Timothy's Thoughts

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...

A company I own stock in sent out an announcement about a new contract they had been awarded. In their statement they said, “we are humbled by this selection.” Suspect that companies say that as a way of recognizing the efforts of those who put effort into making the decision and it sounds better than singing We Are the Champions , no matter how much you might want to do that. One also doesn’t want to offend the selection committee while the paperwork is still being signed. But it made me wonder. Is the statement correct? “We are humbled by this selection.” Is anyone ever humbled by winning? I suspect not. We can be humble when we win, but it is not winning that humbles us. Losses can humble us. If we’re expecting to win, but if someone we didn’t expect to win beats us, it will humble us. But what can humble us when we win? To be humbled when we win requires that we look at the competition and see what they are capable of. We’re glad when we win that we came out on top, but the hu...

P eople say that a writer should imagine he is writing to one person, much like he would if he were writing a letter. The idea is that by doing so he will avoid the problems caused by trying to say too many things to too many people. But I see something wrong with this idea. Imagine, if you will, that you have a mother-in-law that you can’t stand and you have chosen to write to her. So, in your story you begin to point out what is wrong with everything she does. When she reads the story, if the theme is obvious, she will take offense. That is probably why some people have the idea that we shouldn’t have an obvious theme. Sometimes, we intend for people to be offended, and that’s okay, but just because we don’t want people offended doesn’t mean we must not have an obvious theme. Instead of writing your story to her, write it to we. Find a way to include yourself in your audience. Instead of venturing into areas you know nothing about, look for common ground. Don’t tell your mother-in-...

M erry Christmas. I hope you are attending church somewhere this Christmas, whether with your home church or at a church where you are vacationing. If you live in Fort Worth and are looking for a church with its doors open today, South Park Baptist Church will have preaching at ten o’clock this morning. Now, on to other things. I thought the video below very fitting for a Christmas post: Flash mobs like this interest me because they take art to the world. People who might not visit a concert hall, a church, or even the center court of a mall while a choir is singing, will stop and listen. Still more will pass these videos around on the Internet. In spite of what some church music directors believe, people still like choirs. So why aren’t people flocking to churches with talented choirs? Largely, I think it has to do with keeping up appearances or event the fear of death. Some people are afraid to say that they like choir music because they think their friends will think they are s...

T he saying is that you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. To me, it seems like marketing is like bringing horses to water. The more horses you bring, the more horses will drink, but not all will. If you are trying to sell a book, your job isn’t to make people buy the book. Your readers will decide whether they want to buy the book or not. What you are trying to do is to put the book in front of as many people as possible. The more people who know about the book, the more that will buy the book. You need not be concerned with those people who don’t buy the book. They weren’t thirsty enough to drink. And who knows, maybe they’ll be thirsty sometime later. So you just keep putting it out there. Some time ago, I heard that on average, a person has to see a book seven times before he makes a decision. That implies that we should look for ways to put it in front of the same people seven times. The problem with that is that we may spend a lot of time putting it out t...

P eople don’t care if someone is good or not, as long as they are nice. That is part of the reason why people change their attitude about sin, like adultery or homosexuality, when it involves a person who is part of the family. When we think of an adulterer as a bad person, it is easy to see it as wrong, but when someone we know and like is involved in adultery, we want to dismiss it rather than think of them as bad people. The same is true of homosexuality. As long as it only involves people who hang out at gay bars, or Catholic priests who are a little too familiar with the boys, it is easy to think of homosexuality as bad, but when it involves a family member or a friend, it looks very different. The real problem is that we have the wrong idea about sin. Think of Jesus and the woman at the well. She was an outcast because of her sin. She had had many men and she had likely taken some of those away from their wives. She wasn’t a good person. I don’t know if she was a nice person or...

M arriage is on the decline. People who do get married are getting married later in life. And many couples forego the legal ceremony and simply live together. Of course, once people start living together, they don’t really see the need for a ceremony because they are “essentially married.” It sounds bleak, and indeed it is, but I don’t think it will always be this way. Life goes in cycles. Part of the reason why people don’t see a reason to get married these days is because they see marriage as something of a religious nature. It is religious people who see a problem with adultery, so when people reject God they also reject marriage. But in time, people will begin to see that marriage isn’t a matter of religion, but God instituted it for a reason. Let me give you a real life example, I’ll change the names to protect the guilty. Jason and Rachel were high school sweethearts. They were so in love. One night, maybe even many nights, things got out of hand and they found themselves in ...