Tim Jones at Elliott Place - as a child with his mother and today.

“How are you?
“I’m alive, I can feel all my pains.
I spent so long trying to stay numb,
but now I know who I am.””

— from "Alive" by Tim Jones

Tim Jones was invited to a home in Flat Rock recently for a photo session and interview to promote his new book of poetry, Blue Mountain Poems. Uncertain of the location, Tim entered the given address into Google Maps and realized immediately that a twist of fate was about to return him full circle to the very place he began his life over 50 years earlier.

Driving up the long curving drive to his interview at Elliott Place, now owned by Marty and Charles Cornwell, Tim experienced a flood of memories. “I hadn’t seen the house since I was about 8 or 9 when the Hartman’s owned it,” he explained. As the house came into view, Tim felt like he was stepping back in time. “It was so phenomenally the way I remembered everything in my dreams. We ended up sitting on the same porch where I played as a kid. Every detail was just as I remembered it. It was magical.”

Tim Jones is as close to a Renaissance Man as one is likely to find in Henderson County. He is a Reverend Deacon at St. James Episcopal Church, Chief Operating Officer of The Hendersonville Rescue Mission, an accomplished photographer with work displayed at The Gallery at Flat Rack, a painter, and now a published poet. All on top of being a devoted husband and father to two adult sons.

Early Years

Tim Jones came home from Pardee Hospital in 1969 to live with his parents in the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of Elliott House. Tim’s father, Charles Jones, looked after Elliott Place for the Hartman’s in addition to his jobs with the local General Electric plant and the East Flat Rock Post Office. Charles was ambitious and hardworking and the young family was building a solid life for themselves when catastrophe struck. Still a very young man, Charles Jones suffered double kidney failure. The severity of the situation was such that he ultimately became the first person to ever receive a kidney transplant at Duke University Hospital in 1972.

The surgery was initially a success, but life for the Jones family would never be the same. The transplant failed after about one year and Charles went on dialysis while the family fell into considerable financial hardship. “That really impoverished us quickly, “ Tim explains. “My dad went from having a growing career to being on disability income. My dad had all kinds of real estate and he had to liquidate all of it. He only got to keep one small parcel over in East Flat Rock, which was the place that I grew up.”

“…I am starstruck by mothers.
I want to savor the taste of affection,
spooned out and served warm. ”

— “Listening” by Tim Jones

The Jones’ struggle took its toll both financially and emotionally. When Tim was just six years old, he came home one day to find that his mother had left the family. He would not hear from her or see her again until he was a young man in college. That night, his father stayed up with his young son and promised that he would never leave him. It was a night that Tim remembers vividly. “My dad slept in the bottom bunk of my bunk bed that night. I kept peering over the top to make sure he was really there. When he told me that he would not leave, I believed him and that is why I think he worked so hard to stay alive and raise me.”

As one might expect, the absence of his mother was to have a profound effect on Tim’s world view, his relationship with his father, and ultimately his burgeoning interest in art. Art proved to be an outlet for a young man grappling with his place in the world and the swirl of emotions amidst challenging circumstances.

It was during these days that Tim also learned much about facing adversity with resilience and perseverance from his father:

“It was just me and my dad. He raised me from a wheelchair, a remarkable man, a credible man of faith, a great sense of humor and determination. We had the department of social services check in on us just because people thought that a single dad couldn’t do the job.

But my Dad had something to prove. I would watch him mow grass from his wheelchair with a push mower, pulling it backward. He was just that kind of determined guy. He prayed that he would live long enough to raise me to prove everybody wrong. “

“I don’t own these words;
they own me.
I found them in my father’s belongings
which I have been unpacking
for half of my life.
When I open my mouth,
my inheritance tumbles out
in years that he never lived
and words that he always did.”

— from "Porous"

Charles Jones continued his determined struggle against health and financial challenges for more than two decades and lived long enough to see his son strike out on a life of his own. When Charles died in 1996, he left a legacy of determination in the face of capricious fate and sacrificial love that continues to reverberate through Tim’s life as an adult.

A Boy in the Woods

Young Tim struggled with fears that something would happen to his father. “We really struggled. There were times we'd say the Lord's prayer and recite ‘give us our daily bread’ and it was a real thing. It wasn't just a thing we were saying. I always knew that if my father died, I had no one. So going out into the woods became my place of solace.” Tim’s East Flat Rock home backed up to a large tract of woods with Highland Lake beyond. “ I had free reign to just go out and be in the woods. I am so grateful for that. I don't know what my life would've looked like if I hadn't had that.”

“Why are you lying down beneath the leaves?
Because I want a blanket to warm me from the confusion;
because I don’t yet know how to look into a mirror
and see the face of someone who is wanted.

Why are you looking up at the sky?
Because it is the first time I’ve ever truly heard my name
whispered from the mouth of God.
It sounds like falling leaves blanketing leaves into wholeness.”

— from “Womb”

Tim’s love of nature was only matched by his burgeoning interest in art. “I can't remember a time when I wasn't messing around with it - the writing and the drawing and painting.” Tim attended East Henderson High School and then went on to Bob Jones University with the intention of majoring in art. “I grew up in a Baptist church with a fundamentalist kind of tradition and Bob Jones was where you went if you had my background. I went there to study art but eventually switched to religion. But I always kept my background in art.”

“I want you to know that the world is fragile,
and fragile is not the same as delicate.
That’s how I know you are resilient too.

I want you to know you are not alone,
and some things are never meant to be
done by yourself… ”

— from “How I Know”

A Heart for the Homeless

During high school and college, Tim worked at Whitmire’s Upholstery located on 7th Ave in downtown Hendersonville. The business was close to the Rescue Mission and it was during this time that Tim first encountered and thought seriously about the issue of homelessness. He points to one experience in particular as being a seminal moment in his life:

“The first homeless person that I ever encountered was an older gentleman. He was slumped up against a wall in an alley. I remember walking up and talking to him and thinking, “What do I need to do? Do I need to give this guy some money?’

But he didn't want anything. He just wanted someone to listen. And I realized he was ten times smarter than me. He had been a preacher and he knew more about Bible stuff than anybody. Talking to him scrambled everything I thought about people living like that out on the street.

It was a pivotal moment when I found out that he was not what I thought he was. And it seemed like just being present for him, and listening to him made a difference. I carry that into what I do now. Most of the time, people know that you can't fix their situation, but they want somebody to actually hear their story.”

Moved by the experience and subsequent conversations with other people struggling with homelessness, Tim became a volunteer at the Rescue Mission. “I never dreamed I'd be walking the same streets all these many years later doing that same thing, but it was just something in my heart.”

Tim was ordained as a Baptist Minister at Bob Jones and after college went on to work at a small church outside of Landrum, SC. He married his college sweetheart Kerry and soon they had their first child. The birth of his son proved to be yet another pivotal moment in Tim’s life. “I could not in integrity, stay in the faith tradition as a fundamentalist. Holding that little boy in my hands, I couldn’t raise him like that if it wasn’t truly in my heart.” Tim says the experience led him to walk away from the church for a while and return with his young family to his roots in Henderson County.

Back in Hendersonville, Tim worked in sales for a while and volunteered once again at the Rescue Mission. It was during this time that he rediscovered his extended family’s connections with the Episcopal Church. The Rescue Mission hired him in 2001 and in 2005 he started his process towards ordination as an Episcopal Deacon which fit well with his desires to help the less fortunate. “Episcopal Deacons are supposed to be out working in the world, helping lead the church out into the world. That not only appealed to me, but it kind of went hand in hand with this call that I've had to work with people on the margins.”

The intersection of Art and Faith and Career

These days Tim continues to enjoy and explore the intersection of his faith, his work, and his art. “Art underlies everything I do. It permeates my sermons, my poems, and my photography. I always tell folks, “I think I'm a painter first just pretending to be a preacher, pretending to be a poet, pretending to be a photographer.’ That's what I do. I paint with words. I paint with photos.”

Tim laughs and says that he is living a life without compartments and that his life can look like a “rolling mess” at times where it is impossible to separate his personal life, his art, his work at the mission, and his work at the church. “It all comes from the same place.”
It is at this intersection of his art and faith and career that Tim finds his truth and finds his voice to share with the world. “I found that by sharing what I've discovered while being outdoors, both in image and in word, it seems to be a ministry. Which always comes back to being vulnerable and willing to share. I never intended to be writing poems or doing photographs so much for public consumption, but then I realized, ‘Hey, people seem to be blessed by this, too.’ It all just kind of comes out of that same place.”

The stresses of working at the Rescue Mission are significant and Tim credits his life-long love of the outdoors for keeping him sane as he deals with the toll of human crises on a daily basis and deals with the grief of regularly losing friends among the aging church membership at St. James. “I find there is a price if I don't go out into the woods. My work can take a toll on my mental health and my well-being, but something about being in nature restores me and lets me go back and serve.”

Finding Balance
These days Tim spends much of his outdoor time in a four-wheel-drive chasing wildflower through the change of seasons. He has created calendar collections of his nature photography and Blue Mountain Poems is his first foray into publishing his writings.

“I walk home from school to avoid the bus
which delivers kids into the arms of waiting moms,
but the driver never can locate that spot for me.”

— from “Womb”

Blue Mountain Poems is an intensely honest window into Tim’s life and he has fully embraced the vulnerability required to be an artist. He also recognizes the value of being able to share intimate moments of his life with others. “I started writing poetry early in my life because I had a broken heart. In my poems I often reference how healing and good things can come out of our wounds and that a scarred life can also be a beautiful life. I am not speaking theoretically when I say things like that. I am bearing witness to my own experience with the hope of encouraging others in pain.”

“Stop asking for permission to change the world.
The world is already changing.
Ask for wisdom to know what time it is.

Ask for beauty to reach inside you
and fire your soul with wildness
to love many colors
and then leap into all of them.”

— from "Conversion"

Where does a poetry writing, photo-taking, rescue-saving, Episcopal Deacon go from here? Tim Jones is not completely sure, but that will not stop him from exploring and embracing the unknown and working for a better world. “If you wait until people give you permission to try to go out and change the world, you’re just going to be waiting.” Then with a smile and his easy laugh he adds, “If I waited till I knew what I was doing, I'd just be waiting and never doing anything.”

Fortunately for us, Tim Jones is not a man to wait. Blue Mountain Poems is an intimate journey through his life told with unflinching honesty and an eye for the beauty that surrounds us, thanks to his many “warm words dipped in wonder.”

When it’s my time to make room
for someone else on this planet,
I might not leave this given space of life tidy,
but I hope to hand it over warm
with words dipped in wonder, restlessly
yearning to lift to climb and to bless.

-from “The Blue Edge of Evening”
Tim Jones

Blue Mountain Poems is available for purchase from The Gallery at Flat Rock located in Flat Rock Square.