Wade Poe

Growth.  That's the long & short of it.  After the "coming out" with deconstruction & rebuilding 9 & 1/2 months back, there's been ups & downs and, as of late - an extended quickening - a cycle of growth including a lot of enlightenment & revelation about myself & everything around me. Yes, I still have solid opinions about all things religious or church related, but they've been sorted for the time being & put aside for a season of watching.  Specifically, the sense that I need to let things be for a solid year before any more permanent commitments of action or activity. Things I still feel fairly solid about: >>> Believers need to embrace the freedom they have in Christ & examine more closely the occasionally misplaced allegiance to the following of religious leaders, groups, & the spiritual hostage situations they can place people into with 100% good intentions. >>> People are often unfulfilled & fearful...

I have an opinion about the election, but that isn't the point.   Months ago, anticipating the way social media might work, I set up additional Twitter/X accounts to see if I could get them to go different directions with things I liked, who I followed, how I commented, etc. In my main account, I leaned hard into the conservative side.  In the additional accounts, I worked the spectrum and covered the middle of the road all the way to progressive.   At some point, two of the accounts just went away/were suspended with no access for some reason that was never explained.  Could be user error or some policy I am not aware of. The results were what I expected - the harder you lean into a direction with social media, the more it feeds you what you're leaning into.  It doesn't take long to be completely inside an echo chamber. Looking at friends/social media connections of people across different platforms, I've noticed the same thing.  Whatever they seem to like...

"Where have you lived and how has it shaped you?" Recently I was talking with a Real Estate client about places we've lived and how the different locations reflect the time in life, "where" we were financially, socially, and in other ways.   I remembered the nice tool we have available in Google Earth and scrounged together some old pics to fill in gaps to look back over my history with houses. First stop, after being born in Gainesville, Missouri (1967), I lived the first five years at Howard's Ridge, Missouri.  At first, we had a house on some pasture where my grandpa kept cattle, hogs, etc. The first house burned down after catching fire from some embers from the fire place.   We had a well out front with a pump handle and an active outhouse behind the house that looked older than our house. While the house was being rebuilt on the same spot, we lived in a cabin, not far from Liner Creek, on Lake Norfork, just a few miles down the road.  There's not a...