Wade Poe

"Where are all the people?  Have we really had a bunch of people who didn't show up?"  It was an amazing wedding and reception, but for a moment at the beginning of the reception, I looked around and was a little sad and disappointed for my daughter and our family a while.   "Why did people not come?  Why did so many not come to the reception?" At some point, a few minutes in, my wife observed in passing that the chair rental place had set up way too many chairs.   We'd asked for six places max, per table, following a carefully planned seating chart and they'd set up eight or more, making it look like a lot of people didn't show up - at least to me.  And only for a little while. It is interesting how details can change how we see situations.  Just a few extra chairs and I thought we'd had people who'd abandoned us after the wedding. After my wife's comments, my mind went back to standing in front of the audience while reading the couple...

Paul, the guy who wrote much of the New Testament, wasn't trying to get people to quit having sex.  He also wasn't trying to get people to a place where they enjoyed what we'd call "Christian culture".  And Paul wasn't setting up a new religious following that would permanently financially benefit anyone. __________ It's easy to project the culture you grow up in on to just about anything.  I certainly learned to project what "church" taught me back in time, into the Bible - as if "Bible times" and the time I was growing up in the church were similar.   Kind of like when we went to "The Great Passion Play" in Eureka Springs, Arkansas - white people, for the most part, dressed in VBS clothes acting out the life of Jesus - that's what the Bible and it's events were like - we just lined up our teachings and ideas and projected them back into scripture. It is very hard not to do this.  Everyone does it.  But that doesn...