My name is Tim.  

 

My amazing wife Megan and I have been married since 2006.  Together we have (three lovely ladies: Sophie, Holly and Genevieve.)

 

Here’s my background:

 

I grew up in the church, but I always hated being there.  

I always felt forced.  

Forced to go.  

Forced to believe.  

Forced to act the way they wanted me to.  

 

My father died when I was 7, and it marked me in such a way that I have never really ever understood.  

 

God was always a part of my life, but when he died, I saw how confused I was about God.  As I got older, I tried to make sense of it. I always heard that God had a plan, and that everything works out for the best.  

 

I had a hard time believing any of it.    

 

How was it God’s plan for a seven year old boy to grow up without His father?  

What benefit could that possibly have?  

 

And so began my inner anger and frustration, constantly looking for answers but coming up short.   I was never really able to express my own views about Christianity, so I played along.  

 

I acted like I wanted to go, and pretended to be a good Christian boy whenever it came up.  But inside, I hated that the people around me that claimed to know God couldn’t answer any of my questions. 

 

Throughout my childhood, I was pretty easy going and happy.  

 

But after I graduated high school, I found myself lost and wandering.  Finding purpose to my life seemed so impossible and distant.  

 

I met my wife when I was 19, and I finally saw a path and a life that felt comfortable.  We hung out for hours, day after day.  She was the first real friend I ever had.  I could talk to her in a way that I never could anyone else.  I enjoy who she is as a person.  She was so different than anyone else I had ever met.  

 

She is amazing and beautiful, smart, funny, and the most important thing is that she truly had a heart for God.

 

And for once, it wasn’t fake.  

 

She was serious about it, and it translated to how she lived and how she treated people.

 

And she felt like home to me.  Being with her was like being in a place you never wanted to leave.  After we dated for a while, I saw in her what I could never see in myself.  A desire to know God.  

 

Her love for God inspired me in a way that for the first time in my life, I went to church because I wanted to.  I read my bible because I wanted to.  And I wanted to know God, because I wanted to.

 

But deep down, I was still searching.  Searching for a purpose, a plan; the what and why to my entire life.

 

In 2002 I was regularly attending a small church in Florida.  There was a guest speaker one night, and he was talking about the Holy Spirit and about the works of the Spirit.  At the end of the message, he said that if anyone hadn’t received the baptism of the Spirit, they could come up and be filled and baptized.  

 

I had never thought about it before, but without even thinking, I got up and walked to the front. That night, I was filled with the Holy Spirit, and my life changed drastically.  

 

I didn’t feel any different, but as I walked back to my seat, and elderly man stopped me and grabbed my arm, and with a big smile, told me that my life would never be the same.  I smiled and said thanks.  

 

He was right.

 

Immediately, my understanding of spiritual things increased significantly.  

 

I had finally begun to understand some of the things that confused me my whole life.  

 

I saw things in the bible I hadn’t seen before.  

 

Along with all this, I felt an unnaturally strong urge to write.   

 

There were many times I listened to the first 10 minutes of a message and spent the rest of the time writing what the Spirit was speaking in my heart.  I wanted more.  

 

I wanted to know God.  I wanted to know what He thought, what He wanted, and what He wanted for me.  

 

Then I started to notice things in the church.  Discrepancies, you could call them.  Or contradictions.  Things the Pastor would say that would rub against the living spirit inside me the wrong way.

 

For years, I wrote every time it happened.  Listening to dead sermons produced pages and pages of notes.  God would show me holes in the message or even how it was just plain wrong.  He would show me the verses that proved what He was saying, and usually 4 or 5 others.  Mostly, I would see what was needed to really make an impact in people’s lives.

 

Still I felt that there was something else.  

 

All this time, I was wandering.  I always had a steady job, but inside me I knew there was more.  I knew there was something else I was supposed to do.  

 

Frustration began to set in as year after year passed with no clear answer as to what I was supposed to do with my life.  I searched many different paths, moving from job to job, each one ending with a quiet whisper.  

 

That’s not it.  Keep looking.  

 

I started college, but I knew that it wasn’t right for me.  I wandered year after year.

 

Eventually I realized I wasn’t looking for a job or a career.  I was looking for something more. Something bigger.  So I thought and thought and thought some more.  What is my part?  How do I serve?  What can I offer?

 

I realized the only way to get what I was looking for was by faith.  That was the missing link.  But I wasn’t hearing about faith in church.  I heard about Jesus and salvation. I heard about grace and praise.  

 

But no one was really talking about faith.

 

I studied and learned about faith and how to use it.  

 

I put it to work and believed I would find what it was that I was looking for, and it actually worked.

 

I finally saw it.  

The thing I had been looking for.  

It was in front of me all along.  Growing, waiting, and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

 

It was writing.  It had always been writing.  The same thing that came as naturally as anything I’d ever done in my life.  The ability that came seemingly out of nowhere after I was filled with the Spirit.

 

This was the gift I had been given.  And it was the one thing I knew should be a priority in my life.

 

This is what I was created to do.  

 

So here I am, giving what I have been given.  Sharing the insight, the understanding, and the musings of the spirit of God as I have received them.  

These things have helped me more than I can ever express, and my hope is that they will shine some light on the dark spots in your beliefs about God and the church.  

It’s time for us to become united in the spirit and start to operate in true living faith and spiritual understanding.

 

 

Brothers, in the name of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, I urge all of you to be in agreement and not to have divisions among you, so that you may be perfectly united in your understanding and opinions.

1 Corinthians 1:10