Wade Poe

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...

Most everyone wants to be happy. But many are taught happiness comes when you get to a certain goal or accomplishment in life, so happiness is always "out there, someday". In the meanwhile, people try to sneak a little "me time" here and there. Maybe at work they take a longer break or just don't do anything for a while. Maybe instead of listening in class, they daydream. For a lot of reasons, we learn not to enjoy the journey we are on.  We don't enjoy the work we're doing or the studying we're supposed to be doing.  Happiness becomes something that is only achieved when we're gaming the system we're in for a little bit of personal choice and fun.  And, very importantly, when we're not doing what we're supposed to do. That's a little bit of an overstatement but it's generally true in our culture. Many decades ago, people were happy when they could find work to do that paid them so they could have a place to stay, food to eat,...

Church hurt.   It’s a thing.  It’s pain caused by something related to and identified with a local church or even religion in general. Early on in deconstruction and rebuilding, it was something I “pulled out and set to the side" as a separate thing to look through. It didn’t take long to realize that it is, for many, a key feature of deconstruction since it’s often “the thing” that influences people to do a double-take at what they believe and to begin questioning. After I quit working for a church, the number of people that approached me with their church hurt was almost overwhelming.  Probably not almost.  It was overwhelming at times. I have heard stories of church politics, betrayal, deception, control, narcissistic leaders, sexism, ageism, racism, abuse of all kinds, and just about everything in-between. It’s a real thing and it comes in different forms and hits people differently.   There’s a LOT of info online about it – some of it really ...