Timothy Jones

The little book of Ruth is packed with Hebrew treasures. Here are five of my favorites. 1. Chesed (חסד): Steadfast Love When Naomi blesses Ruth and Orpah, she prays that the Lord will show them chesed (Ruth 1:8). No single English word captures its richness. It is steadfast love, covenant faithfulness, mercy, and loving-kindness all wrapped into one. Ultimately, chesed is what God demonstrates in Christ, who is the Father's steadfast love made flesh. 2. Marar (מרר): Bitterness After losing her husband and sons, Naomi says, "Don't call me Naomi [Pleasant]. Call me Mara [Bitter]" (Ruth 1:20). She doesn't hide her pain behind clichés. She laments honestly before God. The Lord who heard Naomi's bitter cries also hears ours. 3. Nakar (נכר): Noticing the Unnoticed Ruth asks Boaz, "Why have you taken notice of me, since I am a foreigner?" (Ruth 2:10). In Hebrew, there's a beautiful wordplay. Boaz nakar [נָכַר] the nokri [נָכְרִי]. He notices the unnoticed. That's exactly what our Redeemer does. He sees those the world overlooks. 4. Kanaf (כנף): Spread Your Wing When Ruth asks Boaz to "spread [his] wing" over her (Ruth 3:9), she's asking him to marry her. The kanaf is both a wing and the corner of a garment. Her bold request points us to Christ, our Redeemer, under whose wings we find refuge, and as his bride, the church, we live. 5. Go'el (גאל): Redeemer Boaz is Ruth's go'el, her kinsman-redeemer. A go'el was a close relative who stepped in to rescue, protect, restore, or redeem a family member in need. Boaz fulfills that role for Ruth, but in doing so he also points beyond himself to Jesus, our true Go'el. Christ has redeemed us, not with silver or gold, but with his own blood, making us part of his family forever. Ruth is more than a love story. It's a story of chesed, honest lament, surprising grace, bold faith, and the Go'el whose redeeming grace reaches all the way to us. _______ For more reflections on Hebrew words, see my devotional, Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions Based on Insights from Old Testament Hebrew, a.co/d/0g5jyywr

My latest Substack essay: More Alive than We Thought (Even When You Feel Worn Down) timothyjones3.substack.com/p/more-alive-t… @NelsonBooks @pauljpastor @iamfujimura @BethMooreLPM @malcolmguite

ANOTHER WEEK ENDS: Will McDavid on the weekender today: Loosening the Knot Between Who You Are and What You Do, Christian Wiman on Love Driving Him to God, AI’s Inability to Motivate, and Recovery as Proof of God buff.ly/wGxi7Xp

The great hemorrhages of our world—the warming skies, the vanishing species, the displaced millions—i.e. the grand unraveling of creation and community—are not separate line items on a global checklist of disasters. They are the devastating evidence of a single, ancient crisis: a wholesale relational rupture with God, with ourselves, with each other, and with creation. This is the sting of our four original sins first exposed in Genesis 2. We have forgotten how to be human. Worse, we have rejected the call to be ‘Jesus humans’—the very ones meant to heal this rupture by mirroring the Creator’s love, trusteeing creation, and welcoming the stranger at our gates.

It breaks my heart that so many Christians spend their entire lives sitting before a 31,102 piece jigsaw puzzle, running their fingers through the verses, but never actually seeing the finished masterpiece and the face of the One it was meant to reveal.

Most recent Amazon review. I love what this person said about "not a typical approach." "Absolutely lovely Amazing book. Meeting God where you are and how you are which is not a typical approach to religion I feel. Lovely book to reacquaint yourself and your life back to God." @NelsonBooks @pauljpastor @KSPrior @TheRabbitRoom @christandpc @HaejinMako

@pauljpastor @lclinton_tx @WisebloodBooks Exciting to see this. God bless the finalizing!

What’s happening? A new book is happening. Finalizing my new collection of short poetry @WisebloodBooks. Cover reveal (amazing) coming soon…

@flemingrut Thinking of you, Fleming, and praying.

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated. His name is Qing Li. He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea. The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason. Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005. He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest. Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty. The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected. The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly. Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty. Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month. Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet. The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation. The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall. When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab. Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system. This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress. A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower. The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down. Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks. They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone. The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk. After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature. What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care. But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free. The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish. Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens. Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

“When you can’t see a way forward for yourself or for the world, what you need is a sense that something new can happen, and that another life is possible.” -Ploughstack & Alan Koppschall @koppsch_a @Plough @byronborger @iamfujimura @HaejinMako @EmbersInternat1 @NelsonBooks @pauljpastor @bethfelkerjones @malcolmguite

@joynessthebrave Sounds like you are answering your own question, to the benefit of those of us listening in.

I should do work on the train, but what if instead I ate a pastry and stared out the window at the sea?

@HoneycombHermit @pauljpastor Beautiful and evocative.

First pastel painting I've managed in a while. This is "Last Light" 8 x 10" inspired by a photo by @pauljpastor with kind permission. I do love painting skies and water! #chronicArt #disabledArtist #pastelArt

CS Lewis: "A [person] really ought to say, ‘The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago’ in the same spirit in which he says, ‘I saw a crocus yesterday.’ Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. The spring comes slowly down this way; but the great thing is that the corner has been turned." I like that image--the corner has been turned. @HaejinMako @bethfelkerjones @NelsonBooks @byronborger @TheRabbitRoom

@iamfujimura All kinds of beauty on display here.

A garden is a symphony: every flower is a song. #fujifarm #artis

The world did not have to be this beautiful, but it is, because God is beautiful and creation reflects Him!

I'm excited about the book that my son, Abram Kielsmeier-Jones, cowrote: Building a Safer Church. See cover below. Release date: April 6, 2027. Help get the word out for this important work! Website for his center is spiritualsafetycenter.org @katybowser @KatelynBeaty @kategaston @flemingrut @bethfelkerjones

I'm grateful for these encouraging words endorsing my book Fully Beloved from the inimitable and gifted Andi Ashworth and Charlie Peacock: "For decades, Timothy Jones has faithfully held out the invitation to know true love and goodness through Christ. His books have decorated our shelves and penetrated our thick, weary skin. He’s done it again with renewed insight on the subject of our most profound ache: Am I loved? Oh my, how we need the answer over and over! With Fully Beloved, Tim has given the Beloved Community just that. Like an artist, he paints beautiful stories that lead to transformative answers. This is truly literature of the loving kind." --Andi Ashworth & Charlie Peacock Co-authors of Why Everything That Doesn't Matter, Matters So Much: The Way of Love in a World of Hurt @NelsonBooks @ds_shepherd @DanielNayeri @mockingbirdmin

I really enjoyed being on Kimberly Stuart's "For Real" podcast, with the episode released today! We had a conversations by turns deep and meaningful and tied to real life, as the podcast name suggests. I hope you listen! kimberlystuart.com/podcast @iamculturecare @iamfujimura @courtneyellis @pauljpastor @ds_shepherd @charliepeacock @TheRabbitRoom

Verses very appropriate for Pentecost Sunday! And what an encouraging and grace-bathed poetic image (and visual image, as well!). @iamculturecare @MarianiPaul @pauljpastor @FrontPorchRepub

Reflecting on the kind and generous things people have said about my new book, I am grateful for these words from Sandra McCracken: “In Fully Beloved, Tim Jones hits the heart—naming the ache of loneliness and our lifelong quest for belonging. With honesty and relatability, he invites us to encounter the God of divine love, who draws us irresistibly into deeper healing and wholeness.” In writing it, I did indeed hope readers would find that invitation to encounter irresistible. Perhaps you will sense something encouraging there, too, in, as my subtitle says, Our Heartaches and Our Hopes. @Sandramccracken @scottsauls @iamfujimura