Wade Poe

Just about anytime we've bought a vehicle, in the weeks and months ahead, I would see one like it just about everywhere we went.  Even way back in the day when we'd bought a Peugeot 505s and an Isuzu Trooper! There's something about familiarity - it builds as your perception widens. Your perception widens as you become aware of something and your eyes are able to see it more easily. I probably passed the same amount of vehicles that looked like that before, but now that I drove one myself, I saw it everywhere I went. God is that same way. Once you see what he's shown you about himself and about you, you see him just about everywhere you go. A lot of us grow up being trained to see God mainly in a church building.  But as Paul said, God doesn't live in buildings that we make. (Acts 17:24-28) When you begin to see him for who he is, you don't just look for key words or a certain look from people, you begin to see him in approaches and actions and other places. You...

All the politics...man, it's a lot of stuff.  It's crazy, isn't it?!  Wow. You have some who speak a "Christian message" but push a "Caesar agenda". And then you have a whole other group that does * exactly the same thing*. Each of the "sides" has a Christian message, one emphasizing a different POV than the other, both calling on "Caesar" to be their enforcer. __________ One side wants to do good by painting Jesus into a corner of always giving everyone a pass on any kind of life, behavior, or condition - but he never, ever calls anything wrong except not accepting all people and not helping everyone.  He's the life of the party and the freebies never stop flowing. And he's 100% on board with taxing people to pay for it - he doesn't call individual believers to do anything much about it - just "Rome". In fact, you don't even have to "believe" in him. He's just there if you need his teaching o...

Most people doubt where they stand with God.  It's mostly because we don't separate the good news of what God is doing in Jesus from the Old Covenant. Jesus came to show us his father's heart, tell us something much bigger was coming - and made it happen. We often don't see the Old Covenant and the New Covenant as distinctly different, so we hang on to versions of ceremony, law keeping, and "better safe than sorry" and try to blend them with the gospel. The good news, is simple - the life that was lost because of sin has been restored through what God has done in Jesus.  Sins are forgiven and not counted anymore, God's Spirit lives in us, if we'll believe it. If we "grew up in church", we likely heard that "mercy there was great and grace was free.  Pardon there was multiplied to me.  There my burdened soul found liberty, at Calvary." Some people's experience might have been (thankfully) different, but many of us learned that we...

Ice cream with a little cinnamon & sweetener mix is pretty nice. Occasionally I'll get a container of low carb vanilla and sprinkle a little cinnamon & sweetener on it. I ran out of pepper one day, so I saved the container, cleaned it out and put in equal parts cinnamon & my favorite "healthy" artificial sweetener to make it easier to sprinkle. It made making ice cream a lot easier.  On occasion.   It took me a while to figure out I needed to label the box that had my ice cream topping in it so I didn't get it mixed up with the new box of pepper. Before that, sometimes I'd add cinnamon and sweeter to things I wanted to put pepper on.  And vice versa, a few times I put a healthy amount of pepper on my ice cream a few times. Eventually, I just got some paper, wrote "sweetener + cinnamon" on it and put it in the cabinet. And then I realized I probably needed to label both sides of the box. Why? Because I kept getting them mixed up when I didn...

I did the funeral for this sweet lady a few years back and one of the favorite stories her family shared about her was a time that she and a friend took a trip during which they would be passing through Tennessee and on to Alabama to visit relatives.  On the way, they decided they’d try a side trip to see the home of Johnny and June Carter Cash, which they heard was near the main highway.  They followed the directions they were given -- this was way back before GPS -- and when they arrived they stood outside the gate that led to the driveway up to the Cash’s home. They were snapping photos when a beat up looking old pickup with fishing poles hanging out the back pulled up.  The driver was a “caretaker looking man” dressed in cutoffs and an old shirt. He kindly offered, as he opened the gate, to take them closer so they could take pictures on the porch of the house.  They jumped at the chance and, after taking a few pictures of the house, the “caretaker looking man” w...

"God is good, all the time.  All the time, God is good." It usually depends on how we define "good".  Not everyone sees good the same way.   Good these days usually means that you need to agree with me and disagree with things, points of view, or other things that I disagree with. When my kids were small and they wanted ice cream or some other junk food all the time, they would not have thought that my wife and I were "good" for telling them "no" so that they would have a balanced diet and would have treats as treats and not as their main food source. A lot of people want a "nice" God who doesn't contradict our wants, desires, and dreams. But if scripture and history is to be trusted, God isn't that way.  He's good in the ways he defines good, but not in the ways that we'd always like him to be. This small variation in how we define good and nice is a giant wedge that drives a lot of people away from religion or church p...