Turkey Pot Pie Love

I dearly love turkey pot pies.

There’s just something especially delicious about getting a steaming hot pot pie and using your fork like a can opener to carefully remove the lid. Ahhhhhh. Next, you take white bread and scoop up the insides (careful or you’ll get burned!). Yummy! Then, eat the crust, and finally, the piez de la resistance; a tall glass of cold milk.

I love my wife, too. But words escape me when I try to describe what my heart feels when I see her. I simply see her and tell her “I love you.” Kathy doesn’t need a string of adjectives, because she can (hopefully) hear the tone in my voice.

Humanity is at a loss for words when it comes to adequately describing truly important things.

Like the word “love”. How can I love turkey pot pies and love my wife?

Maybe volume plays a part. No, I’m not recommending a bullhorn to read valentines. Maybe we just need to constantly hear something in order for us to begin to believe it.

I think maybe the reason that the word “love” pops up so often in the Bible (five hundred and nine times in the NIV translation) is that we tend to forget that God loves us. Maybe we’re so simple-minded that God thought, “If I don’t tell them at least five hundred times, they’re gonna miss the whole point.”

What does it mean that God truly loves us? That He dearly loves us? That He loves us?

Brennan Manning, an author and speaker, once stated, "The God of so many Christians I meet is a God who is too small for me. Because He is not the God of the Word. He is not the God revealed by and in Jesus Christ who this moment comes right to your seat and says “I have a word for you. I know your whole life story. I know every skeleton in your closet. I know every moment of sin, shame, dishonesty and degraded love that has darkened your past. Right now I know your shallow faith, your feeble prayer life, your inconsistent discipleship, and my word is this, I dare you to trust that I love you just as you are and not as you should be, because you’re never gonna be as you should be.”

I spent years of my life trying to appease an angry god. A deity who wanted to see me fail so that I could grovel for forgiveness at its feet. A deity who tolerated me when I did all the right things, but punished me when I didn’t quite make the cut.

It wasn’t until I started reading the Bible for myself that I began to hear God tell me, “I love you, Joe.”

And the longer I read, the louder those words became.

There came a point in time where I finally believed it.

My life has never been the same.


Colossians 3:12
Therefore, as God's chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

Psalm 13:5-6
But I trust in your unfailing love. I will rejoice because you have rescued me. I will sing to the LORD because he is good to me.

Psalm 42:7-8
I hear the tumult of the raging seas as your waves and surging tides sweep over me. But each day the LORD pours his unfailing love upon me, and through each night I sing his songs, praying to God who gives me life.

John 3:16-17
For God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.