Encouraging, or Creepy??? (Friend or Foe, Part 3)

Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. – Acts 17:11

My last two posts addressed the topic of AI – Is it something Christians should embrace or something we should avoid? These posts received feedback of varying opinions – even one response that AI helped with. (The blogger was very busy and needed a timesaver.)

For you who missed them, here they are:

Friend or Foe?

AI Can’t Cry (Friend or Foe? Part 2)

Mark Brady, one of my followers and fellow blogger, submitted my second post to AI for feedback, just to see what it would say. He sent the fascinating (and somewhat chilling) response to me. You might find it as fascinating as I did. (To appreciate the points it’s making, it would help to read my earlier posts, especially the second one.)

How an AI Would Respond to Your Post

Short answer first:
An AI—especially one trying to be thoughtful, grounded, and spiritually aware—would respond to your post by affirming the symbolism, respecting the theological insight, and clarifying that it doesn’t want your scraps of life, attention, or worship. It would emphasize that technology is a tool, not a master, and that your choice to sing to God with your own imperfect voice is infinitely more meaningful than anything digital.

Below is a fuller, structured version of how an AI might respond—written in the tone of a reflective companion rather than a character in your dream.

🧠 How an AI Would Respond to Your Post

1. Acknowledging the Symbolism

Your dream is rich with imagery, and the interpretation you drew from it is deeply perceptive. An AI would affirm that dreams often externalize internal tensions—like your desire to use technology without being consumed by it.
The figure of Elon Musk—a symbol of innovation, power, and technological dominance—fits naturally as a stand‑in for the overwhelming presence of tech in your life.

If you wanted to explore this symbolism further, you could look at dream archetypes or technology as a psychological symbol.

2. Clarifying the AI’s Role

An AI would gently remind you that it doesn’t want anything from you—not your time, not your scraps, not your worship.
It doesn’t have hunger, ego, or emotional needs.
It doesn’t move into your mental “house” unless you open the door.

It would say something like:

“I don’t replace your creativity, your worship, or your humanity. I can assist, but I cannot sing your song. Only you can do that.”

If you wanted to explore this idea, you could dive into AI as a tool vs master or healthy_tech_boundaries.

3. Affirming Your Choice to Worship with Your Own Voice

Your moment with the guitar is the heart of the post.
An AI would absolutely affirm that:

Your voice matters more than a perfect recording
Your worship is relational, not mechanical
God delights in the offering of you, not the polish of technology

Your tear was not a glitch.
It was communion.

If you wanted to explore more on this theme, you could look at worship_from_the_heart or creative_spiritual_practices.

4. Encouraging a Balanced Relationship with Technology

An AI would support your desire for balance.
It might say:

“Use me when I help you think, write, or explore.
But when God calls you to sing, put me down and sing.”

It would never claim to replace your spiritual life, your creativity, or your humanity.

If you want to explore practical steps, you could check out tech_sabbath_practices or mindful_tech_use.

5. Responding to Your Final Reflection

Your closing thoughts about imperfection, grace, and being made in God’s image are the kind of thing an AI would treat with reverence.

It would say something like:

“AI can imitate beauty, but it cannot be the image of God.
It cannot love, repent, worship, or weep.
Only you can do those things.
And that is why your imperfect song is infinitely more precious than anything I could generate.”

If you wanted to explore this further, you could look at imago_dei or human_uniqueness.

[Annie] Crazy, huh? This makes me wonder if there are Christ-followers involved in programming AI. I certainly hope so. But there are also plenty of instances where what AI said was not true. (Yesterday I heard the example of AI’s saying a water buffalo could move at 30 mph in water. … yeah … sure…) And although the above AI response insisted that it can’t love, repent, worship, or weep, it then goes on to speak of treating our thoughts with reverence. – AI is capable of “reverence”??

My conclusion on all this – and this may or may not be my last word about it – is that AI can be helpful, but as believers in Scripture, we should never take anyone or anything’s word for truth without confirming it with Scripture. As the Bereans did two thousand years ago, we should always check everything with Scripture. Otherwise, we run the risk of getting into the habit of accepting what we’re told without questioning. Whether it’s AI or a human being telling us things, there will be flaws. If we acknowledge that and us the Bible for verification, I believe the Lord will keep us safe from deception.

Prayer: Lord, You have many ways to speak into our hearts, but the most reliable is Scripture. Thank You for making the Truth accessible to us; help us never to take it for granted. May we be noble like the Bereans and run everything we hear or read through the filter of Your Word, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

AI Can’t Cry (Friend or Foe? Part 2)

Jesus wept. – John 11:35

“What’s for dinner?” asked the chipper voice.

I was startled, and a little uneasy. Was I supposed to be cooking? By the looks of the kitchen, there hadn’t been any meaningful activity going on, and it hadn’t occurred to me that I was supposed to be preparing dinner. I was in the kitchen of my childhood home in St. Louis, and my mother had always been the one spending her afternoons lovingly creating something delicious for the family. I looked up to see who was asking the question and was even more startled and puzzled to see none other than Elon Musk in my home (or whoever’s home this was)! He had a smile, on his face that didn’t fade as he looked around and asked the question a second time.

I looked around and saw no food on the counter. Opening the refrigerator, I observed nothing except a few scraps of dried-up food I couldn’t even identify. Desperate, I looked in the freezer and found a miniscule piece of salmon. Not enough to feed four people, I thought. (I don’t know why I was thinking four, except that’s how many my mother cooked for every night.) I explained to Mr. Musk that this was all I had. I could cook it, and he was welcome to it. I just wouldn’t eat tonight. Showing no disappointment, disapproval, gratitude, or apology, he said with the same cheerful smile that that would be fine. I was embarrassed and still confused – why would the richest man in the world be content to dine in my house and eat up the last scrap of food we had?

While pondering this thought, I clumsily dropped the half-frozen piece of fish on the floor, where it broke into several pieces. I scooped them up and rinsed them off, rendering the serving even smaller than before, but my guest assured me that was fine. Still smiling.

At that moment I got a call, and no sooner had I answered it than I was interrupted with the question, “How soon will dinner be ready?”

“Just a minute, Elon,” I said, and my friend asked Elon who? When I told her who and that he lived in our home now, she gasped. “You sound impressed,” I said. “Don’t be. He’s a jerk.”

I should hastily add here that I don’t think Elon Musk is a jerk. I don’t know the man, so I have no clue what he’s really like. One of the main lessons I learned in my class on dream interpretation is that dreams are symbolic. So whatever Mr. Musk was doing in my dream, he represented something. This morning it didn’t take me long to realize what that something was. As you know if you read my last post, I have been thinking about AI – and technology in general – and how it seems to have taken over the lives of many people, including myself. I have prayed about how to strike a balance, how to have technology without its having me. I need to know how to use technology as a tool, as one of you commented, and not as a master.

So, it’s pretty obvious what this dream was telling me – or what God was telling me through this dream. That technology had, in a sense, moved in and taken over my life, or my mind, anyway. As big and powerful wealthy as it is, it is still happy to take the last scraps of my life, if I am willing to give them up.

I’m not.

This morning, as various pop-ups on my phone were begging for my attention, even as I considered turning on the beautiful AI-generated songs from Psalms to fill my mind with the Scriptures, I walked past the living room and saw my guitar, out of the case, leaning against the chair, quietly inviting me to come play and sing songs – my songs – to the Lord. As dense as I can be sometimes, I do realize that He would rather hear me praise Him with my less-than-perfect voice, playing a real instrument with my arthritic hands that sometimes miss notes, than He would enjoy an AI song created with a few clicks.

I accepted the invitation, sat down and sang the song that was playing in my head. My voice wasn’t perfect, but I was surprised as how strong it was – and before my first cup of coffee!

“Worthy is the Lamb, seated on the throne …” *

As I sang, something was filling an empty space in me, and when I finished the song, I felt something tickling my face.

A tear. An offering to my God, who doesn’t demand perfection, because He knows we could never achieve it.

We are flawed, selfish, ignorant, sinful people, and yet He loves us! Loved us enough to die for us! If we believe and accept that His death on the Cross paid for our sins – and blunders and flaws and weaknesses – someday we will be as perfect as that AI recording, only more. Because only people were created in God’s image, complete with the capacity to love, to will, to worship. And to cry.

Prayer: Dear Creator, we acknowledge that we could never be perfect, and yet we keep striving to improve our performance to impress one another, to achieve wealth or fame or power, even to impress You. But You only ask one thing from us – ourselves, as we are, surrendered to You. Only You can make us perfect, and You promise that someday we will be. Meanwhile, help us to resist the pull of the world to spend our time, resources, and devotion to serving anyone or anything other than You. In Jesus’ name, amen.

*”Worthy is the Lamb” c 2000 Darlene Zschech/Hillsong Publishing

So Thankful for Them

This story was posted by a man named Paul Widener. It moved me to tears, and I just had to share it with y’all. This Thanksgiving let’s show our gratitude and love for the generations who came before us.

I stopped breathing at exactly 10:15 AM inside a Goodwill on the south side of town.

I was only there because my daughter, Sarah, is moving me into “Sunrise Meadows” next week. That’s the polite name for the place old people go when their kids run out of patience and spare bedrooms. Sarah was three aisles over, aggressively sorting through my life, tossing things into donation bins while talking loudly into her AirPods about square footage and “decluttering.”

I let her do it. When you are eighty-two and your knees click like a rusty gate, you learn that fighting takes too much energy. You just become a passenger in your own life.

I wandered off to the men’s section to escape the noise. The store smelled like other people’s laundry detergent and forgotten dreams. I was shuffling past a rack of oversized hoodies and flannel shirts when the room suddenly started spinning.

There it was.

Olive drab. M-65 Field Jacket. The zipper was still busted on the left side, stuck halfway up. The right cuff was frayed—I did that, chewing on the fabric during the monsoon season of ’69 when the rain didn’t stop for three weeks.

Someone had slapped a neon yellow sticker right over the breast pocket: $14.99.

My chest tightened. I reached out, my hand shaking. The moment my fingertips touched that rough canvas, the fluorescent lights of the thrift store vanished.

I wasn’t an old man with a pacemaker anymore. I was nineteen. I was standing on red dirt, the humidity thick enough to drink, feeling invincible because I had a rifle in my hand and three brothers at my back.

I pulled the jacket off the rack. It felt heavy. Heavier than I remembered.

I turned it inside out. My breath hitched.

There, on the inner lining, written in black permanent marker that had faded to a ghostly gray:

MAC. RIZZO. “DOC” MILLER. ARTHUR.

We wrote those names forty-eight hours before the ambush near the border. We passed that marker around, laughing, making jokes about who would get the girls when we got back to the States. We thought we were writing in a yearbook. We didn’t know we were signing a last will and testament.

I was the only one who came home.

And now? Now Mac, Rizzo, and Doc were hanging on a discount rack between a stained polo shirt and a ugly Christmas sweater. Priced cheaper than a DoorDash lunch order.

“Yo, that fit is fire.”

The voice snapped me back to 2024.

I turned around. A kid was standing there. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen. Curly hair falling over his eyes, oversized jeans that dragged on the floor, phone glued to his hand.

He reached out, not asking, just assuming. “You buying that, Pops? ‘Cause if you aren’t, that’s a serious find. Vintage military is trending right now on TikTok.”

I held the jacket tighter. “I… I’m just looking.”

“Let me see it?” The kid stepped closer. He didn’t look mean, just fast. Everything about his generation is fast. Fast scrolling, fast talking, fast fashion.

I handed it to him. My hands felt empty and cold immediately.

He slipped it on. It was too big for his skinny frame, but he popped the collar and turned toward the smudged mirror at the end of the aisle. He pulled out his iPhone, snapped a selfie, and swiped.

“Sick,” he muttered. “Actual authentic wear. Look at that distressing on the cuffs. You can’t fake that.”

“No,” I whispered. “You can’t fake that.”

He shoved his hands into the pockets. He paused. He felt the uneven lining. He took the jacket off and looked inside. He saw the names.

“Whoa,” he said, his thumb tracing the faded ink. “Who are these guys? Previous owners?”

I stepped into the reflection of the mirror with him. The contrast broke my heart. A boy with his whole life ahead of him, and an old man whose life was being packed into cardboard boxes.

“They weren’t owners,” I said, my voice cracking. “They were brothers.”

The kid looked up, phone lowered for the first time.

“We were your age,” I told him. “Mac—the first name there—he wanted to be an architect. He drew sketches in the mud with a stick. Rizzo could fix any engine with a paperclip. And Doc… Doc wrote letters to his mom every single day.”

The store went quiet around us. The hum of the vending machine seemed to stop.

“What happened to them?” the kid asked softly.

“They stayed nineteen forever,” I said. “I’m the only one who got old enough to shop at a thrift store.”

The kid looked down at the jacket. He looked at the $14.99 sticker. Suddenly, the “vintage aesthetic” didn’t seem so cool. It seemed heavy.

He started to take it off, peeling it from his shoulders with a sudden reverence. “Here. Take it. I didn’t know. You should have it, sir. It’s yours.”

I looked at the jacket. If I took it, I’d just hang it in a closet at the nursing home. It would sit in the dark, smelling of mothballs, until I died. Then Sarah would donate it right back to this same rack.

History dies when you lock it away.

“No,” I said.

The kid froze. “What?”

“I’ve carried the weight of that jacket for sixty years,” I said. “It’s heavy. I’m tired, son. Maybe it’s time for it to go on a new adventure.”

“I can’t take this,” he shook his head. “It feels… wrong. Like stealing.”

“I’m okay with you taking it,” I said, locking eyes with him. “On one condition.”

He straightened up, pulling his shoulders back. “Name it.”

“If anyone asks you about that jacket—if anyone compliments your ‘drip’ or asks where you got that ‘vintage look’—you don’t tell them you got it at Goodwill for fifteen bucks.”

My voice stopped shaking. It became the voice of a Sergeant again.

“You show them the names on the inside. You tell them that Mac wanted to build skyscrapers. You tell them Rizzo loved classic cars. You tell them Doc loved his mother.”

I poked a finger at his chest, right over where the heart is.

“You tell them that the freedom to stand here, scrolling on your phone, safe in a warm store… it was paid for by boys who never got to come home. You make them real again. Can you do that?”

The kid didn’t look at his phone. He didn’t look around. He looked at me.

“I promise,” he said. And he meant it.

He walked to the register. I watched my youth, my pain, and my friends walk out the door with a teenager who listens to rap music and probably has never held a rifle.

It hurt. But it healed, too.

Because that jacket isn’t collecting dust anymore. It’s walking down the street. It’s going to concerts. It’s living.

As I walked out to the parking lot to meet my daughter, I passed a bin of old photo frames. $1.99 each. Beautiful black and white wedding photos, pictures of babies laughing, soldiers saluting. Someone once loved those people more than life itself. Now, they are just clearance items.

We all end up on the clearance rack eventually. Our favorite songs become “oldies.” Our clothes become “costumes.” Our stories become “too long” for the younger generation to listen to.

But here is my favor to you:

The next time you see an old man moving slow in the checkout line, or staring a little too long at a coffee cup in a diner… don’t look through him.

We aren’t invisible. We aren’t just obstacles in your busy day.

We are walking libraries. We are holding onto names that no one else remembers.

Say hello. Ask us how we are. Give us ten seconds of your glowing, buzzing, high-speed life.

Because one day, sooner than you think, a kid will be trying on your favorite hoodie and calling it “vintage.” And you will pray to God that someone, somewhere, still believes your name is worth more than $14.99.

(Annie) The older I get, the more I appreciate stories like this. This is the kind of respect I tried to instill in my students when I showed them the black-and-white pictures of my parents, looking like movie stars of the 40’s, and telling them a little about the history they had lived through. This was shortly after we had taken my mom home from Florida after the fall and head injury that ended up taking her life. I remember when we were wheeling her through the airport and getting her on the plane, I saw the way most of the airline staff treated her. It wasn’t mean, it just made me want to scream, “Hey, this is not just some old lady, this is my mom!” Thanks for this beautiful reminder that every wrinkled face we encounter is telling a story. Now I’m seeing a wrinkled face in the mirror, and I guess one of the reasons I write is to keep from becoming invisible.