Timothy's Thoughts

I 've been struggling with a story lately. I have a rough outline done but some of the finer points are difficult. The story involves a woman killing someone, but the story isn't about her, it is about another man. The strange thing about this story is that the man she kills needs to be killed, but I need it to be the case that the reader feels that the man the story is about should have been the one to kill this man. I'm also struggling because the story takes place in a modern setting, so it is hard to see this as justice if it doesn't first go through a court of law.

R omance novels make up the bulk of the Christian fiction market. Harlequin’s Love Inspired is pumping out six a month. Then there are suspense novels, many of which are also romances. Harlequin’s Love Inspired Suspense is pumping out four of those a month. And that’s just a portion of what one publisher is putting out. It seems that the theory of Christian publishers is that there is not story that cannot be rewritten as a romance. I’ve been giving this subject some thought ever since Tamela Hancock Murray brought it up on Steve Laube’s blog ( [1] , [2] ). Tamela is a literary agent and a romance novelist, so that should give you some idea of her view on the subject. But the thing I’m really struggling with is the concept of love that we find in Christian romance novels. I’m not going to tell you that they aren’t clean. I’m not going to tell you that they are poorly written. I could give examples, but most are clean enough that pastors’ wives read them and the readers aren’t complai...

T he other day, I was involved in a discussion about providing links to more than just Amazon.com. The claim was that Barnes & Noble checks to see if authors are linking to them or not and they will stop selling the author’s books if they don’t find links to their site. I don’t know if that is true or if it is just an urban legend. It seems to me that Barnes & Noble has better things to do than to pay someone to see how many links there are from the author’s website. Besides which, Barnes & Noble makes money from selling books, not from links. But it’s one of those things that sounds almost believable because Barnes & Noble has a history of refusing to sell some books. But this post isn’t about that. In the discussion, one of the things mentioned was that with so many booksellers out there, having more than one link results in a big long list. I suggested that rather than having a list of links, people could just have their website or blog randomly choose which link t...

H appy New Year. This is the year the world ends, or so say the people who are putting faith in the Mayan calendar. But you may recall, the world was supposed to end last year—twice. But some people think that the world is going to end December 21, 2012, all because of a Mayan calendar. Most people are acting like they believe it will end then, but I do think there are people who are afraid that “it just might be true.” The sad thing is that people are more willing to put their faith in Mayans who are dead than they are in people who are living. They are more willing to put their faith in a piece of ceramic with no evidence to support it than they are in the Bible, which has a preponderance of evidence to show that it is true. Why would you believe a calendar that has no proven claims over a book that has hundreds of proven claims and no disproven claims? That doesn’t make sense to me. One thing I know is that the world is not going to come to an end on December 21, 2012. I cannot ...

W hy did God choose men to lead? Actually, that is probably the wrong question. As I’m sure you will recall, Paul’s basis for saying that men are the head of the family is based on the fact that God created Adam first and then Eve. Though some people may see that as rather arbitrary because it seems like the luck of the draw whether a person will be either male or female, consider that what God did is not unlike what you would do if you were picking a team of workers. The first person you would pick would the team leader. You would decide what you need in a leader, look for a person who meets those qualifications, and once you found that person, you would pick a team who complimented that person’s style of leadership. God had an advantage over us. He was able to decide what he wanted in a leader and then build the guy to exacting standards. In choosing a helper, he looked first at the creatures that were already there, but when Adam didn’t find anything he liked, God made a helper who ...

A recent discussion of Romance novels caused me to reexamine the Greek love words. These are storge , phileo , eros , and agape . There’s little question what some of these mean. storge appears to be a fondness for the people we know. You might have this for your co-workers. phileo goes farther than that. It is more like the love that David and Jonathan had for each other and apparently, it is the love Peter had for Jesus. It reminds me of old family friends that you may not see for months, but when you get together it is like you’ve never been apart. Then there is eros which is that natural sexual desire that we all have. It is good when a man has it for his wife, but he could also have it for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. We don’t have much control over it, but we do have the choice not to act on it. Lastly, there is agape , which I suspect is misunderstood by many people. The reason I think this word is misunderstood is because people have equated agape with the unconditio...

I paid off my mortgage the other day. I’ve got to admit that it made me a little nervous. I’d been saving up the money for some time and it made me nervous because my bank account suddenly dropped by a significant amount. But I talked myself into hitting the button. The mortgage is gone. I am officially debt free! It will take me a while to build up my savings to what it was before, but it is very freeing to know that there isn’t a bank out there who has a right to foreclose on my house or to repossess my car. And though life always has expenses, it is nice to know that if I were to suddenly lose my job that I would have a roof over my head for as long as it took to find a new one. Ultimately, it is God who provides and in this case, I believe it is he who has given me the ability to pay off my house. He has blessed me well, though I frequently wonder why. I certainly don’t deserve all he has given me. As I think about this, I can only say that the wealthiest people in the world...