all the unread posts and decided not to read them. These days, we get so much information coming at us and lately I've had more than I can handle. In school, I remember reading about a battle that was fought after the end of a war. It's sad to think that people died for no reason, but sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off if information too longer to come to us, like it did back then. For all the information we have, most of us are just as powerless as we ever were. My brain is full and it needs time to rest.

I had this weekend off. I needed the time away from work because we've been working a project that is mentally draining. I needed some time to do something other than look at computer code from morning til night. So what did I do this weekend? I looked at computer code from morning til night. There's a tool that I use that allows for the development of plugins to extend its capability. There's a feature that I've wished the tool had for a long time, so I decided to try adding it. It seemed like a simple task. I thought I would just mess with it for a few hours and see where I got. I don't know what I was thinking. I ran into problem after problem. The first problem was in figuring out how to get a plugin to work in the first place. There is documentation online about how to do it and I found a simple "Hello World" example, so I thought it would be easy. Unfortunately, the tool and the documentation are not in sync. So after several hours of messing ...