Timothy's Thoughts

S in and our attitude toward it is an interesting thing. Not that long ago, divorce taboo. Fornication was also taboo. It’s interesting how different things are today. We’re much more accepting of divorce than we used to be. As for fornication, you can’t hardly watch a television show these days without someone at least implying that he is sleeping with his girlfriend. And for that matter, look at the Tyler Clementi case. I don’t condone what Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei are accused of, but the biggest concern people seem to have right now seems to be how to stop such bullying and no one seems to be concerned about what else was going on in the room at the time. Tyler Clementi is not innocent, but because he died people want to put all the blame on his roommate. First let’s consider the alleged crime of Dharun Ravi and Molly Wei. If I had someone using my dorm room for romantic encounters with a lover—either man or woman—I would be more than a little upset, so I can understand the tempta...

M ost people realize that I don’t agree with Rachel Held Evans. My take on her doctrine is that she believes a living god exists, but she also believes we came from monkeys. But I have no intention of discussing her doctrine. There’s plenty of evidence to prove her wrong that others have written about. What I do want to talk about is a marketing tactic she uses that might do us all well to examine. Writing for The Washington Post Rachel wrote the article When Atheists and Baptists Agree . In the article, she calls her critics by name and provides links, but she doesn’t pick on just any critic, she chooses Ken Ham of the Creation Museum, Hemant Mehta of the Friendly Atheist Blog and Dr. Albert Mohler, a prolithic blogger and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It is through his blog that I learned of the article she wrote. What we can learn from this is that if you want publicity from blogs you should pick a fight with bloggers who have a history of writing about...

O ne of the hard things in life is saying what’s right and knowing that people will be offended by it. As writers, I think that influences what we write. We don’t like people to be offended. We want everyone to like us, but that doesn’t happen. The easy thing is to try to please people, but it doesn’t make us much of a person if we tell them things that we know aren’t true. I believe the thing that makes writing hard isn’t the work but rather doing what is right.

T he other day, Brandon Cox of Saddleback Church wrote about repurposing sermons to get as much out of them as possible. The argument is that since sermons take so much effort to produce they should be used to the maximum. Having repurposed sermons on numerous occasions in the past, I get his point, however, as I considered the concept in that light I began to question the wisdom of that. My first problem with trying to squeeze everything we can out of a sermon is that the people who’ll be seeing the repurposed sermon may not be in the target audience of the original sermon. For example, suppose a pastor in a fishing village preaches a sermon, we package that sermon up and play it for Rick Warren’s usually audience at Saddleback Church. I’m guessing it wouldn’t go over well, and yet it may have been a very effective sermon in the other church. It is important that we realize that we can’t divorce the message from the audience. Another issue is that I don’t see why we should spend so ...

I n the interest of full disclosure, I should first say that I own stock in Radio Shack. I’ve often said that I think one of Radio Shack’s problems is that their stores are too small. I like Radio Shack because they you can’t help but dream about all the ways you can build something with the cool stuff they have in there and I don’t like Best Buy because it is such an unsatisfactory shopping experience and yet I shop at Best Buy more than I shop at Radio Shack. If I had my way, Radio Shack would have a superstore the size of a Best Buy store where you could get any and all the stuff that Radio Shack sells online. That being said, there’s something to be said for the small stores that Radio Shack has. I walked into a Radio Shack the other day in need of RCA connectors. The store clerk greeted me the moment I walked in the door and asked how he could help. I told him what I needed. He not only knew what I was talking about, but he left the counter, walked the short distance to the back ...

P ornography is a problem. And it’s not just men. I won’t bother to repeat the statistics because on a personal level you either have a problem with it or you don’t. The reason I bring it up on this blog is because due to the title of one of my books, the Google Alert I’ve set up for it generates a number of results linking to web pages where people are looking for specific kinds of pornography. I’m sure they sit in the privacy of their own home or maybe even at work and think that no one knows what they’re doing. Of course, God knows, but even if that doesn’t bother them, there’s really nothing you can do online that someone else can’t see. I don’t figure those people who are online looking for pictures and videos of mothers doing strange things to their children are finding evidence of my book like I’m seeing evidence of their search, but it got me thinking. There are people who think they should write books to reach the sinner. Some of these people write books with bad language and...

W e had a full house at church yesterday. There was still some seats left. Some people sat in the choir loft. We had a video feed going, so I was upstairs taking care of that, though I wouldn't be able to tell you if anyone actually watched it or how many. Even if no one watched it, it was good practice for us. I'm sure the day will come when we'll need that capability. Sometimes it's good to practice something just so you'll be able to do it later. I'm sure that can be applied to writing, but frankly I don't feel like writing much more at the moment.