Timothy's Thoughts

A n atheist stopped by my blog the other day. He seemed to think it was important that I be told that “God is not love.” He had a long list of adjectives to describe what he saw God as being in the Old Testament, one of which was jealous. I couldn’t agree with all of the adjectives he used, but I could agree with that one because God describes himself as jealous. He wants our worship and doesn’t like it when we worship something else. My atheist friend appeared to think that was a bad thing. To me, that is at the very heart of sinfulness. Compared to God, man is nothing, but so many people have this idea that they are so special that it would be wrong for God to tell them what to do. God made man from the dust of the ground. You can’t get any lower than that. We are dirt. Break us down into minerals and we’re worth less than $5. If we could see all of the Universe, we’re just tiny specks on a tiny planet near a tiny star in a tiny galaxy. What arrogance for us to think that God has a...

S teve Laube recently posted an article on average book sales . The figures he posted are interesting and yet, most authors never sell that many books. Across 10 authors and 51 books, he came up with a figure of 12,455 copies. Someone else came up with a figure of 5,000 copies. Most of the one million books published in the United States each year will never sell more than 100 copies. Why the differences in numbers? One thing we have to ask when trying to find the average is what we really mean by the average. As you are probably aware, there is more than one way to calculate an average. The most frequently used method is to calculate the mean. This is done by taking the total books sold and dividing by the number of titles. This is what Steve Laube did. But the mean has little meaning when a few books have very large numbers and the rest are smaller. For example, if we have three books with sales of 5,300, 7,000, and 1,000,000, the mean will be 337,433. We wouldn’t tell an author wh...

T he Bible says that every sin is a sin against God. How can that be? We see an example of that with Joseph. When he refused to sleep with Potiphar’s wife, he asked how he could commit this great sin against God. We know that’s what it says, but we question how what goes on between two people could be a sin against God. It might be easier to understand if he had said it was a sin against Potiphar, but he didn’t; he said it was a sin against God. One way in which it is a sin against God is that it fails to recognize that God is in charge. If God says adultery is wrong and we decide it is okay, then we’re saying that we have more right to control our lives than God does. If your boss told you to do something but you decided you wanted to do something else instead, he just might be upset with you. Another way that it is a sin against God is that it breaks the fellowship with God. God is holy. In fact, that appears to be his foremost attribute. God is not able to look at sin. When we d...

M y cup runneth over” is an expression we sometimes use in reference to the blessings of God. God blesses a person so much that they just don’t know what to do with all he has given them. What a wonderful thing it is when the Lord blesses us that way. The thing about a running over cup is that the excess spills out over the side. It may run across the table and if you don’t catch it quickly, it might soak any papers you have lying there or it might spill onto the floor. If you had another cup sitting there, you might be able to catch the excess in it. God’s blessings aren’t much different than that. Sometimes, we look at the lives of people and see that God is blessing them, but when we look at the people around them, we see that they too are benefiting from the blessing that God is giving to that person. If God is blessing a mother, her children and her husband are also receiving a blessing, as is her church. Anyone who happens to interact with her, even if it is someone she encou...

W hy are there girl power movies, but we don’t see boy power movies? So many books and movies have a theme in which a young girl does things to show that she’s able to do just as much as any boy can do. They’re usually cute stories that encourage girls to see how special and beautiful they really are. There’s nothing wrong with that, but why aren’t their movies for boys like that? And what would one look like if there were? I think part of the problem is that there is a tendency to lower the bar. While people say that girls can do anything that boys can do in order to encourage girls to live their dreams, they downplay many things that boys can and should be doing so that it looks like girls don’t have as far to go. That might help to encourage girls to take charge, but it has the opposite effect on boys. Tell a boy that something he’s doing is easy enough a girl could do it and it no longer seems like it is worth his time. Tell a boy that something he does that we wouldn’t encourage...

I keep hearing that women are more educated than men these days. From what I hear, colleges have more women than men. I have no reason to doubt that, since the numbers don’t lie, but then I saw an interesting picture. It was of some Engineering interns at a particular company. In this picture, there were fifteen young men, but only two young women, who had worked for the company during the summer months. Now before you start talking about sex discrimination, let me say that from what I know of the company, that isn’t likely. The only reason I can think of why there weren’t more women in that picture is because there were so few qualified women who applied. So here’s the thing: though there are more women than men attending college, when you look only at the hard jobs, it appears that men still outnumber the women by a substantial number. In other words, while there are a substantial number of men who don’t act like men, it is still men who are accepting the great challenges of life. ...

S ome people may disagree with me, but I think men understand love better than women. Take for example, the cases where a man loves another man and a woman loves another woman. Two women that love each other will go shopping together. They’ll call each other on the phone. They’ll visit together. They’ll talk about their kids and their husbands. But when men love each other, you see none of that. Oh, two men might occasionally have reason to shop together. They might go on a hunting or fishing trip together. They might sit around and talk about their kids and their wives. But that isn’t love. Most men would do those things with just about anyone, whether they loved them or not. If hunting is his thing, what man would pass up a chance to go? Who cares who he is going with? When two men love each other, you know it because they work together. Some men will spend a whole day helping a friend repair his car. Some men will take the a Saturday and use it to help a friend move. It may not be...