Reflections

More than his beginning

On Sunday, Wade preached Job 42:12 at Freedom Church. “The LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (Job 42:12, NRSV).

He said most of us stop at chapter 1 and live there. There are forty-two chapters. He also said the season of Job’s affliction — from the blow to the start of restoration — was, by most theologians’ reckoning, one to nine months, short against a life that ran past 140 years. God restored him. Greater than before.

I have been turning that over all week. Not as a slogan. As a man who just heard a trial coming.

You know that moment. Someone says the thing out loud and the room changes. A job that will not hold. A company that might not. A marriage on the edge. A child who isn’t okay. A parent fading. A doctor who uses the word cancer. You have not lived the whole of it yet. You have only heard it. Job’s story starts with news like that. Loss named before the ash heap is even warm.

Last week it was me. A cancer diagnosis. I am still in the hearing of it. I run a company. People wait on decisions. Provision still rides on ordinary Tuesdays. And now this sits in the chair with me. I do not know the length of this season. I will not pretend I do.

I needed Sunday anyway. Wade said Job’s pain was real and also not the whole of his life. Relatively short. The book spends a long time in the middle chapters, so it does not feel short when you are in them. A week can feel like a year. I know that already. He said God restored Job — latter days more than the beginning, twice as much as before. He said God can restore you.

I want to be careful. I am not Job. I will not tell a man who just lost his work, or a woman who just heard cancer, that their trial will be brief, or that twice as much is coming if they pray right. Restoration is not a receipt. Job’s children who died were not replaced like livestock. The preacher did not answer Job’s “why,” and God didn’t either. He showed up. Job said he had heard of Him, and now he had seen Him.

That is how I am trying to trust. Not by clocking this. Not by forcing the latter days before they come. By staying with the God who was still in the room when the news was bad. If He restored Job, He is not done. If the season feels like chapter 1, I am asking for grace to believe there is a 42.

If you have just heard a trial coming — a job, a diagnosis, a phone call you did not want — I will not hurry you. I will only say what the text says, and what I am holding this week. He blessed the latter days more than the beginning. That is not a date I can put on my calendar. It is a God I can trust.

— Jay

Sunday’s message was Wade Haskins at Freedom Church, ‘Run It Back | Part 1.’

Rest for your souls

I keep hearing Jesus’ invitation in a season when almost everything else sounds like a demand.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28–30, NRSV).

Come. Not impress. Not produce one more proof that you still matter. Come.

I know a particular kind of weariness — the kind that isn’t only hours, but weight. Carrying responsibility for other people. Decisions folks depend on. Provision riding on outcomes I can’t fully control. The quiet fear that if the work shifts, the worth might shift with it. That’s a heavy burden even when things are steady. I can only imagine how it lands when a paycheck disappears, or when a young worker can’t find the first job at all.

Jesus does not offer a productivity system. He offers Himself. Rest for your souls — not rest as vacation from responsibility, but rest as a different center of gravity. His yoke, not the market’s. Learning from Him, not from the algorithm that never sleeps.

I’ll be honest: I’m still learning this. Some days I come to Him with the burden still clenched in my fists, asking Him to bless my grip. He is gentle enough to keep inviting. Humble enough not to shame the tired. The Church’s work in this disruption is not to yell “adapt faster.” It is to become a people who know how to come — and how to welcome the weary without making them earn a seat.

If AI strips away the illusion that our value is our output, maybe this is part of the gift buried in the hard news: we get to practice coming again. Not as winners. As people who need rest only He can give.

His yoke is easy. His burden is light. I’m trying to believe that with my hands open.

— Jay

Let it land

This morning a Wild at Heart reading landed in my inbox. John Eldredge was talking about beauty the way you talk about air and water: not as decoration, as daily food for the soul. God filled the world with it the way He filled it with oxygen. We swim in it. Most of us, he said, rush past it. We don’t take it in long enough for His goodness to actually land.

The reading didn’t point to a verse. I went looking for one anyway, because I needed a name for what I was feeling.

“O taste and see that the LORD is good; happy are those who take refuge in him” (Psalm 34:8, NRSV).

Taste. See. Not glance. Not agree that goodness exists somewhere. Take it in.

I know this in myself. When the work is frantic, I treat the morning like a hallway. Coffee, screen, the next task. Light on the trees and I don’t stop. A kindness from my wife and I’m already halfway to the next problem. Then, on the days the work goes quiet, or threatens to, I do the opposite and still miss it. I stare at what’s missing and call that realism. Either way, I rush past the very thing that could feed me.

I can talk about God’s goodness and not let it land. I can believe it the way I believe a weather report. True, and unused.

Beauty is not a luxury for people whose jobs are safe. It is one of the ways He keeps saying, I am still here, and I am still good, when the title is loud and when it is gone. A walk. A meal that isn’t eaten over a laptop. The face of someone who is not a task. The ordinary saturation of a world He did not have to make this lovely.

I want to be careful not to make this into a self-care tip. This isn’t “think positive.” Taste and see is an invitation to receive. Refuge, the psalm says: happy are those who take refuge in him. Not in the inbox. Not in the next hire. In Him.

I keep failing this in small ways. Today I am asking whether I will stop long enough for one good thing to actually reach me. When work is frantic, goodness is still there. When work is gone, goodness is still there. The question is whether I will take it in, or keep walking past the table He already set.

Taste. See. Let it land.

— Jay

The morning reading was from John Eldredge, whose book Experience Jesus. Really. is about this very thing — breaking free of the noise and digital distraction to actually encounter God.

The people down the road

We have Amish families not far from us. I’ve driven past the farms, watched the buggies on the shoulder, seen a dozen people raising a barn wall together on a Saturday. It’s easy to romanticize them, and just as easy to wave them off as a museum piece. But lately I keep thinking they may already understand something the rest of us are about to need badly.

Here’s what struck me. They’ve built a life that doesn’t run on the things AI is about to shake. There’s no 401(k) riding the market. No single employer to be laid off from. No sense that a person is worth what they produce. When a barn burns, the neighbors rebuild it. When a farmer breaks his leg, his harvest still comes in — brought in by other hands. The medical bills are carried by the church, not an insurance company. The old aren’t shipped off somewhere; they’re kept close and cared for at home. Needs — food, shelter, care — are met by people, not products.

I want to be careful not to make them into something they’re not. Most aren’t even farmers anymore; plenty run small businesses, and they’ve felt hard times too. This isn’t a call to sell the car and dress in black. And it isn’t that technology is evil. What they’ve held onto is a posture: they decide, together, what to let in — asking of each new thing, does this draw us closer, or pull us apart? And they never let go of the one thing a machine can’t replace: each other.

Honestly, it convicts me. My security is spread across accounts and a job and a system I don’t control. Theirs is spread across a community that will actually show up. When the ground shifts — and it’s shifting — which of those is really the more solid ground?

The first church looked a little like this. “All who believed were together and had all things in common… and they distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44–45, NRSV). Not a commune, not a rule — just people who genuinely carried one another.

I don’t think we’re called to flee the modern world. But I think we’re being invited to recover something the Amish never set down: to be a people who look after each other so completely that when work grows scarce, no one quietly falls through. That kind of community can’t be automated. And it may be exactly what this disruption leaves people starving for.

— Jay

The unknown God

I watched a talk by Mo Gawdat this week. He used to run the moonshot lab at Google, and now he spends his days warning us about where AI is headed. He’s brilliant, and he’s not wrong about the disruption coming. But what stayed with me wasn’t his fear. It was his faith.

Because he has one. He speaks of a higher intelligence behind everything. He says that if there is a God, that God is still God, above anything we build. He believes we are more than our bodies — that something in us doesn’t end when the body does. He treasures love. Sitting there, I kept nodding. He sees so much.

And then came the ache. Because he has gathered all of it — the design, the soul, the love, the life beyond death — and set the one Person at the center off to the side. He’ll keep the fruit. He leaves the root.

I don’t say that to look down on him. If anything, he’s paying attention to things most of us rush past. It reminded me of Paul in Athens, walking through a city full of altars, until he found one marked to an unknown god. He didn’t mock it. He said: the One you already worship without knowing — let me tell you his name. God did this, Paul said, “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him — though indeed he is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27, NRSV).

Not far. That’s the phrase I can’t shake.

Here’s what struck me most. We keep saying that AI can’t be trusted to invent its own morality — that a great intelligence has to be raised on values that come from outside itself, or it will only amplify us. I think that’s true of us, too. We can’t manufacture our own goodness and have it hold any weight. It has to come from outside. And Christians believe it already has — not as a principle, but as a Person who lived, and died, and rose.

So when someone reaches for the transcendent and stops just short, I don’t want to argue him into a corner. I want to be clear, and kind, and say: you’re not far. The God you sense is real. He has a name. And he came close enough to touch.

The disruption ahead will push a lot of people toward these questions. May we be ready — with reason, and love, and the name.

If it helps, I put together a short, gentle guide for having these conversations — without pretending we have all the answers: Faith Conversations in the AI Age.

— Jay

Consider the birds

Something has been sitting on my heart, and I think it’s the deepest part of all this.

We’ve been saying that our worth was never in our work — that when AI takes our output, it can’t take our value, because we were made to love God and neighbor. That’s true. But there’s a harder question underneath it, and I don’t want to skip past it: what happens to our trust when the paycheck shrinks?

Jesus saw this in us. “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” (Matthew 6:26, NRSV). In Luke he says it even more plainly: “do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink” (Luke 12:29, NRSV).

Striving. That’s the word. So much of our fear about AI is really striving — the dread that if we can’t produce, we won’t be provided for. And Jesus doesn’t answer that fear with a better financial plan. He points at a sparrow and asks us to believe that the God who feeds it has not forgotten us.

I’ll be honest: that’s easy to say and hard to live. It’s one thing to trust God when the accounts are full, another when the work dries up. But maybe that’s the gift hidden in this disruption — that it will press us into the kind of dependence we were always meant to have. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33, NRSV).

I don’t write this from a mountaintop. I’m asking myself the same question: when my output is cut back — some, or all — do I have that kind of faith? I want to. I think the days ahead may teach us all what it really means.

He feeds the birds. He knows what we need. Let’s prepare our hands — and our hearts to trust him.

— Jay