Timothy's Thoughts

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...

I saw a video that ABC News put together the other day that talked about how the US government is spending a lot of money to make dollar coins but people aren’t using them. They’re even building a new warehouse to hold them. So maybe they’re making too many of them right now, but from my perspective, it seemed like an odd piece. I use the dollar coin all the time. Many vending machines have prices that are near or over a dollar, so anytime I buy something from a vending machine I use the dollar coin. It may be true of men more than women, but the dollar coin is easier to use because it is easier to find a dollar coin in a front pocket than it is to retrieve a dollar bill or a credit card from a billfold. I think this is just another case where the news media is failing to paint the whole picture. They have a point they want to make. Picking on the dollar coin is fun because seems to show that the government is wasting money even as they make money. But give it time. In a few years,...

W hile looking into the word nevertheless for yesterday’s post, I came across an interesting story in the Bible that I felt would make a good post by itself. It comes from Ecclesiastes 9:12-18. This wisdom have I seen also under the sun, and it seemed great unto me: There was a little city, and few men within it; and there came a great king against it, and besieged it, and built great bulwarks against it. Now there was found in it a poor wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city; yet no man remembered that same poor man. Then said I, Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard. The words of wise men are heard in quiet more than the cry of him that ruleth among fools. Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good. I immediately thought of how this passage applies to writing. No matter how brilliant your writing is, if you don’t have a platform, people will doubt what you say. On the oth...

N evertheless is a word that appears 97 times in the King James Version of the Bible. It’s an interesting word because it ties two thoughts together with the second thought being related, but doesn’t obviously follow the first. The word first appears in Exodus 32:34, “Therefore now go, lead the people unto [the place] of which I have spoken unto thee: behold mine Angel shall go before thee: nevertheless in the day when I visit I will visit their sin upon them.” In context, this verse comes just after the people sinned by making a golden calf. You recall how they danced around it and said it was God. Moses went to atone for the people. Moses even went so far as to say that if God didn’t forgive them, he might as well blot Moses out of the Lord’s book. But the Lord said he would blot out those who sinned against him. The purpose of the nevertheless here seems to be that the Lord is telling Moses to go ahead and lead the people to the promised land and the Lord would lead them, but do...