Getting and Keeping a Mentor

18 March 2025

Young adults need mentors, and a lot of them even know it. Most young adults never get a mentor, because they don’t have the first clue how to find one, and more importantly, how to behave in a mentoring relationship. It’s not their fault; nobody is born knowing these things. Unfortunately, most older adults no longer teach this skill set — not even parents. From the Boomers onward, far too many adults don’t know how to mentor, don’t want to, and simply refuse to assume the responsibilities and moral authority to do the job well.

So if you’re in the market for a mentor, but don’t know where to start, pull up a chair, grab yourself a fine brewed beverage, and let Uncle Tim lay some wisdom on ya. There’s two skill sets you need here: finding and acquiring a mentor to start with, and then living in a mentoring relationship.

The first thing is identifying the person you would like mentoring from. This can be really simple: look for someone who…

  • is who you want to be when you grow up, or
  • can do a specific thing that you really want to to do.

You’ll be tempted to think of internet personalities or celebrities. Stop it. Work harder; find someone less famous, and preferably someone local. Once you’ve identified the person, move in for a closer look, as close as you can get. Do you want the whole package, or some specific skill? Are there particular things about this person you definitely do not want to pick up? Think about that one long and hard; if you spend significant time with this person, you may end up more like them than you wanted to be.

Once you’ve found the person…then what? Ask, of course! But there’s an art to maximizing your chances of getting a “yes.” First you need the right mindset, and then you need a good approach. As a potential apprentice, you need to have a clear understanding of the nature of mentoring relationships. In no particular order, here are some key things to know:

  • If you’re just getting started, all you need is someone a little ahead of you. As you grow, you’ll come to need (and be able to attract) mentors with much greater experience and skill.
  • Every beginner dreams of being mentored by a master teacher from day one. That really does happen occasionally; I’ve met a few such people. Usually, that person is the teacher’s kid, favorite nephew, or something like that. If you get such an opportunity, by all means take it, but don’t sit around waiting for it to magically happen. Normally, a master teacher’s time will be spent with advanced practitioners who have already put in the time to master the basics of the craft, and who have already proven their commitment to continuing in the work. Those people are a much better investment than you are as a beginner. If you’re the kind of person who won’t engage unless you can be guided by a master, then you’re also the kind of person no master will take. Nobody needs an apprentice who won’t get over himself.
  • It’s really rare that anybody worth following actually needs your help. Unless you happen to have some special skill your prospective mentor really needs, this isn’t going to be an even exchange at the beginning, which means you’ll be asking for an investment, not a trade. (There are ways of evening up. I have a colleague who cold-approached a world-class practitioner and asked him to mentor her; she offered to pay his regular hourly rate for any time he spent on her, so he wouldn’t lose money. He said yes; she worked her tail off, and today she’s highly and uniquely skilled. She also spent a small fortune getting there; not everyone can do that. But it was money well spent.)
  • Since it won’t start as an even exchange, you will be a net drain on the system in the beginning. Teaching you has an opportunity cost; your mentor is going to get less of something this year because he’s spending time and effort on you. What the cost is to him depends on the situation; it might mean slowing down his work so he can teach you as he goes; it might mean taking fewer jobs in order to make time for you. The time he spends with you might otherwise be spent with his wife, his kids, his friends, reading, learning some new skill, or binge-watching UFO documentaries, but count on it, that time is coming from somewhere. No need to feel bad about that; your mentor thinks you’re worth the investment, or you wouldn’t be here. But he has an expectation that the investment is going to pay off; it’s up to you to make sure he’s right.
  • Speaking of the investment paying off, here’s a basic rule of human behavior: everybody always gets paid…somehow.
    • You will get tutelage and experience.
    • Your mentor will get…something. In order for the relationship to work well, you need to know what he’s getting out of it. Find out what it costs and don’t be put off by the inconvenience. Training an apprentice isn’t convenient either; this is your end of the deal. If it’s not worth the cost, then find a different mentor. If it is, then pay it and make it look easy.
    • It’s an asymmetrical relationship, but it’s not asymmetrical everywhere, all the time. There are things your mentor will do for you that you couldn’t do or wouldn’t be expected to reciprocate. That’s fine. There are other things that you absolutely should reciprocate, and you’ll blow up the relationship if you don’t. Know the difference.
    • Balance is a moving target. Your obligations mount as your skills grow and your mentor’s needs change. Keep an eye on ways you might be able to reciprocate now that you couldn’t have when you started.
  • If you have integrity, you will at some point disagree with your mentor. That’s okay. Your mentor is not God, and it’s ok to disappoint him—but make it count. If the relationship is worth having, then it’s worth taking good care of; don’t become a disappointment through inadvertence or over something stupid.

Knowing that’s what you’re getting into, do you still want this person to mentor you? If so, then you want to ask in a way that maximizes your chances of getting an enthusiastic “Yes!” Here’s what you need to do:

  • Do your homework.
    • Know as much as you can about the field.
    • Know who you’re approaching. Study websites, social media pages, curriculum vitae. Whatever’s publicly available about where your prospective mentor has been and what he’s done, learn it.
    • If your prospective mentor has already produced material for up-and-coming workers in your field, get it. It’s gauche to ask an expert to tell you a bunch of stuff for free when their livelihood comes in part from selling that same information. If it costs money, then spend some! Read the books; watch the videos; listen to the podcasts. Digest that material ahead of time; don’t ask your prospective mentor to waste time telling you things they’ve already put out there.
  • Have something to show for it
    • Having done your homework, showcase it. At a minimum, come in with some intelligent questions: “I read where you said X, and I was wondering….”
    • Better: “I’ve been following your instructions from [book/podcast/article], and here’s what happened. I have some questions about my next steps.…”
  • Ask boldly
    • We all fantasize about our chosen mentor seeing how we’ve applied their work and begging us to come study with them. It’s okay to have the fantasy, but know that it’s a fantasy. People worth following already have plenty to do; mostly they don’t go about asking for more work.
    • Be very clear ahead of time about what you want from this mentor. Do you want them to give you a book review? Help you put together a business plan? Edit an article before you submit it? Help you figure out which school to go to? Find an investor? Talk about life over coffee for an hour a week? I strongly suggest writing it down clearly. “I want [person] to [action] for me.” You may not get what you want, but you should know what you want.
    • Don’t be coy. You’ve showcased your work; you’ve made the best case you can that you’ll be a worthwhile investment. You know what you want from them. So ask clearly for the specific investment that you want.
      • It’s ok if you’re just asking for something small, like “Would it be ok if I call or email to ask about advice on next steps every couple months? It doesn’t have to be a grand request.
      • On the other hand, if you want more, ask for more: “Could we meet for an hour every other week for the next year?”
      • You may well get a no. Take it gracefully. God has a way of bringing people back around in our lives; don’t burn the bridge. You never know what will happen later.
      • You may get “I can’t do that, but we could….” and an offer of some lesser level of investment. In that case, take it and follow up quickly. Treat it as a second interview.
      • You may just get an assignment. “I can’t meet with you, but here’s what you should work on next….” Frequently, your wounded pride will tempt you not to follow through on the assignment because they turned you down. Do what you want, but know that once upon a time, a very busy man gave me such an assignment. I did it, and it changed the course of my life. (God was being kind to me. In hindsight, he would have been a terrible mentor. But it was a great assignment. I’ll tell you about it sometime.) Also, again, treat it as a second interview. Sometimes it is.

If you got a “no,” don’t give up. Keep looking around. Locate another likely candidate. Do the same thing. Keep going until you find what you need.

On the other hand, perhaps you got a yes. Now you have a mentor! What do you need to know, to keep the relationship good? First, go back up to the top and review all the things I said about the nature of the mentoring relationship. Have all that firmly in mind. Then…

  • You got into this relationship seeking guidance. So take it. If it doesn’t work, come back for a debrief. But don’t come back with “I thought your advice was stupid/hard so I didn’t do it, and now I need help managing the fallout of my poor decisions.” Can’t complain about the results you didn’t get from the work you didn’t do. If you screwed up, it’s not the end of the world; recover as best you can, go back to the drawing board, and do what you were told.
  • Some of the guidance your mentor gives will seem stupid. That’s normal. Real life is frequently counterintuitive, and if you already knew all the smart ideas, you wouldn’t need a mentor, wouldja? Go ahead and do what you’re told; see what happens. Usually, hindsight will provide all the insight you need. Sometimes, you’ll need further explanation. The best time to ask “Why?” is after you’ve gone and done the thing. Don’t ask for someone to invest valuable time and expertise giving you guidance and then argue with them about it. Show your commitment, then ask: “I woulda sworn that wasn’t going to work…and it did. I still don’t get it. Why?” Occasionally—because even the best mentors are fallible—it really will be stupid guidance. But as a newbie, you can’t tell whether the advice is wrong, or you are wrong. Accept that occasionally you’re going to follow bad advice. It’s the cost of doing business.
  • The above is a useful rule of thumb, but there are exceptions. Sometimes a promising-looking mentor turns out to be a tyrant who’s exploiting you and giving nothing worthwhile in return, and you really should just walk away. On the other hand, sometimes your mentor simply didn’t understand the problem. The easiest way to navigate that is to take responsibility yourself: “I’m so sorry, I don’t think I explained the problem properly. Let me try again….”
  • Some guidance will call for a metric ton of hard work, and you’re going to be tempted to seek shortcuts. Don’t. In the words of Scott Sonnon, “Until you have thoroughly mastered the basics, every ‘new’ idea you have has already been considered and rejected, with good reason.” That won’t be true 100% of the time, but close enough. Your time will be better spent working hard to master the basics; innovation can wait. (That said, look up the story of Gaston Glock sometime. There are occasional spectacular exceptions.)
  • You aren’t signing your life away when you apprentice to someone. You answer to God on the last day for yourself; you have to choose to follow your mentor’s guidance or not. But you can’t reasonably expect someone to continue to invest in you if you don’t take their guidance; conversely, if you don’t find their guidance worth following, you probably need a different mentor anyway.

So there ya go. I hope it’s helpful to you. Now, I know some of this is hard to hear, and of course I understand if you disagree. No worries; I’m fallible like everybody else. Maybe you know better than I do. And anyhow, I’m not holding a gun to your head; ain’t nothing stopping you from doing it your way. Best of luck….

Comments Off on Getting and Keeping a Mentor | How To, Mentoring/Disciple-Making, Real Ministry Training | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Your Preferences are not “Standards”

11 March 2025

I read this post recently, and in the main I agree with it, although I’ve a quibble here and there. It prompted a thought that I want to flesh out here. For the purposes of this post, I’m speaking to young, single Christians who want to get married.

There’s much discussion, even in sensible treatments like Aly Dee’s post above, of the merits and demerits of “lowering your standards.” Conceding the overall discourse of “standards” for a second, the discussion makes sense. You have a wish list of traits you’re looking for, and you want most or all of them in a spouse. That’s what they’re bringing to the table; in market terms, that’s the price you charge for your hand in marriage. Most people are willing to haggle a bit; if your prospect exceeds your expectations in a couple of areas, perhaps you can give some ground in a couple of others. But sometimes, despite your willingness to haggle, you just can’t get the deal done. In market terms, it makes sense to lower the price if the product is just not selling, right?

Of course it does. But you may be looking at the whole interaction through the wrong lens.

Let’s talk about these “standards,” because in my experience, when I ask my young, single friends to give me the list of standards, we too often end up with “loves Jesus,” “wants a family,” “blonde,” and “good calves” all on the same list. They do not belong on the same list. “Blonde” is not a standard, and marrying a brunette is not “lowering your standards.” There simply is no meaningful sense in which blonde hair is a higher standard, and dark hair a lower one. God likes them both.

“But I really like blondes!” you say. No problem. Wherever you’re looking for a spouse, if you have lots of prospects and you only spend Friday evening at home when you absolutely want to, then stick with blondes. Why not date who you prefer? But if the only prospect you have is a brunette, don’t be an idiot. Letting go of a preference is not lowering a standard.

Standards are things God likes. Preferences are things you want. You have no business marrying someone if God isn’t going to like it. You have every reason to consider haggling where your preferences are concerned. True story here: I had my own list, back in my single days. I imagined a woman who was a brunette or redhead, 5’4″, intelligent, a reader, loved the outdoors (among other things). I got three of those five things, and that’s fine. My wife being 5’10” and more of an indoor person does not threaten our marriage in any way.

I was also looking for a woman who loved Jesus, wanted a family, and had a heart for ministry. These things are not in the same category as the other list, and I got all of them. Missing one or more of those things would have fundamentally undermined a godly marriage. Now, as it turns out, we were unable to conceive, and navigating that was one of the more painful things about our life together, but providential suffering doesn’t undermine your marriage. Lack of godly values undermines your marriage.

God likes tall girls and short girls. He likes people with skinny calves and people with muscular calves. He made tons of both. You can learn to like what God likes. You had better not learn to like what God doesn’t.

Nobody is saying you shouldn’t have preferences, and nobody is saying you shouldn’t go for as many of your preferences as you can get. But frankly, if you’re 30 and still single after years of trying, you should be prepared to do a lot of negotiating. So get on your knees, pray, and ask God to give you the wisdom to know what to do, because this is one of the most important judgment calls you’ll ever make.

Comments Off on Your Preferences are not “Standards” | Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Hacking Our Virtues

4 March 2025

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues….The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.” – G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

For Christians interacting in the public sphere, it is often true that “the sons of this world are more shrewd…than the sons of light.” One common tactic Christian voters fall prey to is an appeal to hard cases. The enemies of the truth often don’t really need you to support wickedness; it’s enough that you’re silent about the common good. How do they achieve your silence? Easy. Given any proposal, find someone who will be adversely affected, and then make you feel uncharitable, unfair, and unchristian if you back the proposal. While you’re stymied into silence, a united block of opposition crushes the measure. In this way, Christians are repeatedly shamed into silence.

Simple response: Ask yourself, “Does this person share my values?” If the answer is no, then get really suspicious. If you’re letting someone who thinks it’s ok to dismember babies in utero appeal to your sense of fairness, for example, that calls for a closer look, don’t’cha think?

For example, take the current hullabaloo over the question of having to identify yourself in order to vote. In a country with our democratic system–only citizens can vote, and each person may vote only one time–voter identification seems like a very basic requirement. Yet political progressives have managed for decades to stymie multiple proposals to protect the integrity of the system by requiring voters to show a valid ID. It’s racist, you see. Or sexist. Or ableist. Or something.

In recent conversation with a friend, one of the common objections came up: “My mother is disabled and can’t really leave the house. Does that mean she shouldn’t be able to vote anymore?” This is exactly the kind of thing that trips Christians up. We want to be fair, and we want to value the disabled members of our community. So far too often, all it takes is a question like that, and we wilt.

Don’t wilt. Of course the disabled woman should still be able to vote! She’s disabled, and that means this is going to be harder for her than it will be for other people who don’t struggle in that way. It may take a major effort and some help. It may be that she really does need an absentee ballot (as various Americans abroad will also). That sucks! It’s not ok. But it’s not ok that the poor woman needs help to get to the toilet, either. Let’s stop pretending that this is some insurmountable barrier.

We live in such a convenience-addicted culture that we forget: inconvenience is just inconvenience. “Difficult” does not mean “impossible.” And the truth of the matter is, the inconvenience here is pretty minimal. We make you show a valid ID to buy beer, a pack of cigarettes, or even cough syrup. That’s not because there’s a smoke-filled room in Washington where they’re plotting to deny women and people of color access to cough syrup.

So yeah, an ID requirement might make voting a bit more inconvenient. So what? Meaningful community participation is often inconvenient. Pretty much everything worth doing is inconvenient. Hard cases are hard; no one is saying otherwise. But let’s be real: this is not remotely an impossible problem, and there’s no reason to pretend that it is. We have always had people with a legitimate need for an absentee ballot, and we’ve long had the ability to accommodate that. I don’t see that going away; in fact, internet technology has made it even more possible to satisfactorily demonstrate your identity at a distance. In fact, just recently I had to set up a financial account online that required a scan of my ID plus other identifying information, and then compared that to government databases. I never left the couch except to get my wallet. If we can manage this sufficient for tax/banking purposes, we can manage it for voting.

Inconvenience is not really a sound argument against protecting the integrity of the system. The argument here is that it’s worth the inconvenience. I remember voting being inconvenient for my parents, too. I grew up so poor we ate the seed potatoes–breakfast, lunch, and dinner–one winter because we had literally no money to buy food. My parents always found a way to get to the polling place, because it was important, worth sacrificing for. I remember, because they certainly didn’t have money for a babysitter — I got dragged along with ’em, right into the voting booth.

In a nation of 300 million people, are we going to be able to find someone who should have been able to vote, but couldn’t because of this law or that one? Yes. No matter what the law, there will be such a case somewhere, no question. And it will be a travesty, and we should fix it. But exceptions are exceptions, and ought to be treated that way. Most people will have no such difficulty, and there’s no reason to use a fractional minority of hard cases to avoid taking the same sort of commonsense precautions we routinely navigate to buy beer, cigarettes, and cough syrup — particularly when we’re facing a massive (and thoroughly justified) drop in public confidence in institutions.

Do not allow people who do not share your values to hack your virtues in order to paralyze you. A policy need not be perfect to be an improvement on what we have now. Support common-sense reforms because you love all your neighbors, but don’t stop there. No matter how good the policy, some people will fall through the cracks. So step up yourself and do your best to take care of them, too.

Comments Off on Hacking Our Virtues | Discernment | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Lessons on Worship

25 February 2025

Comments Off on Lessons on Worship | Exegesis, Worship | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Hospitality as Alchemy

18 February 2025

I’ve been meditating recently on the parable of the unjust steward, found in Luke 16:1-13. Since Jesus Himself calls the guy unjust, obviously it’s not the cheating that Jesus is recommending. What does Jesus want us to take away from this?

The steward has a short window of opportunity where he has access to his master’s accounts, and he makes the most of his temporary access to make friends for the long term. We find ourselves in a similar situation. Everything you have can just disappear (as some of our brothers and sisters in California recently found out). But while you have it, what are you doing with it?

We can squander the goods we have, or we can use them to lasting effect. Few things are as fungible as a warm meal. The scraps you don’t eat will be cold in an hour and inedible in days; what you do eat will end up in your toilet in a day or two, depending on your intestinal transit time. But that meal, that future poop, shared with someone else, becomes an expression of love and care. Applied to someone at the right moment, that very transitory matter becomes a lifelong conviction that they’re loved.

The alchemists of old expended enormous effort trying to turn lead into gold. In hospitality, we do something much more spectacular, and we succeed at it! We transmute the basest of matter into something better than gold: the pleasure of God and the care of His image. So go forth and be hospitable to someone who can’t pay you back.

2 Comments | Mere Obedience, Shadow Ecclesiology | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

A Fuller Fulfillment

11 February 2025

When we talk about “fulfilled prophecy,” what we usually mean is a straightforward prediction along the lines of Micah 5:2, which says that Messiah will be born in Bethlehem. Matthew shows how the prophecy was fulfilled. But that’s not the only thing that “fulfilled” can mean.

“Fulfill” has a fuller sense (if you’ll pardon the expression) than just the Micah 5:2 predictive prophecy meaning. In the Hosea 11//Matthew 2 usage, the original sense in Hosea is critical to Matthew’s meaning. Knowing that Israel is God’s son is necessary to understanding the points that Matthew is making: first, that Jesus is Israel (in exactly what sense is a question Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt.

Don’t miss that latter point. Matthew invokes “out of Egypt I called My Son” not when Jesus leaves literal Egypt, but when Jesus flees Judea. Judea is the “Egypt” Jesus is fleeing, and Herod is the baby-boy-slaughtering “Pharaoh.” John the Baptist will later reinforce this same point by calling repentant Israelites to come out into the desert to pass through water, a new Exodus forming a new people of God (Jesus joins the new people of God “to fulfill all righteousness”). John the evangelist will much later make the point explicit in Revelation 11:8.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there, but neither do we want to miss something that is there—and the NT shows us repeatedly that there’s a LOT more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis (Matt. 22:32) to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the NT shows us a way of reading the OT that we perhaps wouldn’t have come up with on our own, but that’s ok. God is revealing it to us in the way He handles His own revelation.

In conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But if that’s all we have, then our hermeneutic will force us to condemn the Holy Spirit’s exegesis of His own work. There has to be something wrong with that picture. What is it? Easy: the Book of Nature isn’t all we have. The Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read.

5 Comments | Exegesis, Hermeneutics, Speaking as God Speaks | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Reading Your Life

4 February 2025

The church through most of history did not view typology as a feature of literary texts. We viewed typology as a feature of history that is reflected in literary texts.

That sounds like a small difference; it’s not.

There is really only one true Story, and God is telling it. It starts with “In the beginning, God created…,” continues through the Deluge, Abraham offering Isaac, Moses breaking the tablets, Jesus touching the lepers, your breakfast this morning, and right on until the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven…and then it gets really good! This genius Story has themes and motifs running through it that happen in your life just as surely as they happen to anybody else.

Understood that way, the Bible is not just a storehouse of theological knowledge or moral directions for living your life; it’s the Rosetta Stone. The Bible doesn’t contain the whole Story (what book could?), but it contains key parts, told by God Himself. Understood rightly, the parts of the Story contained in the Bible don’t just teach us what sort of story we’re in; they teach us how to read all the rest. Particularly the part we happen to be living in.

New Testament authors read the Hebrew Bible this way. In fact, later Old Testament writers read earlier ones this way as well. If we can be taught by them, then we can read, not just the OT, but our own lives.

Comments Off on Reading Your Life | Speaking as God Speaks | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

With Reverence

28 January 2025

A friend recently raised the question of how to cultivate reverence for God. In a culture of therapeutic moralistic deism and “Jesus-is-my-boyfriend” music, how do we keep ourselves from treating God casually, even flippantly? This was my answer.

I remind myself who I’m dealing with: the God who made the world and everything in it (and then de-created and re-created it all in the Deluge), crushed the Egyptians’ gods and slaughtered their firstborn, came on Horeb in earthquake, fire, and storm, invaded Philistia alone by allowing the capture of the Ark so as not to reward Israel’s faithlessness, and emerged with offerings, triumphant. The God who fulfilled His promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who opened the secrets of the kings’ dreams to Joseph and Daniel, who used Balaam (1400 years before the event) and Daniel (550 years before the event) to send the Magi to fund His Son’s life-saving flight to Egypt. The God who has never failed to notice a sparrow falling from a bough, who numbers the very hairs on my head, who knows my every sin, failing, weakness, and character flaw, and has aggressively forgotten them all.

I’ve spent time with some dangerous men over the years — good men, but dangerous. (I’ve spent time with dangerous men who were not good, too, but I’m talking about the god ones right now.) Sensible people do not treat such men carelessly: you think before you speak, attend to small courtesies, go somewhat out of your way to avoid giving offense unnecessarily. And if you’ve given offense, you face it decisively and take the consequences as they come.

I remind myself to treat God at least as reverently as that. He is *for* me and He loves me, but He is not to be trifled with. Wise men remember that.

1 Comment | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Strong Flavor

21 January 2025

For many years in my ministry, we’ve talked about taking a “craft beer” approach to ministry. A mass-produced beer like Miller Lite is designed so that pretty much anybody can drink it. There’s nothing that would bother anybody, but at the cost of being pretty tasteless: inoffensive, but insipid. Nothing memorable, nothing interesting. A craft beer like Russian River’s Pliny the Elder, on the other hand…it’s a very strong set of flavors. Set free from the burden of trying not to offend anyone, the makers of Pliny the Elder are free to execute a positive vision, to make a product that is unapologetically something in particular instead of generically inoffensive. Lots of people don’t like it, but the ones that do, like it a lot more than Miller. A liquor store near me used to limit Pliny purchases to one bottle per customer, and they’d still sell out in a day.

God has not called you to be inoffensive.

Everything you do isn’t going to be for everybody. To some we are the aroma of life, and to others the aroma of death. But what God has called you to be — be that, as hard as you can. Don’t make yourself tasteless

Go forth and be a strong flavor. If God calls you to serve a particular demographic, do what you need to do — and then be a strong flavor! Don’t make yourself tasteless.

Comments Off on Strong Flavor | Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

G-d

14 January 2025

Some believers have taken to using “G-d” and “L-rd” rather than “God” and “Lord.” What are we to think of this?

This is a modern reflection of the rabbinic practice of refusing to say the name of God. This was not the practice of the ancient Hebrews of Old Testament times (an important point, and we’ll get to that). The practice of substituting a circumlocution for God’s name developed at some point after the Babylonian captivity (I’m not sure we can pinpoint when).

The rationale given for the practice of substituting “Adonai” (“my Lord”) for YHWH is derived from the Third Commandment: “You shall not take the name of YHWH your God in vain.” If we never even say the name—so goes the reasoning—then we can’t take it in vain, and thus we will keep the commandment. This is wrong for four reasons.

First: REALLY???? Does anybody honestly think that God gave the Third Commandment hoping that we would all just stop saying His name? Does anybody really think that’s what God was after?

Second, this sort of overly scrupulous fence around the law is an unnecessary burden. God actually gave us the law that matters, and here we are making up extra regulations to keep. Why? This is the kind of reasoning that took a command against boiling a kid goat in its mother’s milk and extrapolated it so far that you can’t have a milkshake with your hamburger, even though none of that is from goats, the milk and the meat don’t come from the same breed of cattle, and it doesn’t boil in your stomach anyway.

Third, from Eve’s “Neither shall you touch it” to today’s adulterous pastor who keeps the Billy Graham rule, that sort of thing is always destined for failure. As Paul would later write, “These things indeed have an appearance of wisdom in self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body, but are of no value against the indulgence of the flesh.” It just doesn’t help. Building extra fences doesn’t stop us from eventually breaking God’s law anyhow.

Finally, this particular brand of scrupulosity doesn’t actually meet the burden of the Third Commandment anyhow. Remember the expansive way that Jesus reads the Sixth and Seventh Commandments: hating someone in your heart without cause already breaks the command against murder; lusting for someone not your spouse already breaks the commandment against adultery. Now imagine that you were to say something that would violate the Third Commandment if you used the actual name of God, but instead you substituted “G-d” or “HaShem” (Hebrew for “the Name” and a commonly used circumlocution for exactly this purpose). Do you really imagine God is going to say to himself, “Well, technically, that’s allowed”??? I don’t think so.

So this to say: If you personally feel convicted to use “G-d,” then go ahead, but don’t think that observance is protecting you from violating the Third Commandment. If you’re wondering if you should adopt the practice, you need not feel compelled, and no one should try to compel you.

Comments Off on G-d | Speaking as God Speaks, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »