A reflection on timidity.

(Part 2 of a series on how I write about the Bible, looking at a story about Paul and Timothy.)

I always smiled when I read Paul telling Timothy that “God did not give us a spirit of timidity.” I thought it was delightful wordplay from a guy often accused of being intense. So I looked at the word. It’s deilia. Which means that it is not a pun at all. Deilia sounds nothing like Timotheos.

But I looked at deilia in Vine’s. It turns out that the word Paul uses to describe the kind of spirit that G...