Timothy's Thoughts

I n life, it doesn’t matter how you start as much as it does how you finish. You may begin in poverty or in wealth, but the real question is what you do with your life. Endings are so much more important than beginnings. Think about what you see in the Bible. As great as the beginning is, God always had his eye on the end. In the end, he wanted a relationship with us. In the beginning, he gave us the freedom to choose, but without seeing the relationship he wanted to have with us, none of that mattered.

H ave you noticed that nearly every movie that Hollywood produces has a love story? Stratch that. Have you noticed that nearly every movie Hollywood produces has a romance? There are exceptions, but even a real guy's movie, like Die Hard , has a romance. There's a reason for that. I'm sure I'll take some heat from the romance authors out there, but the fact is that romances are easy to write and easy to sell. At least, they're easier to sell than stories without a romantic element. I believe the reason is that we all have this natural desire to hook up with someone and live happily ever after. But desire and reality are often very different. First there is the struggle to find someone. Then there is problem that marriage turns out to be a lot more work than most people imagined. So we like stories that let us imagine that we can storm a tower, kill a bunch of bad guys, rescue the girl, and walk off into the sunset with her. But just because they're easier to s...

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 ...