Timothy Fish

About Timothy Fish

I was born in Southeast Missouri, two days after the start of spring. While I don’t recall that event, I imagine it was muddy. That’s how I remember spring in Southeast Missouri. Just when you think winter is over and the snow is leaving, the hills turn loose of all that water they’ve been holding and you have mud, keeping you inside a few more weeks. I ruined more than one shirt in the mud and nearly lost a few rubber boots. The ground latches onto them and won’t let go.

Zalma, my hometown, is in the hills, but it is just a few miles north of the flatland and the Mingo Swamp. I suppose that partly explains the mud. I probably wouldn’t have been in that part of the world, but my dad pastored a church there. He had another job fifty miles away, but he felt that a pastor should live near his church. I am grateful that he and my mother taught me about the Lord. In 1983, my father led me to the Lord and a week later he baptized me in Castor River, which runs right through my home town. And yeah, it was muddy. It is also one of the fondest memories I have of my mother’s father, who found an old dime on the river bank that day and gave it to me. I’m not sure how much that dime is worth, but it will never equal the value of the memory of that day.

I used to want to be fireman when I grew up, since that was what Dad did when he wasn’t pastoring. I did make a few strides toward that goal. I can claim to have spent a summer working in Fire Protection with my dad at the diaper plant where he worked and I invested several community service hours in the local volunteer fire department when they were just getting started. I even helped fight a few fires, but I still remember the day that Dad brought home that first computer. It was a used TRS-80 Model IV. When I saw what I could do by writing a few lines of code, I put aside the dreams of wearing the funny looking hard hat and never looked back.

That dream took me away from that small muddy town, though I return there when I can. After high school, I attended Southeast Missouri State University. They awarded me with a Bachelor of Science with a Computer Science/Mathematics major. I moved to Fort Worth to work. Fort Worth seldom has any mud, except when the winds blow in all that dust from west Texas and the rain comes to wash it out of the air. I later obtained my Master of Science with a Computer Science major.

I suppose my education played a major part in why my name came up as someone who could take responsibility for our church website. At first, I was afraid to take it on. It was little more than a bunch of out of date information thrown together into a website. I said I would think about it, believing that my response would be no, but the Lord had other plans. I’m not sure if a week went by before I took on the responsibility. It amazes me to think that if I had not taken responsibility for that website that I might have never written a book.