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. “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” (Matthew 6:26). 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).
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. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33).
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