Timothy's Thoughts

I ’m fascinated by desire paths . In the video below, Tom Hulme discusses designing based on desire paths in dirt. But desire paths aren’t always paths that we can see from satellite photos. Since I do quite a bit or work with websites, I spend a significant amount of time looking at website statistics. In particular, I look at the phrases people type into search engines. There are a number of search phrases that I have targeted. When I see these show up, this tells me that what I’m doing is working. But things get more interesting when I begin looking at the other phrases. Not long ago, on a church website, I saw that someone had visited the site after typing the phrase, “hanging of the greens service ideas.” On one hand, this is of little importance. At some point, the church had positioned itself on this desire path by holding a “hanging of the greens service” and someone posting something about it on the website. You can be sure that the person following this path isn’t going to vi...

F or the past couple of weeks, our Sunday school class has been looking at some of the Apostle Paul’s letters. Now, you may be wondering how Paul’s letters relate to hashtags. Recently, I’ve been seeing hashtags…I mean a lot of hashtags. I’ve been seeing posts with three or four or more hashtags. I see posts where half the post is taken up with hashtags. What do I do? I ignore the post and keep on scrolling. I suspect most other people do as well. We need to think about hashtag strategy, and I think Paul’s epistles can help us with that. Paul’s Form Paul followed a standard form, when he wrote his epistles. This may have been how he was taught to write in school, but it is worth considering. First, he tells the reader who he is. In your Bible you’ll see that all of Paul’s letters begin with the same word. Can you guess what it is? Absolutely right. “Paul” is the first word of every letter. (Hebrews would be an exception, if it is written by Paul.) Next, Paul gives a brief introduction ...

S o, as I’m reading through 1 Corinthians and trying to prepare for a lesson on Sunday, it occurred to me that when we get to chapter twelve, Paul is still dealing with problems. He has just addressed the unfair distribution of the Lord’s supper. Chapter thirteen is going to call for them to place a priority on love. But that usually not the way we address it. Usually, when we see this thing about spiritual gifts, we ask people what their spiritual gift is. We may even send them off with a spiritual gift assessment and when they come back and tell us that they have the “gift of wisdom” or the “gift of prophecy” or whatever it happens to be, we start trying to match them up with some ministry that tends to have a lot of people with the same assessment as they have. Besides the fact that the Bible tells us nothing about what circles to fill in for each of the spiritual gifts, what does that have to do with problems? It seems to me that Paul is stating what he seems to think is obvious to...

S ome years ago, following a committee meeting at church, I made a sarcastic comment to a friend about what had been discussed. I don’t remember what I said, or what had been discussed in the meeting. What I do recall is that I found myself summoned to a meeting at church, a few days later. I show up at this meeting, not even thinking about the earlier conversation. But when I got there, the door closed and the conversation began, “Someone told me that you’re upset.” So much for my idea that this meeting had something to do with a project I working on at the time. For the next hour or so, we discussed this thing that I didn’t want to discuss at all. A simple offhand comment had turned into a position that I was expected to defend and my attempts to dismiss the whole thing did nothing to bring the conversation to a close. All from me just thinking aloud. I learned something from that. Venting is not allowed. Never say something that you aren’t willing to defend. I was looking for someon...

S tephen Wilkes made the observation that “The act of sharing has become more important than the experience itself.” He made this statement in a TED talk in which he was telling about his work as a photographer. To achieve the affect he is looking for, he spends many hours in one location, shooting thousands of photos of tourist attractions. This gives him a lot of time to observe human behavior. While doing so, he noticed that people were using historic locations more as a backdrop for photos of themselves, rather than exploring the site. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. We’re unlikely to change it. I’m more interested in why this is the case. This hasn’t always been the way things are, but one thing we know about humans is that we don’t change much. Our motivations today are very similar to what people’s motivations were when the Bible was being written. It’s unlikely that the change in what people do at sites has anything to do with a chang...

H ow is salvation like a helmet? I’ve heard many sermons about the armor of God. More often than not, emphasis is placed on what a helmet is rather than on the armor itself. Just as we aren’t battling flesh and blood, we aren’t actually wearing armor. There is value in knowing that a helmet protects the most valuable part of our body and we might point out that like a helmet, salvation keeps us alive, even if we have other injuries. But maybe the point of Ephesians 6:10-20 isn’t that spiritual things are like physical armor, but we are to prepare ourselves for battle. Truth When we stand in battle, we are to have truth. We are battling for hearts and minds. The enemy is lying to those we are trying to reach. When we speak the truth, the enemy is caught with his pants down. No lie can stand up against the truth. So, we go into battle with truth like a belt. Righteousness Of course none of us are completely righteous, but Jesus is our righteousness. Even so, one of Satan’s favor tactics ...

A couple of years ago, I went on my first official “Mission Trip” to Albuquerque, New Mexico. This year, our church has returned to do much of the same thing we did then. In fact, some of the work we are doing this week includes repairing picnic tables we repaired two years ago and replacing windows in a mobile home that we repaired windows in two years ago. I find myself, again, asking, why do we do these mission trips? Before we answer that question, I think we need to define two different types of mission trips. Interestingly, a mission trip may be one type for one person and another type for someone else on that same trip. I see these two types as expert mission trips and training mission trips. An expert mission trip is one in which a person with special knowledge and experience, such as an eye doctor, travels to a mission field to put that knowledge and experience to use. A training mission trip is one in which people travel to a mission field to perform tasks that they do infreq...