A man of faith and ideas

From the accounts of those closest to him, Timm was passionate about ideas and faith. He was a man who thought deeply about the consequences of faith in this world, how to live it, how to further it.

"It's about a life of service," Timm wrote in his journal in 2004. "Taking the actions of love to touch the lives of all I meet. In that I am being the "person of God" or "persona of God" to all I meet. It is the acts of love that melt the ice and crack the stone that surrounds men's hearts."

In a file titled "reason for creation," Timm writes,

Why did God make the material realm that we define as 'creation'? What was its purpose? I have always believed that we were made to give glory to God, but that doesn't answer the bigger question of why everything else was created.

It's interesting to note that when Satan and the angels staged their celestial revolt against the great I AM, that they were not destroyed but mearly banished to Hades. It seems that they would never come into the story again, but they did. For whatever reason Satan was allowed back into the story with the freedom to tempt man to commit the first sin. Then the Bible ends with their final judgment based, according to Revelation, on his deception of man, a penalty that completely writes them out of the script. That's odd that it would happen at that point and not following their original rebellion.

Perhaps that is the reason for creation. For whatever reason, God could not do more than banish Satan and the angels at the time of their sin, but would need something else to happen. Perhaps his Holiness still needed appeasement prompting Him to make this universe of time and space, knowing what Satan would do, allowing Yahweh to finally be done with Satan once and for all. Maybe, that's where we come in.

Sometimes Timm's thought seems to war with his faith. There is an academic analysis of the virgin birth part of the Christmas story which suggests that it was a later invention by theologians to distance the Christian faith from its pagan sources. He was enough of a Biblical scholar to dig at the primary sources, question the funadamentals.

Timm's faith was deep, but he wasn't a fundamentalist. Lots of ideas floated through his mind. He was interested in origins and myth. He studied American Indian lore and attempted to write a novella of sorts about an aboriginal people. He took the old Cohea name of O'Cobhthaigh. There are papers on petroglyphs on his laptop.

Timm was curious enough about the use of physics in neuroscience research as to write a letter to the National Institute of Health asking what best practices were in use in relation to this. It may have been his own struggles with mental decoherence (suffering for years from the aftereffects of his head injury, leaving him at times dissociative, having seizures, finding it difficult to focus, getting soon bored and restless). Perhaps, he thought, his thinking problems were do to the decoherence of quantum physics. A passage in an NIH report had him scratching his head:

Because of the uncertainties introduced at the ionic, atomic, molecular and electronic levels, the brain state will develop not into one single classically describable macroscopic state, as it does in classic physics (referring to classical Newtonian physics), but into a continuous distribution of parallel virtual states of this kind.

Having come into Alcoholics Anonymous through a church-based 12-step group, Timm was devoted to the idea of Christian recovery. There are a number of .pdf papers that Timm collected on his laptop, with titles ranging from "An Integrated Christian Psychology" "Scripture and Psychological Science: Interactive Challenges" and "Christian Psychologists: Serving Christ and His Kingdom."

To me, as a fellow member of AA, Timm's yearning to work his recovery under the auspices of Christianity makes deep sense. The end of working the 12 steps of alcoholics anonymous is to have the sort of spiritual experience so profound that the "thirst" for godlike experience is replaced by a deep and living and abiding one. To keep the doors as wide open as possible for people of all faiths and beliefs, AA does not identify the "Power greater than oneself" as the Christian God, simply saying that each member must develop a relationship with God "of one's own understanding.")

What I admire about Timm's thought - as I can glean from the writings and studies he left behind - is that he was a man who worked hard at being adult in his faith, to be both teacher and student, questing, always questing for better answers, a more secure ground on which to stand as one who loved and served his Lord using the talents he was given.

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For a more complete look at Timm's thought about his faith, I include here a portion of a talk he gave to a church men's group. One of the truisms in AA is that men work with men, and women work with women: recovery depends on a singleness of purpose, and too frequently meetings can become lonely-hearts club for those who seek solutions in other things than God. Timm's bonding with other men must have been slow and difficult, having been such a loner for many years, having distant relations with his brothers. But as you shall see, Timm speaks deeply from the heart here, and it is his very honesty that surely allowed him to speak with the "persona of God" - to be a thinking man's man and a disciple of his Lord. Also in the notes of his speech we get a vision of his history which he shared with others that they might feel hope in their brokenness.



Good evening, my name is Timm O'Cobhthaigh. Pastor Chris had asked if I would share a little about my own journey in dealing with my own brokenness and the lessons learned along the way.

I have spent most of my life involved in one way or another in the church, active in everything from singing in the choir to preaching. For most of those years I lived with this thought that there was something really wrong with me since I could never really live as good of a Christian life as I saw the others in my church were living. I struggled with ...

- Anger
- Depression
- Self-esteem
- Guilt
- Grief
- Marriage, Relationship
- Work
- Family/Kid
- Faith
- Health
- Mental Health
- Alcohol/Drug Abuse
- Integrity
- Affairs
- Sexual Addiction/Behaviors
- Pornography
- Gambling
- Finances
- Entertainment

I love being able to be here in a place where I am no longer alone. I'm with guys just like me.

We all have things that we are struggling with - things that we refer to as our brokenness.

Whenever I start talking about brokenness and purity issues I always have to start with why I think it's so important to God. I had always God referred to as father, the one who loves his son, who disciplines, who provide and who is intimately aware of everything I do, say and feel.

But there is a part of God's character that goes to the core of His interest in us - that is his passionate, uncompromising love for us. Someone who loves me more passionately than any earthly lover ever could. And, like any lover wants nothing to come between Himself and the object of His love - us.

That is why I think one of the main reasons brokenness is so dear to him because he knows how this can drive us to Him or lead us away from his presence.

There's an analogy that I like to use that has helped me grasp this and it comes in the form of a campfire.

I love camping. I love campfires. When I'm living in purity for me it is like sitting next to this campfire. I can feel God's presence; there is a deep peace that allows me to relax. That is the kind of relationship I read in the Bible as a follower of His, constantly connected to Him.

Matthew 5:8: "Blessed are the pure in heart - for they will see God."

I had never learned how to deal with life, at least not in a way that invited God in. I knew, or thought I did, how to take care of myself, to survive, to make it through regardless of the situation. But early in my 20's I began to notice the growing rift between me and God.

At this time I was in a college ministry, and had fallen committed a sin - not sure what it was, but I think it was either buying a porn magazine or crossing sexual boundaries with a girlfriend. The problem was that this wasn't the first time this happened. I hit my knees and begged God to forgive me yet again, promising with a solemn vow that this was not going to happen again.

I'll never forget that night because I felt God impress something upon that I remember today.

The fact that I was forgiven was a moot point - Jesus had taken care of that on Calvary. Repentance, on the other had was something else. It wasn't about just vowing to not due it again, but to find out why I kept falling like this. This was not so much about remaining useful to God, it was about a God who loved me more passionately than I could ever imagine and He, like any lover, hated any kind of distance I created between us due to how long it would take for me to feel worthy of walking back to the fire again.

The parable of the sower found in Matthew is a prime example of this. What happens when seeds fall among thorns and grow up among them? Often times a wound is not addressed properly and becomes infected, creating a whole new set of problems. For the more serious, we end up with a gangrene that slowly spreads through our body and will kill our relationships and or our walk with God.

I'd like to say that the heavens opened, the clouds parted and a beam of light touched my brow, setting me free to follow the path that was now before me. But life doesn't work like that.

It was a couple years later when my life seemed to fall apart again after a relationship went sour. I had a friend at the time who had listened to my sniveling suggested taking some time to listen to God about what he was trying to tell me through this.

After hitting my knees it was like God was impressing on me that he was trying to heal some of the brokenness in my own life by letting me deal with the consequences of my decisions made in my attempts to deal with this.

I prayed at that moment one of those prayers that proved I was not one of the brightest light in the harbors. You know that there are certain prayers that we need to be careful about praying. We all know the type, like asking for patience, what happens? It's like all of a sudden we are a magnet for every difficult person within a 50 mile radius. Or humility -- we end up falling on our faces.

You think I would have learned, but no, I told God "God, you do whatever you have to do to heal me."

Yes, that began a path that got worse before it got better. During the next few years I became more and more aware of the distance that was growing between God and I, as my life in general seemed to get orse and worse. I changed jobs, careers, relationships, churches and states to somehow to get my life and relationship with him to level out.

I finally ended up in Oregon in an attempt to "find the right place" a couple years later where I came face to face with some very unpleasant realties about my life, with the first being if anything was going to change, I was going to have to deal with my alcoholism.

A little fact of life: if you try to use something like alcohol, drugs, money, work, sports, sex, whatever - to deal with pain or just to cope, it will eventually create its own problems.

As I began to deal with my alcoholism I found that I really couldn't just separate it from the other areas of my life, but was going to have to look at how I have dealt with my own brokenness. namely my relationship with God. I began to realize that the problem was not the alcohol, the towns, jobs, women, churches or anything else in my life but it was how I dealt with all of these things.

The key thing for me was going to AA where I had to get a sponsor. Basically it was somebody I stayed accountable to and develop a relationship with. I think I'm like most guys, getting into a close relationship with another guy is not something I'm comfortable with. Alexander the Great became the Great because he had developed a military strategy called "Macedonian Phalanx" that was little more that a military formation with a straightforward mandate - you never go into battle without the man beside you. In ancient warfare when a soldier held his shield in his left an thrust with his sword, his right side was exposed. The formation placed a trusted soldier at their side to help protect them. Dealing with things is one thing, walking them out is another. I need other men in my life who know me. It's not only about avoid terrible sins, but God often communicates to me through those I'm close to.