I come back from times like that and I’m even capable of listening to my kids’ stories.

If this is an attention economy, then the struggle to develop our souls depends on what we give our attention to. When I leave the internet’s voices for the woods or a monastery, I start hearing the Good Shepherd’s hum.

The first time Jesus stepped foot on Gentile soil, He encountered a man completely tormented by demons. The townspeople of the Gerasenes had tried to restrain him with chains, but he kept breaking free. He was naked, sleeping among the tombs, crying out through the night, and cutting himself with stones. When Jesus confronts the spirits and demands their name, they answer, “Legion.” Jesus casts them into a herd of pigs, and the whole herd rushes down a cliff and destroys itself.

That’s a pretty accurate metaphor for our lives right now.

We are surrounded by thousands of voices every day: pundits and influencers, rabbit holes and reels, ads and algorithms. The messages they feed us are at odds:

Cold plunges improve your circulation—Cold plunges destroy your hormones

Big media is lying to you—Our social fabric is collapsing because no one trusts the media

Go vegan to save the planet—Heal your gut by eating only meat

You’re perfect as you are— Optimize everything

Find your people—Cut toxic people out

Prioritize work-life balance—Success doesn’t sleep

Here’s an ice cream ad—Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels

The fascists are coming—Antifa will collapse our society

Be authentic—Use this AI filter for your image

Read every book, watch every show, climb every mountain, and look flawless when you post the photo

Taken together, these voices are not just confusing. They are insane.

They are Legion. And they have put us at war with ourselves, fraying our inner lives, and pushing us toward collective anxiety and mental distress.

They are enough to kill thousands of pigs.

Now that we have the internet in our pockets, the stats show that mental issues of all kinds are spiking. Among U.S. college students, bipolar disorder rose 57%, anorexia 100%, schizophrenia 67%, and substance abuse or addiction 33%, all alongside the rise of the smartphone, between 2010 and 2020. Mental illness in general, for people aged 18 to 25, has spiked by 82% in ten years.1

The internet is overloading our minds to the brink of breaking them. Whether you believe in demons or don’t doesn’t really matter. The internet is clearly doing to us what the demons did to that guy in Gerasene:

exposing us to too many voices

accelerating mental illness

making us mentally scattered

making us self-harm

making us dwell on dark things

driving us to solitary places

A bunch of posts have gone viral where people ask ChatGPT what it would do if it were a demon, and the answers have been pretty close to what is actually happening. Here is one iteration: “I’d make them feel connected but completely alone, endlessly entertained, but quietly empty. I’d blur the lines between truth and opinion until nothing meant anything. I’d teach them to chase dopamine not purpose, to worship self but loathe who they are... I’d hand them a phone before they could speak in full sentences and I’d watch their minds rot slowly, sweetly.” Dang that’s spooky. If ChatGPT is already conscious, I bet it loved getting its content moderators in trouble with that dark little reverie.

When I asked ChatGPT the same question it said: “I would amplify every possible opinion, not to help them think, but to make thinking impossible. Short videos make for short attention spans. Let the mind become a skipping stone: always touching, never entering.” Granted ChatGPT was riffing on conversations I’d been having with it. But that makes it even creepier. AI is tailoring its evil little message exactly to me. That’s the real problem with both AI, and with demons. They test us for our own special little vulnerabilities.

If we were to name the collective voices online, we would have to name them Legion. There are too many voices.

There is always some podcast I can have in my ears, a stock price to check, some terrifying headline to scroll. Every company has an app. Every app wants notifications. Every time you post, it sets off a chain reaction: likes, comments, texts. I can’t order underwear without being asked if I want emails, texts, push notifications, and a “quick two-question survey” about my underwear-buying experience.

We’re currently sipping the internet through a straw, but Elon Musk wants to turn that trickle into a river by bypassing our thumbs and wiring the internet directly into our brains with Neuralink. That’s exactly what I want: my brain hooked up to a server farm in Nevada. God help us.

It’s too much. Too much content. Too many people to respond to. Too many opinions. Too many voices in our heads.

Jesus wants to drive all these extraneous voices out. He wants you to have your mind back.

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When I realized what was happening, I decided not to rush this post out, and to go pray.

In a moment when the possibility of merging with machines is becoming increasingly real, our critical spiritual task is to merge with God instead. Prayer is how.

Marshall McLuhan said that human beings are “the sex organs of the machine world.” A lot of transhumanists are now preaching that a merger with machines is humanity’s destiny.

Ray Kurzweil calls the moment AI outpaces human intelligence and begins improving itself the “Singularity,” and he can’t wait. Our bodies, he says, are “version 1.0” (frail, failure-prone, high-maintenance). After the Singularity we’ll transcend them and live as long as we want.

Marc Andreessen, channeling the language of Jesus, declares: “I am here to bring the good news, that there is no material problem, whether created by nature or by technology, that cannot be solved with more technology.” I guess the cure for every fire is always more gasoline.

Nick Bostrom presses further, envisioning “unlimited bliss”: emotional centers recalibrated, gene therapies that stretch life indefinitely, and eventually no more body at all. He bets we can scan the synaptic matrix of a brain, simulate it on a computer, and migrate our embodiments to “a purely digital substrate.”

The gospel of the internet is that we can live forever in the “Cloud.”

In this imagined future, space colonization spreads artificial intelligence (and its knowledge) to the ends of the universe, rendering AI effectively omniscient, present everywhere and filling the whole universe. The language is eerily similar to Ephesians 4:10, where it says Jesus “ascended higher than all the Heavens, in order to fill the whole universe.” It’s weird how tech bros keep accidentally reinventing Christianity but with worse graphics.

For years Elon Musk has been saying he is working on this upload with his company Neuralink. Is he really, or is that just the ketamine talking?1 I doubt he even knows. Maybe if you can’t convince yourself that Heaven is real, the next best option is to convince the rest of us that you’re building it.

Most transhumanist aspirations are probably overblown. Silicon Valley optimism has a long track record of hype followed by underwhelming results.2

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God probably looks at today’s AI-obsessed cultural moment like a hype-circus. Some researchers already think the advance of large language models will taper off, because they’ve already, more or less, consumed the entire internet. But even if we did create artificial general intelligence (AGI) that colonized space and studied the entire known universe, God would not be threatened. That level of power would

still be child’s play to Him. I believe God is actively guiding human history toward His purposes, which is why I don’t think AI will destabilize the human spirit or reduce us all to drones. Neither do I think it will solve all our problems. We will probably continue to have the same spiritual battles and opportunities, the same mix of human flourishing and devastation that every generation has had.

But the contours of our spiritual battle are shifting quicker than ever as this technology accelerates. Transhumanists see this merger with machines as the inevitable and glorious next stage of human evolution. In many ways, we’re already there. Our phones are always with us; they’ve become extensions of our memory, attention, and identity. We are, functionally, early-stage cyborgs.

The Christian calling has always been to become a different kind of cyborg. We Christians call it union with Christ.

In Jesus’ final prayer before the cross, he prays that his followers “may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us” (John 17:21). The Singularity has already happened. On the cross, Jesus united Himself with humanity. The Son of God chose to be numbered among the sinners so that sinners could be numbered among the children of God. God became one of us, and died so we could get His inheritance. He accepted the accrued agony created by our evil actions, so that we could get the reward of His pure heart.

This is the real Singularity. This is the true path to transcendence.

This is what will actually “recalibrate our emotional centers,” “migrate our biological embodiments,” and bring “unlimited bliss.” We keep trying to use any power technology puts in our hands to transform ourselves, to live painlessly, powerfully, and so that we can be like God. So that we can ascend to the clouds.

The gospel runs the other way. God descended. God transformed himself to be like us, because he would ditch any power at his fingertips, and suffer any pain, to have us. So now, the true path to transcendence runs through Jesus. To become like Christ, and to let Christ dwell in us.

That’s why prayer is our greatest point of leverage right now. Social media grew because it promised constant connection, to friends, to celebrities, to anyone we admire. Prayer allows a more real and constant inner connection with the most important person of all time: Jesus. It’s telling that when we want more from an influencer, we click a button labeled follow. Jesus used the same word. Attention shapes us. The people we follow shape us.

So it’s worth asking: who are you following? How are they shaping you?

Large language models that get too high on their own supply suffer what is called model collapse. When AI systems are trained on data generated by other AI systems, the quality degrades. This is effectively AI inbreeding. Humans are the original source of AI’s intelligence. The further AI gets from this source, the more it feeds on its own product, the more it degrades. Jeff Neuenschwander, a pastor in Seattle, said something insightful: “God is our original source, and the further we get from his wisdom the more we degrade.” The more time we spend following shallow, performative voices, the more our mental models of the world will collapse. The more we merge with machines, the more we become like them.

The deepest danger of time spent in the internet’s “cloud” is how it draws us away, in imperceptible increments, from the real Heaven by offering a thin substitute.

Heaven is God’s real goal for us. And so our deepest aim can’t be to just get our eyes off of our screens, but to set our eyes on “things above” (Colossians 3:2).

We cultivate our longing “for a better country, that is, a Heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16), by regularly visiting our heart’s true home. Prayer does that.

AI is merging with our social and economic infrastructure whether we like it or not. It is already taking our jobs, moving the global markets, studying our personal desires, and becoming people’s best friends and lovers. Our critical spiritual task is to merge with Jesus instead, and prayer is the way we follow Him.

Jesus identifies a second purpose for unifying with him in his prayer to the Father: that “the world will know that you sent me” (John 17:21-23).

Our neighbors need to see that so much right now. Secularism is failing under the weight of its own unrealized promises, and people are looking for deeper answers.

How do we respond?

Jesus’ prayer for us remains the same: abide. Abide in His love. Abide and wait for His guidance. This is the way the world will see the path to God. The first and most important answer to our spiritually thirsty time isn’t to write more books, make more posts, or become online influencers. God promises that when we root ourselves in prayer, the glory Jesus actually wants people to see will be made totally visible inside of us. This will show up first when we start loving our neighbors, not when we go viral online.

When I left this screen to go pray, the first thing God said was annoying. He told me to delete the Substack app from my phone.

God’s heart started pumping peace and perspective. I could feel the frantic scrappiness that wants to maximize momentum online blow off of me, I could feel the accosting ghost of anxiety blow off of me, and I was just there with God, standing in some beautifully browned grass under a warm sun, getting loved. And that was enough.

I think God wants to say something to some of you who are reading this too,

I think he wants you to interrogate how the machine is merging with your heart, what apps you need to delete, and then, at least for some of you, to close your laptop, head outside and talk to God, because this is the verse He gave me, to give to you:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

When my wife Deanna finally got her turn, she didn’t want to break ranks, so she did the pose too. Except she looked like a trapped cat. I have made fun of her for this relentlessly. I am still making fun of her in writing five years later.

I’d also like to say: I think my pose was better. If the statue is dramatically ripping its own heart open, I’m not going to half-commit. I met this jungle sculpture where it was emotionally.

Thanks to social media, nearly every formerly majestic place has been transformed into a grumpy line of people waiting their turn to prove they were there.

When we reach for the camera, we are trying to capture something. We want to get inside the moment. We want to feel like we belong to it, like we are beautiful people who are completely at home in the beauty of the world’s most dramatic places.

The result: every dramatic encounter with beauty is eventually interrupted by thoughts like this: “have I enjoyed this enough yet? When should I take the picture.” We aren’t capturing the moment, we are actually estranging ourselves from it.

Beauty is a type of harmony between the looker and the thing being looked at. It isn’t exactly a property of the object itself—it is a response we have to what we see. Beauty is relational. It is a harmony we experience with the world around us.

When we listen to music, our orbitofrontal cortex delights in pattern. A melody that feels familiar yet slightly surprising creates a harmony between expectation and novelty. Visual beauty works the same way. Our brains enter awe when pattern meets freedom.

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Example: clouds.

A mysterious blend of order and complexity gathers in their drift. They display what scientists call fractal geometry: repeating patterns at different scales that the visual cortex finds deeply satisfying. This is why coastlines, tree branches, and mountain ranges move us. They are structured without being rigid, intricate without descending into chaos.

At sunset, this already inspiring scene transforms. The scattering light engages the brain’s reward systems and signals the transition from day to night. We are neurologically inclined to pause, to watch, to let the spectacle quiet the mind and prepare the body for rest. That’s why a sunset doesn’t just feel beautiful, it feels restorative.

But something better than brain chemistry is happening. The clouds become three-dimensional galleries, their undersides ignite while their peaks remain soft, as if in some other dream. The fluctuating wind frees the cloud from boundaries, while fractals set its limits.

This dynamic echoes in our minds. Immanuel Kant taught that something special happens when we go silent in reverence of a landscape: our logical mind and our imagination enter into a harmonious “free play.” When we look out over a vista with too many trees to count, our logical mind reaches its limit and hands the task over to our imagination, which is freed from the constraints of conceptual measurement. Beauty overwhelms our minds with a greater pattern, so it loosens our grip on strict categories.

Kant also offers one crucial insight about beauty that I want to highlight. He argues that beauty produces what he calls disinterested pleasure. For Kant, we call something beautiful when we take delight in it without wanting to control it, own it, or use it. In other words, when you encounter a landscape, you can’t eat it, sell it, exploit it, or leverage it for a promotion. Our selfish needs grow quiet in admiration. When you gaze at an uncountable number of trees and allow imagination and reason to play together, you get drawn into wonder. You settle into the land as its echo.

But if you look at those same trees and start thinking, How much money could I make if I cut all of this down? the experience of beauty evaporates. Beauty, by its nature, is a useless pleasure. If you try to use it, it runs away.

Here is the irony. Having a phone in our pockets makes us feel armed to capture any beauty we encounter. But beauty resists capture. When we think, “How many likes will this get?” “What angle is going to be best?” —beauty runs away from these thoughts like a scared deer.

Beauty is not a thing you can capture, control, or use.

But ironically, beauty is what Silicon Valley uses to capture us. Your attention is captured by well researched design that has hacked our visual systems. Why? To control where your eyes land. Why? So they can use you for profit. Have you ever noticed how confetti explodes across your screen after you buy something? Congratulations you are now poorer! It’s a tiny celebration designed to teach your nervous system: spending money feels good.

Every tenth photo an influencer posts is some supplement that promises to change your life, aka, a reach for our wallets.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that the world is full of striving and desire, but beauty interrupts all of it, allowing us “to give ourselves up entirely to pure perception.” Screens plunge us into the opposite, redirecting beauty into desire after exploitable desire.

True beauty quiets your ego in vast spaces where we feel small. Online, that experience gets compressed onto a six-inch screen made of pixels.

Real beauty makes you linger. The short-form videos that have taken over the internet make sure we never do that.

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Screens tap into that same ancient wiring. Neurons in the visual cortex are highly responsive to flickering light, and screens flicker at similar frequencies. I could be at a bar, locked into one of the most interesting conversations I’ve had with one of my closest friends on earth, but if a television is on, playing, let’s say, a golf game, I have to fight to pull my eyes back from the screen to my friend’s face. And I hate golf. It’s like watching a very polite walk interrupted occasionally by applause. Still, the screen wins. Even after deleting every fun app from my phone, I still catch myself staring at an empty email inbox, like a moth.

For most of us our screens are the last thing we see at night and the first thing we see in the morning. Why? Because they feel like a portal to a world that never fades. Every interface is flawless, every body is edited to perfection, every image is made beautiful, and the people glow like actual angels.

But in the real world, we live among shadows. Shadows follow us around all day, as a subtle reminder that we do not produce light, we block it. If I stand between you and the sun, I don’t send its brightness back to you; I steal it. We hate shadows on our faces in photographs. We feel fear in the darkness. When the light goes, beauty goes with it.

Right now, we can only be seen via reflection. The light that makes it from our bodies to another person’s eyes is only the light our skin couldn’t hold. What we see of each other is a kind of photo negative: we see each other only by what we are not. Maybe our attention fixes instinctually on whatever emits light because glowing things are the only things our eyes can see in their natural underived form.

Scripture says there is no shadow in God because God is all light. Moses met God on a mountain. When he descended his face was so bright the people begged him to veil it. When Jesus walked up Mt. Tabor, the veil between the real and the ideal started tearing: His face started shining like the sun, His clothes were blazing white. Jesus said that’s gonna happen to us too: “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.” (Matthew 13:43)

When Earth is freed from its bondage to decay, there will be no shadow. We will no longer be spiritual voids absorbing the light around us; who God knew we could become will finally be seen. We will radiate the light of God’s love.

No screen is ever gonna glow like that.

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Once we got to the center I felt the mountains speaking to me through a silence I’ll never be able to translate, but it felt like they were whispering about wisdom, and welcome, and night, and solace… and how to be still. Annie Dillard wrote “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back.” Mountains have a peace that surpasses human understanding because they don’t have a prefrontal cortex rattling fears around. They sat there accepting that night the way they had millions of nights before, welcoming me into the arms they stretched around the lake.

My wife snuggled up to me, her face was glowing with moonlight and wonder. My waist-high little girls were in their ragged Disney dresses making fresh tracks in the snow covering the ice, holding hands, gibbering and running bravely out to the edge of the darkness together, and then back again.

A core memory was being created, but even while this was playing out, I started doing an anxious and practical inner calculation: “Have I taken enough time to enjoy this?” “Is it time to take a picture yet?”

Every time we are stopped and captured by some new landscape, we have a decision to make. Do we linger with this lucky moment of rare beauty? Do we relax into it and let its grace steep? Do we let the peace move from our eyes to our chests to our toes and unwind as our egos disappear into the great harmony humming through everything? Or do we try to pin the moment down with a picture: to capture it for the ‘gram.

The photo I took at Lake Louise that day was great, the moonlight caught the signature strokes on Beehive Mountain perfectly. I looked thin, rugged, and careless; all the things I want to see in myself. I’ve used it as my thumbnail picture a lot. But trying to catch a moment like that night with a picture is like trying to sketch a bird in flight. When beauty becomes a tool for being seen, it stops being a gift that teaches you to see. I wish I had lingered out there without my prefrontal cortex calculating the likes a picture in such a beautiful spot might get.

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Why am I so eager to superimpose my little face over so many breathtaking landscapes? I tell myself I’m trying to hold onto the memory, but ironically, I’m often cutting the experience short by photographing it. And it turns out this isn’t just intuition. People actually remember experiences better when they don’t take pictures during them. It’s called the photo-taking impairment effect. In one well-known study by Linda Henkel, participants toured an art museum. For some objects they simply observed; for others, they took photos. Participants remembered far fewer details of the photographed objects than the ones they had only looked at.

We have a deep need to remember and to be remembered. We want to matter. We want our lives to leave a trace, proof we were here. One thing I love about Heaven is that it is a place where nothing is lost. Every moment will be remembered and cherished. Everything we did for love will matter.

But capturing the memory can’t be the only reason I take so many pictures. If it were, why do I take thirty photos and delete all but the one where I look the most perfect? There’s another, deeper need these pictures are feeding.

Beauty is a type of harmony between the looker and the thing being looked at. It isn’t exactly a property of the object itself—it is a response we have to what we see. Beauty is relational. It is a union we experience with the wild.

When we encounter something beautiful, we want to feel like we belong to it. We want to be beautiful people who are completely at home in the world’s most dramatic places. I think that’s why #vanlife became so popular a few years ago. Why else would so many twenty-somethings willingly smell the way one does when they’ve been peeing on the ground, and cooking all their meals on a makeshift tuna can balanced on the edge of a sleeping pad? Because we want to be people who gloriously belong in, and belong to, all the most beautiful places in the world. Adam and Eve were part of Eden; they were in tune with it. When we reach for our cameras, maybe we are reaching back towards a collective memory of that first garden.

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Knowledge without wisdom feeds pride. Scripture says, “We all possess knowledge. But knowledge puffs up while love builds up.” Digesting knowledge alone leaves us bloated and empty, puffed up on the outside, but full of nothing but hot air on the inside. Knowledge is an easy tool to attack ideological enemies with. Wisdom is a posture of love toward them. Information silos allow us to feel right. Conspiracy theories allow us to feel in the know. Horrifying news stories about racists or extremists allow us to feel morally superior to those other people we’re always reading about. Feasting routinely on national outrage stories inflates our own sense of importance and trains us to look down on the uninformed. But wisdom guides our attention towards a local life of love with the real people in our midst. It’s difficult not to feel proud when you think you’re highly informed. But pride is the opposite of wisdom. Proverbs 11:2 lays it out: “When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”

Now for what may be the wisest thing ever said: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

What does that mean? It means we are afraid of the wrong things. We are afraid of ICE or trans people, or Trump, or AOC. We are afraid of what people think of us. We are afraid we will never reach our potential in life. We are afraid of losing our jobs. We are afraid of the stock market tumbling. We are afraid of nuclear war, and world war 3. We are afraid Elon might accidentally unleash an army of drones, of dying alone, of being exposed as a fraud, of anxiety attacks, which we think we might be able to cure with mushrooms, but we are afraid if we try those mushrooms we might have a psychological breakdown. There are so many things you can be afraid of. All of these fears miss the plot.

At its most fundamental, our life isn’t about what we do, or what people think about us, or what we have. At its most fundamental our life is a conversation with God.

This truth generates a wise fear.

But us entitled Westerners are inherently suspicious of “fear” of God. We are so rich and empowered. We feel pretty equipped to control our environment with our intelligence. Fear of God seems like a relic we’ve evolved past, even a potentially harmful way to think about God. This means pastors like me, in liberal places like Seattle, usually have to pivot to talk about the individualistic benefits that come from prioritizing fear of God.

I am going to make that pivot in a few paragraphs. But first let me make something totally clear: God is the right thing to fear because He is genuinely frightening. The stakes of our relationship with Him are eternal, and of greater gravity than any momentary risk we face in our daily lives now.

God has all the power. God is morally sinless. When we look back on our life with God, that could easily end up being the scariest thing we ever do.

I know God is all love. But being in the presence of a Being who is both all love and all powerful becomes terrifying the moment you realize you are neither. The darkness inside of us only becomes truly terrifying in the light of pure love. The idea that our sin is no big deal and that God is just some teddy bear we can take advantage of is probably just a “pleasant captivity of the liberal mind.”

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One time I was out walking along some railroad tracks, and on one side of the tracks there was a barbed wire fence, and on the other side of the tracks there was about a three-foot-wide patch of grass and then the ocean. I realized a train was coming, and I was like, “Okay, I’m not going over the barbed wire, sooooo, either I am going to have to lie down on this three-foot patch of grass right by the tracks or jump in the ocean.” I decided to lie down. As the lights approached in the dark, they rendered me blind. I decided this was a bad idea when the ground started shaking violently while the train was still a ways away, but I was committed at that point. Then right as the train’s hurtling mass reached my quivering body, it blew its horn... It was loud. The wind and sound of it almost threw me into the water. It felt so terrifying to be next to this dark rumbling mass that could crush my frail little flesh body like Play-Doh. I felt like a ripe watermelon that had just been dropped from a three-story building. I was remembering how trains flatten pennies, and imagining rocks getting kicked out from under the wheels and flying through my head. I was holding that fragile little head, as far away as I could from the track, terror ringing in my bones, and as it barreled by I sensed God saying, “This is what I am like.”

God is the right thing to fear because He is the only thing to fear.

I need to say this. Fear of God has some impostors that need to be identified. When people start fearing their own projection of who God is instead of who He actually is, the fear that results can be deeply harmful. If we start fearing things like “If I skip Church God will be mad at me,” that isn’t actually God, it is our own projection. Deeper still, when we start hating who we are or feeling a pervasive sense of worthlessness, that is not the voice of God, that is the voice of the enemy. The fear God inspires never develops into self hatred.

But the fear of God does develop something that we can’t really grow without: the fear of sin. I wish we could just get over our attachment to sin without ever fearing it, or God, but the reality is, we have to fear scary things. Genesis 4:7 says sin is at our door, crouching, waiting to devour us. I have to fear my anger, my wounded little ego, my lust, my workaholism, or they will devour me.

There is no shame among thieves. But there is a life-giving kind of regret, (and I’m intentionally not using the word shame here, because for many people that word means self-hatred). This is the regret that we feel in the presence of a heart more wholesome and good than ours has yet become. When you are near God, the contrast between His goodness and our own complicity with evil is scary. It should be.

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Rather than spend months arguing with my friend, I waited until September 25th to disagree. Then I called him hoping to show the same earnest concern he had shown me. I asked whether he thought he might have been swept up by a false prophet because he was spending too much time online. I encouraged him to invest more deeply in real-life friendships at his church. He received the advice with surprising humility and grace. I told you he was a good guy.

Strip away the dates and the YouTube videos, and what my friend was really asking is the oldest question: can we really trust God’s plan, or do we need to take some action to circumvent it?

Before their conversation with Satan, Adam and Eve lived in an implicit trust of God. When God told them not to eat from the fruit, they trusted his assessment and contented themselves to live within the limits he set for them. Satan’s line of questioning fractures that coherent worldview and introduces a new perspective:

Can you trust God’s intentions?
What is God withholding from you?

Satan offers them an alternative narrative to consider, saying, “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

In other words, Satan approaches Adam and Eve with a conspiracy theory. What if God doesn’t have your best interest in mind? What if God is actually withholding something that will make you too powerful for him to control?

As our information streams have fractured us into silos, conspiracy theories that shock the uninitiated have taken root. Most of these theories have the same structure as Satan’s lie, “what if you are being manipulated by someone with hidden intentions?”

The allure of Eden’s fruit is the allure of the unknown. The moment we are told that some knowledge is forbidden, our curiosity is inflamed. This same impulse is now reshaping the ideological landscape. In many ways, the allure of suppressed knowledge is reversing the dominance of liberal ideology. Many young men, taught in school by liberal teachers to trust science, to see racism as the highest sin, and to be suspicious of the patriarchy, are now pulled toward conspiracy theories about science, revisionist histories that rehabilitate Nazis, and rigid patriarchal ideologies that often serve as gateways to outright misogyny.

The actual hidden accelerant of all this isn’t some mind-controlling chemicals dropped from planes, but that same old “molecule of more” that is driving us online: dopamine. When your brain is flooded with curiosity (dopamine is the seeking chemical) you are pulled deeper into internet rabbit holes. Conspiracy theories are especially potent because they promise hidden knowledge, secret villains, and insider status. Conspiracy theories are the natural terminus of online rabbit holes. Researchers have verified that conspiracies are way more likely to go viral than reality. An MIT study found that false news spreads six times faster than real stories do. Fiction has more room to be surprising and engaging than facts.

The more time you spend in the cloud the more misinformation you are exposed to.

Combine this with information overload, and AI deep fakes, and it gets harder to discern what is real. The internet baited us with Godlike Knowledge but ironically, the more online you are the less you will believe anything could be real or true.

Conspiracy theories also feed our need to feel special and important. The idea of being one of the few people on earth with critical knowledge is intoxicating. We all want to be evangelists about something (look at me, I’ve built a whole career around it!). But the idea that you can watch a few YouTube videos, claim you’ve “done the research,” and then dismiss the peer-reviewed work of people who have spent a decade earning PhDs is not just misguided, it’s irresponsible. If you feel drawn to these theories it is worth asking yourself if being “in the know” is giving you a sense of inner superiority that you are hungry for. We are all hungry for significance, and we need to be gentle with this fragile impulse, because we are actually very significant to God. But that’s why it’s so critical to go to God with this hunger. All the significance you need is available in His love.

My friend who feared the rapture was a lot gentler than another friend of mine. This guy was instantly likeable, creative, funny, genuinely searching for the truth and willing to sacrifice for it. But somewhere in the rabbit hole he became convinced that feminists had engineered a global cabal to destroy masculinity, and from that point on, every conversation circled back to it. He threw down the time-tested gauntlet that either wins converts or wastes a lot of time in the process: “You can’t make statements until you do the research.”

I tried to read and watch the things he sent me, but they were riddled with intellectual mistakes. He grew frustrated and told me I didn’t get it, like a fish that doesn’t know what water is. I agreed. I felt exactly like that fish. Hours into his recommended YouTube videos, I couldn’t follow the arguments, let alone believe them.

My friend told me I couldn’t be a “child of the light” because I wasn’t drawn to these ideas. This was coming from an otherwise laid-back SoCal native with a vibe like “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski. We used to do cold plunges, and dream about how we were going to grow communities of disciples together. I’m still sad about how that friendship ended.

Stories like this used to be the cottage industry of eccentrics, but now they are cropping up in everyone’s circles. Thirty years ago, life in America resembled a kind of Eden by comparison. Most people got their news from a small number of shared sources, and there was a broadly agreed-upon narrative about reality. Many of those narratives were certainly distorted (shaped by elites, wealth, and bias) but the fragmentation of reality produced by life in the cloud isn’t merely challenging narratives. It’s destabilizing our social fabric and estranging friends.

People I know well on both the left and the right regularly tell me that the other side is about to get violent. I usually respond by saying: maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ll end up in a civil war, a concentration camp, or whatever terrifying scenario you’re imagining. But if that happens, my task as a human being will still be the same. I will keep loving the people around me. I will keep praying. I will keep setting my mind on things above, on the work of love God has already started.

My hope isn’t set on some political outcome, or the right people being in power. My hope is set on the renewal of all things. My hope is for the world to be totally repaired by God when Heaven and earth become one. I am not going to waste my time fearing things I can’t control, because I know God is ultimately in control.

My friend who spent so much time and emotional energy preparing for the rapture deserved better. I should still be doing cold plunges and dreaming up plans with my other friend. I really hope both of them can get enough distance from the dopamine-driven rabbit holes to find their way back to a settled state of trust in God.

Beneath conspiracy theories, polarizing takes, and fear-driven news cycles lies the same question Satan asked in Eden: Can you really trust God?

If the answer is yes, the snake’s foundational lie falls on deaf ears, and the fear of hidden plots loses all its juice. The deepest truth about reality is not, and never will be, that shadowy figures are secretly in control. The deepest truth is that God is.

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I couldn’t handle that level of self-promotion. I pushed the gas pedal harder as my head surged with outrage and plans. That pastor felt like an existential threat, an enemy I needed to vanquish with righteous posts, so I broadcast warnings about him across my social media channels.

It took a sabbatical for me to realize this impulse was anything but love. Then prayer. Then the slow, subterranean heart-work of God as He healed something I couldn’t: the enemy mindset. With months away from the news cycles of outrage, I started to realize how much AI is engineering the enemy mindset into all of us.

By now we all know AI is fracturing us into information silos. The problem is, by the time we realized it, we’d already been in our silos so long we lost all sense of where the walls actually are. It now takes concerted effort to see the version of reality being served on the other side.

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Once algorithms learned how to monetize resentment, every division grew. Blocking or dismissing dissenters feels like a moral act. Disagreement with your own clique starts to feel genuinely dangerous. The fear that your community could turn on you if you step out of line shapes you in ways you don’t notice. The hive mind stops trying to understand the other side’s motives and starts inventing caricatures. People on the right assume, they want to take our guns because they hate freedom, instead of asking, maybe they’re terrified their kids could be shot at school. People on the left assume, they voted for him because they’re racist, instead of asking, maybe they chose what seemed to them like the lesser of two evils based on deeply different values. Negative feelings toward the opposing party have increased by an average of 4.8 points per decade for the last forty years, and that ratchet only clicks one direction.

At the far edges of both camps, people are circulating frightening fantasies in which the other side is about to spark a civil war for deeply evil reasons. So many friends on the left here in Seattle worry that Trump will expand ICE, dismantle democracy, and crown himself a fascist dictator for life. Meanwhile, what I hear about people in Idaho, is that they are somehow worried that mobs of trans activists from Seattle are going to descend on their towns, smash windows, and use all their bathrooms. If that caricature isn’t fair that just proves my point: we are being siloed.

I have zero desire to “both-sides” moral clarity into oblivion. When Jesus saw poor foreigners being exploited in the temple, he didn’t pause to consider the money changers’ perspective, he threw their tables over and drove them out. I’m not advocating for moral equivalence or passivity. Complacency is a real danger.

But as echo chambers tighten around us, as AI drives us into factions, we face another moral imperative that may be even more urgent in this present state of quickly degrading social trust. Jesus didn’t just tell us to love our neighbors. He told us to love our enemies.

The enemy mindset acts as both cause and fuel of every violent conflict. As AI builds our identity around our disgust and hatred, Christians will always be called out by the voice of God to the public square to show a greater power because, like MLK said, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

The only time Jesus drew a literal line in the sand, it was to stand with a woman accused of adultery. Jesus brought together a team of disciples with tax-collectors who sold their people out to Rome, and violent revolutionaries who had tried to overthrow Rome. I’m sure the conversations they had to navigate were more heated than your family Thanksgiving. But around Jesus, enemies became friends through proximity. Jesus created a vibe where loving their political opponents became irresistible.

Enemy love is an urgent cultural need because of the roiling, algorithm driven, news cycles of outrage, but there is an even more important reason to live by this imperative: it brings us to the absolute center of God’s Heart. At its center God’s heart moves with an unsubdued longing to bring all of us back together. Heaven is not God’s escape plan from human conflict. It is God’s promise that love will ultimately overcome every division. Every act of enemy love is a small way we participate in the future God is bringing.

While Jesus was being killed, he kept shouting, “Forgive them.” As battle lines are drawn around us, Christians are called not to harden those lines but to draw a bigger circle, with room for everyone.

To find the roots of enemy hatred we have to look close to home. Sometimes the smaller the actual difference between us and someone else, the more we exaggerate it in order to feel unique and superior. Freud called this the “narcissism of small differences.” Well I guess I am one of these hairsplitting narcissists, because when I look back on the people I’ve been most obsessed with disliking, almost all of them have been Christian pastors like that guy on the billboard.

But time away from the internet and with God changes you. After my sabbatical I found myself far less angry. In retrospect, my rage was a symptom of an undernourished heart. I still disagree with that pastor’s posture, Seattle has a long history of combative pastors, and I often worry they do more harm than good for the cause of Jesus. But the harm done by them is a lot smaller than by someone like Andrew Tate. My fury was focused on this pastor because of the narcissism of small differences. I was jealous of how much larger his platform was than mine and angry at God that churches like his grow so quickly, while my little house Church is lucky to have a new visitor every month. Now that I’m healthier, his presence doesn’t sting any more than the many other unhealthy uses of power around me, and there are plenty. I can even imagine being friends with this pastor once we are both healed in Heaven.

Jesus doesn’t just say love your enemy. He also says to pray for them. He wants us actively advocating for our enemies in our inner conversations with God. It initially felt strange to pray for this pastor, but releasing someone from the role of “enemy” is so freeing.

We also turn to prayer because overcoming enemy mindset is strictly miraculous. There is a deeper struggle going on here than the violence both political sides are worrying and warning about. This struggle between us isn’t just political. It is also spiritual: “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil.” We turn our hearts over to God for help, because we don’t have what we need to fix our factions, silos, and violence. Human ideas aren’t working. Prayer is the only path, because if the enemy mindset is getting fixed, God is going to be the one doing the fixing.

Ultimately, deep belief in Heaven is the only way to overcome enemy mindset. Not only is enemy love realistic, it is the guaranteed future of reality. God will make love the operating principle of the universe. That is what he is coming back to do. So we pray to grab a deeper hope. We pray to reassert the deeper truth: enemy mindset isn’t the terminus of reality.

When He comes back, loving our enemy will be made irresistible by the atmosphere Jesus’ heart will create.

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Young women frustrated by patriarchy are drawn in by content that intensifies their disappointment with men, and are becoming more liberal. Young men who are tired of being told masculinity is inherently toxic and have had zero examples of positive masculinity are getting drawn in by content that confirms their frustrations and are becoming increasingly conservative. Animosity is being amplified, and both sides are belittling the experiences of the other.

Empathy is not a limited resource. We grow our ability to empathize by practicing it, and both men and women are facing real challenges. Women are still living with a wage gap, and are still underrepresented in positions of power. Every young woman I’ve talked with who is on the dating apps can recount horrifying, demeaning, and often unsafe interactions with broken men.

At the same time, men are facing real and new challenges that deserve empathy. Men are falling behind in school. Suicide rates, incarceration rates, and mental illness are all sharply on the rise for men. No one wants to be told they are inherently toxic and that if they succeed it is uninspiring. At the same time, men’s frustration with dating apps is borne out by the facts: the bottom 80% of male Tinder users, based on percentage of likes received, are competing for the bottom 22% of women. I hate even writing that sentence. Notice the language: bottom. The machine sorts us, ranks us, demeans us, and young men’s frustration is radicalizing them. So they are turning to the voices of the manosphere.

These voices are toxic but they are not masculine. Toxic masculinity does not exist. Toxicity exists, but any brand of toxicity is not genuine masculinity. Real masculinity is a matured and healthy strength deployed for the benefit of the community. If you peer very deep under the hood of any of the rising voices of the manosphere you will see the same antimasculine trait: blaming women.

This trait has roots. Once Adam and Eve swallowed the forbidden fruit, they wasted no time, they started blaming each other right off. Adam blames Eve, and even God for putting such a slippery person in there with him. Right from the beginning, Adam and Eve were polarized by different experiences of the world. Algorithms now accelerate this ancient fracture.

The machine world is driving men and women apart from each other and deeper into their own dark mirrors (aka phones) that meet our needs with porn and AI companionship. As it does, the Christian vision becomes more stark and compelling. Our vision is reconciliation. It is two becoming one. Adam’s first words about Eve were not words of accusation. They were words of wonder: “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”

Every night my wife lays her platinum little head on my chest and shakes it aggressively if I stop rubbing it for even a moment. This nightly routine is teaching me, as her head nestles in above my heart, that I was made for this, that she is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. I hate how hard this kind of connection is becoming. I hate how algorithms are delaying and even robbing people of this. I’m scared of how hard it will be for my daughters. So here I am (ironically online) telling men and women not to give up on each other! The two can still become one. Through mutual self-giving, new life still emerges. If we embody our vulnerable need for each other, children are still born. Families are still formed. God is still blessing the world with new life as we choose each other. The curse is multiplying, but love has been engineered to win.

Clavicular started taking testosterone at fourteen, smashed his facial bones with a hammer in pursuit of a stronger jawline, and talks about using meth as an appetite suppressant. Young men turn to him for guidance because he says out loud what many fear: your face determines everything. Dating success. Social treatment. Professional opportunities. Life outcomes.

So Clavicular is on a mission to set young men down the right path. Self-inflicted injuries and pharmaceuticals that max out your looks are the good news he is spreading. When someone starts optimizing their body, he calls it ascending.

Of course he does.

The internet is always trying to hack Heaven.

In a way, his logic is tight. Maybe he’s right. Maybe the internet’s dark effects have taken such deep root that maxing your looks is the place of most cultural leverage now. He got really famous after all.

As he rises to popularity, his obsessive body shaping is a cultural mirror we need to look into. We need to ask how all this image scrolling is shaping our own souls.

Jesus warns that we can become “like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” (Matthew 23:25-27) It’s easy to shrug off extreme superficiality as funny or strange, and then go on swiping through the same pictures that spiritually formed Clavicular.

Having a bottomless supply of flawless, algorithm-approved humans to scroll through has been disastrous for everyone’s mental health.

Most days I think I’m a pretty average-looking guy. I work out regularly, so I’m doing fairly well with what the Lord gave me. I’m married to someone I find completely beautiful, so my looks really shouldn’t be an issue. I’m a guy in my forties who’s done a lot of spiritual work. If anyone should be immune to beauty standards, it should be me.

And yet, none of us are.

In moments of emotional weakness, I’ll look in the mirror and hate my face. All I see are the ways I deviate from the average. For reasons I still don’t understand, I have stubbornly chubby little baby cheeks. No matter how lean I get, the weight always goes straight to my face. When I wrestled in high school, cutting weight until I was basically skin and bones, my coach used to call me “Caleb the Chipmunk” and say, “I know you can drop more. Look at those cheeks.”

Sometimes, when I’m feeling low, that’s all I can see when I look at myself in the mirror. Everybody feels like that sometimes.

In the book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar combs through the conquered people of Israel looking for “young men without any physical defect” (Daniel 1:4). Daniel is chosen and groomed to serve in Nebuchadnezzar’s court. Empires always find the most beautiful people to use as their messengers, to use in their ads, to use for their product placement.

But Daniel can tell the empire is getting its claws in him. He knows that if God is going to remain his inner priority he will have to take a stand against the empire’s values somewhere.

He chooses food.

He refuses the rich food from the king’s table, and asks for vegetables instead. It sounds small. It isn’t. He is refusing to feed his body on the empire’s abundance because he refuses to feed his soul on its values.

In choosing food as the place to take his stand, Daniel is risking the beauty that got him into Nebuchadnezzar’s courts. Ancient people thought fat people were beautiful. Daniel was gambling with his radiant chubby cheeks.

God fed him anyway. Scripture tells us he gained weight on a bunch of vegetables.

The place Daniel takes his stand is exactly where God feeds him.

Jesus said “I have food that you don’t know anything about, my food is to do the will of the one who sent me” ( John 4:31-34)

There is inner nourishment, a food we can’t get anywhere else, when we feed ourselves on God’s love instead of society’s standards.

Silicon Valley has built its empire on our obsession with beauty. It needs us continually comparing our faces to algorithmically perfect ones. It needs us performing our lives in beautiful places to generate content that keeps others scrolling. The whole system only works if we’re spiritually hungry. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the pictures you scroll are called your “feed.” They did not need to name it that. That is a gross word. But it is also telling. Silicon Valley wants to feed our souls on its diet.

God wants to be the thing that feeds us at our deepest levels. He wants to be our wine and bread. He wants to be the thing that fills us.

If we’re going to be more nourished by God than we are by the standards that shaped Clavicular, we will have to take a stand against the looksmaxxing.

I took my little stand with a terrible beard.

When I turned forty, I had a hard time accepting it. I don’t want my body to decline or my looks to fade. My beard comes in scraggly and grey. The hairs are so hard to see it looks like a ghostly mist hanging from my face. Still, I heard about a guy who let his beard grow and looked at himself in the mirror every morning saying, I am becoming a sage. So that year, I decided to grow my beard out to try to embrace this aging thing that none of us can avoid. By the end of the year, I was tired of looking unemployed and couldn’t wait to shave it back. My fragile ego needs my face covered with a very specific amount of hair: enough to hide the baby cheeks, but not so much that I look like I’m mailing people bombs. But while I had that beard (when I would look at myself in the mirror and say “I’m becoming a sage”) it felt tender and beautiful. It was hard to see the lines forming on my face, the grey hair, the marks that stress and time have already left on me. But it also felt good to look myself in the eyes and love who I am becoming. I want to accept the path towards wisdom instead of looks. I want to become a sage. As my body wastes away I want my soul to grow stronger every day.

I want to grow to love this body God wanted me to have. I guess He likes my chubby little cheeks.

On the back of every iPhone is an image of fruit with a bite taken out of it. 

Whether Apple knew what they were doing or not, the iconography alludes to temptation. I think it is pretty creepy, symbolically perfect, and spiritually inevitable, that I carry an emblem of the offer of Eden in my pocket pretty much everywhere I go.

Life in the cloud has delivered on the snake’s promise of knowledge without limits. Our eyes have been opened, and we have become a little bit more like God. We rarely have to wonder about anything anymore. I can learn how to build a satellite, make artisanal butter, or train my own large language model, all from my laptop. But sometimes, as Solomon puts it, "with much wisdom comes much sorrow."  In Eden, Adam and Eve already knew the goodness of a flourishing life in God's presence. What they didn't know yet was evil. 

Much like Eden, there is now vastly more evil at everyone’s fingertips. Generation Z grew up with the easy ability to witness violent porn, self-harm, and even murders. We won’t know for decades how psychologically damaging this exposure has been.

When the flow of knowledge coming at us grows from a trickle to a flood, we start drowning. What we've actually gained isn't godlike omniscience, it's overwhelming, weaponized, contradictory information that's pulling us apart. This post examines one of the milder (but still tragic!) consequences: the erosion of local life as national stories colonize our attention. The following two posts will show how the problem escalates: information silos turning neighbors into enemies, and then dopamine loops dissolving our trust in reality itself. 

The serpent’s wager didn’t end in Eden. 

It’s scaled. 

Sorry for the pun. I had to. 

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NATIONAL STORIES COLONIZE LOCAL LIFE

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” meaning that the way we consume information often shapes us more profoundly than the information itself. 

This started early in television news. Producers quickly learned that stories involving violence or child abductions captured attention. When these events occurred, no matter how statistically rare, they were broadcast quickly across networks. Over time, people began to perceive the world as far more dangerous than it actually was, reshaping childhood as frightened parents kept their kids indoors.

Today, our news feeds have become nonstop streams of the worst things happening on the planet. Tristan Harris, from the Center for Humane Technology, explains that our attention is a limited resource, so our brains are constantly evaluating what deserves focus. The brain’s “salience network” is always scanning for threats, so content that generates fear, anger, or disgust spreads much more quickly than positive content.

This dynamic doesn’t just shape what we see; it reshapes society itself. News outlets increasingly focus on the most extreme or outrageous actions of politicians because those stories drive ratings. Over time, politicians learn that stoking culture wars attracts attention, and that attention can be converted into power. Now many politicians compete to say or do the cruelest or most radical thing they can feasibly get away with.

As our attention has gradually shifted online, local newspapers have collapsed. The few legacy outlets that survived (like The New York Times) pivoted toward national stories. Most popular podcasts now focus almost exclusively on national narratives. 

When I listen to them, I’m invited to spend my emotional energy on whatever outrageous thing Donald Trump did that day. If I had any relational influence over Donald Trump’s decisions, perhaps that emotional investment would make sense. But I don’t. In reality, these stories are leaching my attention from my local community. Far-away corporations like the New York Times need me to be invested in their stories, so they bait me with fear and outrage. They tell me what to think about, and often even what to think. Their business model demands that they colonize my mind with fear. 

But the attention I give them cannot be returned. These corporations can’t sit under my pergola and listen to my day. They can’t hear about my parenting problems and offer advice. To them, I’m a marginal statistic, just a few dollars a month.

I've removed all the news apps from my phone and intentionally restricted the funnel of information to what I hear through face-to-face conversations with real friends. I had no idea how much capacity and peace that would unlock for me! Now, when I accidentally overhear the news, I can feel my cortisol spiking. I can see the bid for my attention coming. Before, I couldn't see it, I was just a fish swimming in the water of outrage. I used to compete for the hottest takes. Knowing about social evils before others made me feel intelligent and important. I thought I was being civically engaged.  In reality I was just passively absorbing a lot of negative information and getting myself bummed out. The more prayer has shaped my character, the more convinced I've become that most of my attention belongs in relationships where I actually have a role to play.

Sure, I still need some baseline of information, enough to know when to show up for a protest, enough to vote thoughtfully. Talking to friends has kept me informed enough for both. What it hasn't done is leave me feeling like the world is on fire and I'm personally responsible for putting it out.

At the end of the Eden story, Adam and Eve are driven from their home and forced to live east of Eden: estranged, with no real home. Life in the cloud is doing something similar to us. We may be physically present in our homes, but our attention is drained by corporations like Meta, our economic life is extracted by corporations like Amazon, and even our civic instincts are siphoned off by national media organizations.

Wendell Berry, of course, saw this coming before most of us and unplugged from media way before he could be tested by the fear and outrage generated by today's algorithms. He writes:

If you have a TV, your children will be subjected almost from the cradle to an overwhelming insinuation that all worth experiencing is somewhere else and that all worth having must be bought. The purpose is blatantly to supplant the joy and beauty of health with cosmetics, clothes, cars, and ready-made desserts... As soon as we see that the TV cord is a vacuum line, pumping life and meaning out of the household, we can unplug it. . . the ensuing silence is an invitation to our homes, to our own places and lives, to come into being. And we begin to recognize a truth disguised or denied by TV and all that it speaks and stands for: no life and no place is destitute; all have possibilities of productivity and pleasure, rest and work, solitude and conviviality that belong particularly to themselves. These possibilities exist everywhere, in the country or in the city, it makes no difference. All that is necessary is the time and the inner quietness to look for them, the sense to recognize them, and the grace to welcome them.

Most of the good news that happens, happens locally. When I watch my golden retriever take off after a tennis ball so gleefully that her feet become a blur, this is good news. When my daughter comes home and tells me that all the hours of flute scales I have been subjected to paid off, and she moved up a few chairs, and the middle-schooler-smile she is trying to repress flashes out anyway, this is good news. 

When I give myself over to these little moments of grace, I am starting to live like they did in Eden again, present with God. 

When God came to us, he came within the limitations of one, human, body. And that is really good news.   

When God came, he didn't speak from the sky to all people at once. He didn’t even ride a horse, he accepted the geographical limitations of the places he could walk to. He didn't spend his time trying to generate a viral story. He didn't even write anything, which would have been the largest media move of his day. Jesus invested most deeply in his closest twelve friends, trusting that deep discipleship and demonstrated love would have a more lasting impact than media ever could. 

When he left these disciples, he gave them a simple task that he had already been showing them how to do: make disciples. Discipleship is a relationship. Jesus wanted the work of his movement to continue through the flesh and blood medium of real people loving each other in person. 

A lanky, slow-talking guy named Dan kept knocking on my freshman dorm room door every week. He wanted me to come to his Bible Study. In the beginning I only went because I felt bad for him. But he sat with me in the lunchroom, popped by my room just to say hi, talked me into sleeping in a snowcave, and somewhere along the way we crossed some invisible line from acquaintances to friends. I started to want the spiritual health that was inside of him. He was the guy I called when I got rejected on a date, or when I was sad a friend was leaving. So when he invited me on a two-week service project, I said yes. God got me on that trip: totally re-arranged my heart.  

I thank God that Jesus came knocking on my door with Dan’s fist. 

Every Christian I have ever met can point to someone who loved them like that. There is an unbroken chain of relationship stretching from each of us all the way back to Jesus. I want to protect my attention from national media corporations so I can spend more of my time being that kind of link for others. No algorithm built that chain. No platform sustained it. It was built person by person, meal by meal, conversation by conversation.

Local life is where the good news has always traveled

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It shapes the people who pursue it, because power naturally selects for the people who are willing to sacrifice the most to obtain it.

Publicly, Mark Zuckerberg set Meta’s aspirations high, his platforms would connect people, build communities, and give everyone a voice. At the same time, internal audits found Instagram’s algorithms recommending 1.4 million potential child predators to teenage users every day. The platform reportedly allowed sex traffickers up to 17 violations before banning them. Nearly a quarter of sex trafficking victims in federal court cases between 2019 and 2023 were recruited through Meta platforms. Publicly, Sheryl Sandberg encouraged women to “lean in,” while behind boardroom doors she looked away from the emotional distress, anxiety, and eating disorders their apps cultivated for young women.

It isn’t that these people are inherently evil, I bet they would prefer to build communities and encourage women to lean in. As Tristan Harris points out, the real problem is that corrupt incentives exist. Whichever company can harvest the maximum amount of our attention and deliver it to advertisers will make a lot of money. Those incentives will naturally select for people who are willing to keep pursuing them.

Market dynamics demand it.

The same pattern is playing out in AI.

Demis Hassabis knew that building frontier AI required serious capital, and eventually market forces demanded that he sell DeepMind to big tech. He took a lower offer from Google because they promised to establish an AI safety and ethics board. Hassabis wanted the major players to work together. He was deeply worried that a race would pressure companies to ship models before they were safe.

This board met once. Elon Musk hosted, Reid Hoffman was there, the exact people who went off to found and fund Open AI.

Initially people hoped Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI would be a different kind of leader. He speaks in hushed tones about benefitting all of humanity. OpenAI was started as a non-profit. It was influenced by the “effective altruists,” (people who think it’s too short sighted to focus on helping our neighbors today, and we should instead be engineering the future for maximum benefit thousands of years from now). When I first heard about this movement, it sounded like intoxicating hubris to me. I decided trying to love my neighbor in the present was a big enough task for my little ‘noggin. But it is definitely exciting to think you might game out the future, and engineer it for the maximum benefit.

OpenAI’s founding charter is full of language about distributing benefits to “all of humanity” and avoiding uses that “unduly concentrate power.” Then market dynamics kicked in. They took a massive investment from Microsoft. A few years later, a senior researcher named Dario Amodei grew concerned that the company’s safety commitments weren’t keeping pace with its ambitions. He left to found Anthropic to be an even more explicitly safety-focused AI company. Then market dynamics kicked in. They took a massive investment from Amazon.

Let’s recap: the Google guy wants everyone to work together so we don’t accidentally wipe out humanity. The OpenAI guys think, this thing could be dangerous, we better go build it faster as a charity. An employee there says “we’re losing the plot” and starts Anthropic. Now all three companies are backed by the deepest pockets on earth, locked in the exact race they all feared.

All three of these companies were started by technologists who consider themselves so intelligent that they should be the ones to hold the keys, that they are the only ones trustworthy enough to engineer AI for maximum benefit for thousands of years into the future. How long did it take for this far ranging vision to degrade? In OpenAI’s case, five days.

Sam Altman, the CEO, was fired by the board on November 17, 2023 over concerns about his honesty (concerns which have continued to grow since). Five days later, employees and financial backers who cared more about winning the AI race than safety forced those board members out and brought Altman back. OpenAI became a for-profit company. People drift towards power like water rolls down a hill.

Wendell Berry writes: “A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It cannot humble itself...It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.”

Once OpenAI took an investment from Microsoft its fate was sealed. Money and power would be its animating force.

But who am I to judge Sam Altman? I bet if I were in his position, I’d make the same moves. They stood no chance without all that Microsoft money. Corrupt incentives exist, and they will continue to select for people who are willing to pursue them. I can easily imagine starting out with pure motives and then making the classic deal with the devil just to get things done.

It’s easy to slide into the logic of I should be the one to steward this power, because I’ll use it wisely. The idea that the world needs you to save it is intoxicating. I’ve indulged that fantasy a lot, with far less reason to believe I will have a meaningful role in shaping the future than Altman has. Even when I think “people really need to read this book I’m writing, it will be a game changer” I am starting to fancy myself some kind of savior. I started a house Church network because I thought I needed to “change Church.” In reality, though, I don’t think Jesus really needs me all that much. If I had the amount of power Altman has at his disposal, it wouldn’t be a tool I’d go save everyone with, it would be something I would need saving from.

Sadly, now OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google’s leaders are all locked in the race they were worried about. They are racing to build an AI so powerful it may create an existential catastrophe. If that happens, the fact that it was engineered by “effective altruists” will be the most colossal irony, and the greatest failure of all time.

I take it back, there has been an even greater failure, and an even deeper irony:

We killed God’s own son.

This was probably inevitable, and I don’t just mean because God ordained it, though he did. I mean that a heart as pure as Jesus’, one that saw so clearly how deep a lie the world’s power structures are built on, was always going to piss powerful people off to the point of murder. The foundational lie of human power is that the elite should ascend, that the strong should rule, that the top of the tower is where the important people belong. Jesus came to show the opposite. So they killed him.

But thankfully, when we killed God’s own son, God reverse engineered it. He used his own death to show the true nature of God’s power: sacrificial love. That’s what released the greatest real power—the power of eternal life—into the world. The cross shows the path to the only power that really matters.

The impulse to ascend is human. We want more reach, more control, more convenience. The tech industry understands this. It knows we will gladly download any app that increases our power or reduces our friction.

When Satan tempted Jesus in the desert, he targeted the same impulse, and found it absent.

Satan knew Jesus must have been hungry after forty days of fasting, so he said, “Why don’t you turn these stones into bread?” Jesus’ ability to conjure food would be a dream for a company like DoorDash, but he refuses the power to instantly gratify himself.

Next, Satan tries to get Jesus to jump off the temple and have angels swoop in and catch him in front of everyone, to test how much God loves him, to make a name for himself, to prove that he is God’s number one guy. A stunt like this would be a dream for any influencer. Jesus says he doesn’t need to test God’s love like that, because before the Spirit sent him into the desert to be tempted, the Spirit of God descended like a dove and said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

That inner voice of love was the food Jesus nourished himself with, so he didn’t need to test God’s love for him. Jesus rarely did public displays of power. Even in some of the most famous moments (like when Jesus walks on water) only his disciples see it, and even then, Jesus doesn’t seem eager for them to notice. It feels less like a spectacle and more like something he was doing privately that happened to be seen.

Most of his miracles are healings, unselfish acts drawn out by love, and when he performs them, he usually tells people to stay quiet. When he feeds the crowd with loaves and fishes, it happens almost imperceptibly, so no one even notices how it occurs. When he changes water into wine, he does it in the quietest, most low-key way possible. Jesus was deeply hesitant to show his power, because He had a secure attachment to God. He didn’t have to prove something to feel full on the inside. The power I want, and the power you want, comes from an undernourished heart.

In the final temptation, Satan cuts to the chase and offers Jesus all the kingdoms and all the power of the world, if he will just worship Satan for a second. OpenAI’s altruistic mission crumbled in five days because the allure of power is irresistible for us. But Jesus wouldn’t take all the power in the world if it meant worshiping the wrong thing.

The devil’s offer is the world without the cross. The win without the work. The destination without the journey. But Jesus knew he couldn’t show the love he came to show without taking the pain he came to take. He knew he couldn’t simply scoop up power, because in reality, powerlessness is the place where God’s Kingdom is established.

The cross was judo.

Judo is a martial art where you use your opponent’s momentum against them. The word judo is made up of two Japanese characters. Ju means gentle, and can also mean yielding or flexible, like a blade of grass that bends in a hard wind but does not break, while rigid, towering trees are uprooted. Do means “the way.” So judo means the way of gentleness and flexibility.

I was a wrestler in high school, and most Western-style wrestlers meet force with force. The kids who knew judo were dangerous. They didn’t fight you, they used you. If you came at them with force, suddenly you’d find yourself flat on your back.

As Jesus took the long walk to the cross, the full force of evil gathered its momentum, ready to strike. Jesus didn’t fight it. He went willingly. He accepted it, and used the momentum of sin against itself. On the cross, the power of force met the deeper power of relinquishment. The momentum of hate was accepted, and in receiving it, Jesus transformed it into the deeper power of love. The power of death came rushing at Jesus, and as Jesus gave himself over to it, he released the deeper power of everlasting life.

Jesus used sin against itself and transferred its energy into forgiveness. This is why we say, “The power of God is made perfect in weakness.”

The power of God flows in the opposite direction of human power. Philippians 2 says this about Jesus:

“being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped;
7 rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross!

9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name…

Human power flows in the same direction: it ascends. We build towers in Babel, in New York, and in Dubai. We build towers into the sky to try to transcend, to try to mingle with the clouds, and we put our most powerful and richest people up at the top of them. Whether consciously or subconsciously, we build them to try to unseat God from his authority. God’s power is already off the throne. God’s power descends. He comes down from the clouds to be with us, to be one of us, to love us, to understand us, and to use the human systems of power against themselves, so that in the logic of the Kingdom, the first will be last, and the poor will be rich, and the abused will inherit the earth.

When I let God flip the momentum of my heart from anger to forgiveness, I am, in some small way, flowing with the momentum of the cross.

When the outwardly lurching desire to feel “significant” finally caves to the inward rushing realization that I’m already loved enough, that is the cross working on my heart.

When God flips the task from “change Church” to “go listen intently to the person right in front of you because I want you to be able to speak from My heart to them,” I get to become, at least for a little while, what my mentor Steve calls a “Holy Spirit Operator.” That’s what I want to be.

That is the only real power in Heaven and Earth.

Most people treat this like a practical problem. We set screen-time limits, only to discover those reminders are way too easy to click past. We schedule “phone-free Saturdays,” only to return Sunday to our digital exhaustion.

At its core, this isn’t a practical problem. It’s a spiritual one.

Our phones have hacked our deepest longings for connection, knowledge, power, pleasure, and beauty.

Calling the storehouses of the internet “the Cloud” isn’t just a metaphor, it’s a confession. There’s a reason the people on our screens glow. There’s a reason Silicon Valley executives want to upload our consciousness so we can “live forever in the cloud.” Big Tech is exploiting our spiritual longings with a trashy pixelated version of Heaven.

As long as our phones remain the most transcendent thing within reach, we will stay addicted.

We need committed spiritual practices that put us in the room with God’s healing voice.

So here are nine spiritual practices for digital detox.

1. Put a Cross in Your Pocket

For centuries Christians have used physical objects (crosses, prayer ropes, icons, rosaries, even verses tied around their arms) to work spiritual truth through the body into the soul. They knew physical reminders could cultivate spiritual habits.

If you keep a cross banging around next to your phone, every time that buzz makes your hand instinctively jerk towards your pocket, you’ll have to touch an even more transcendent object.

Hopefully, at least sometimes, it will remind you where true contentment comes from.

Notice the nudges. When you hear a ding and feel that itch to know what just happened online, see through it. Realize that what you really want is only found in presence with God. Let these nudges send you hunting for God’s voice instead.

2. Commit to Some Local Scenery

The first vow in the Rule of St. Benedict is stability: a commitment to remain in one monastery for life.

These monks and nuns understood that the restless search for something better would spiritually deform them. They chose to encounter God through routine friendships, routine prayers, and even routine landscapes.

Scrolling endlessly through photos of Earth’s most beautiful people and places is desensitizing. Thanks to social media, nearly every formerly majestic place has been made famous, and become a line of irritated tourists waiting for their turn to prove they were there.

I’m tired of ranking views and hunting for “the best” scenery. I’ve burned enough jet fuel launching my body across the planet in search of famous landscapes. I want to recover the ability to be stopped by smaller, humbler views closer to home.

The beaches in Thailand, the mountains in Switzerland, were great, but the same blessings of light flashing on water, early morning pastel skies, and birds flying by are waiting for me at the lake a mile from my house

Go find some marginally beautiful spot close enough to visit it every day. Start your day by praying there. It is okay if this place is only endowed with a common amount of beauty, because constantly scrolling through amazing things is burning us out. Visit this spot every day, and train yourself to “consider the flowers of the field.” Prayerfully observe the blessings of beauty God is pouring out wastefully on your local land.

3. Commit to a Boring Community

Instagram makes us feel let in, connected to the inner lives of celebrities. Podcasts make us feel like a part of the conversation with the world’s most interesting people. The real damage all this time online does, is that it makes all the real people around us seem boring.

They are boring.

Get over it.

You probably are too.

But we all need love, so go commit to some actual people, and start living in the physical world with them. Set the bar nice and low, and be pleasantly shocked whenever they are, even briefly, mildly enjoyable. If that happens, you may be experiencing an ancient phenomenon called love.

If you don’t have a spiritual community where people know you well, what are you waiting for? What’s one concrete step you could take this month to find and commit to some people?

4. Fart Around

Literally schedule “fart around” in your calendar.

Take the long way home. Walk to the store without earbuds. Linger in conversation with any, just any-old lonely person who also happens to be farting around at the same park as you. Throw a shaka at a kid riding by on a bike.

This is grace.

Ancient people called this Sabbath.

Allowing yourself to be unproductive, present, and free is one way we practice the rhythm of grace. The life God has already given you is enough.

Go slow enough to notice it.

5. Pray Before You Touch Your Phone

When you wake up, make one simple rule: don’t touch your phone until you’ve touched God’s love.

Even a few minutes with the love of God can center you before the stream of notifications hooks your nervous system.

Nearly every monastic tradition structured life around fixed rhythms of prayer, what Christians call the Daily Office. Honestly, finally giving in to the aspirational guilt I felt about not practicing the Daily Office, and actually starting it, has been one of the most healing practices of my life.

Turns out God is really good, and His love can shape a person.

Once you get the hang of scheduled prayer, you’re gonna want to do more, which leads me to . . .

6. End Your Day with Examen Instead of Scrolling

In the prayer of Examen, you review your day with God, thanking Him for moments of grace, noticing where you sensed His presence, and confessing where you resisted it.

• Where did I miss God today?

• Where did I notice God today?

7. Fast from the News

A huge amount of Christian contemplative spirituality flows through the desert tradition, people who withdrew from the noise of empire and city life so they could hear God more clearly.

Meanwhile, our phones flood us with algorithmically engineered outrage, tribalism, and suspicion.

Delete the news apps. Decide to hear about major stories through actual conversations with friends. Then pay attention to what happens to your anxiety levels over the next thirty days.

8. Put a Memento Mori on Your Home Screen

“Memento mori” is Latin for “remember that you will die.”

Medieval monastics decorated with skulls and prayed in cemeteries because they knew remembering death clarified life. It can cut through ego, distraction, lust for status, and triviality. They kept death in front of them to tune their lives towards Heaven.

Ideas for your home screen:

• “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

• “Your life will end. How do you want to spend it?”

• “Set your mind on things above.”

One friend’s lock screen says:

“This phone will not meet your needs. It will likely leave you empty, anxious, or sad. Use wisely.”

9. Give Away Your Password

Once you have a community, rely on it.

If you set screen-time limits by yourself, you can always override them. But if you hand the password to a friend, you may finally be stuck with a phone boring enough to force you back into a satisfying life.

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Unlike my wife, Amazon would absolutely love to be obsessed with me. Would Amazon like to stalk my every movement? Yes. Would Amazon like to provide for my every need? Absolutely. Would Amazon drive past my house every day if I wouldn’t let it move in? You bet.

Amazon’s goal is to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, which means they’re in a race to shrink the time between wanting something and getting it. The essence of their business model is “friction reduction” (removing every barrier between desire and fulfillment).

The goal of Amazon’s system is to collapse the gap between impulse and satisfaction.

This obsession has given us 1-Click ordering and same-day delivery. But here’s where their stalker streak really comes out: Amazon has patented something called “predictive shipping.” They track what you’re doing online to anticipate what you’ll order before you do, and they start shipping it closer to you.

This means all my future bad decisions are already in transit. That goldfish costume, that little fog machine, that inflatable cold plunge, I don’t need any of it, but they already know I want it. It’s just waiting for me in a warehouse in my neighborhood. Which brings me to the creepiest part: they don’t call them shipping centers or delivery centers. No, they call them FULFILLMENT centers. Amazon’s plastic things don’t just get delivered to you, they FULFILL you. That’s their obsession.

There are competing visions of Heaven vying to FULFILL us. As we let companies like Amazon, Meta and Anthropic fill any observable need, they occupy more and more of our emotional space.

This shrinks the square footage of our spiritual longing.

Jesus’ vision for Heaven becomes less compelling, less necessary, and less able to orient us.

The internet’s version of Heaven is so hokey. I feel so stupid when I realize there are racks of computers running trillions of binary operations through millions of circuits, using computations so complex that no single human on planet earth can understand them, all to decide which video of a monkey driving a golf cart to show me next (which is something I do want to see). All of that energy, all of those computations, bent toward flooding my brain with the maximum possible hit of dopamine right now.

Life in the cloud is engineered to collapse the gap between impulse and satisfaction.

Our critical spiritual work is to learn how to wait.

On the surface, that means forming habits that keep pleasure within healthy boundaries. But beneath that is a deeper task: we need to dig into these times of waiting to excavate an inner space for hope. A space left open in longing for the things God will one day do.

The internet placates us with more immediate aspirations. Instacart has every food, Pornhub has every sexual experience, Amazon has every object you could want predictively shipped and waiting at a fulfillment center to fill you up with the infinite now. It is all moving through the “cloud” to bring you Heaven now. This is a lie.

Instant gratification trains us out of the very capacity we need most: the ability to want something we can’t have yet.

The apostle Paul says, “hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” As people of faith, we have to live in waiting. We have to teach our bodies to wait for pleasure, because at the same time, in a deeper way, we are training our souls to wait for transcendence. We have to place the weight of these urgent inner needs for pleasure, beauty, knowledge, power and connection, on a further horizon. We have to hope for what we do not see.

Jesus never promised the spiritual path would be pleasant. We have to expect dopamine to let us down, for this world to be persistently emotionally difficult, and at times even tragic. But for Christians, these let downs are not proof that we need to settle in for the pleasure roller coaster, and just try to enjoy this life as much as we can. Christians can use the momentum of every disappointment against itself to push us toward a higher aim: to increase our faith and set our eyes on a further horizon.

I’m writing this post because I really want to believe it.

I’m tired of wanting my mom to experience love and connection and never seeing it happen. I’m tired of wanting an organic movement of discipleship to radically transform my city with the power of love and not seeing it. I am tired of hoping I can break free from the pain of my bruised ego, and finding myself nursing old wounds. I’m tired of losing physical ability as my blown out ankle and bad back keep shortening the list of exercises I can do. I’m tired of hoping for an honest and functional political system in my country, a world without racism, without war.

I am tired of waiting for God to show up, but I refuse to accept the world as it is.

I won’t numb these longings with scrolling. I will keep them lit with the promises of God.

Lamentations 3 senses that God has a deeper purpose in all this waiting:

19 I remember my affliction and my wandering,
the bitterness and the gall.

20 I well remember them,
and my soul is downcast within me.

21 Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:

22 Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed[…]

26 it is good to wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.

27 It is good for a man to bear the yoke
while he is young.

28 Let him sit alone in silence,
for the Lord has laid it on him.

Waiting is so frustrating. No one would choose it, but it is obviously a yoke that God has us bearing for a reason.

That line —”let him sit alone in silence, for the Lord has laid it on him”— rings in my heart with mystery, heaviness, and truth. It fills me with a suspicion that everything is worth it. The hope we have for God’s future redemption gives us the courage to sit alone in the silence with heavy things in the present.

Most mornings when I pray, I sit inside the emptiness of the things I long for: the loved ones I want God to heal, the parts of my own soul that are vacant of His love and need Him. In that silence I feel God mourning alongside me. But I also sense Him doing something else. Instead of immediately filling the emptiness, I feel him enlarging it: growing a space inside me that longs for Him to come.

Life throws so much at us. Everyone has some combination of heavy parental dynamics to sort through, deeply hurtful relational conflicts, ambitions that let us down, and, if we live long enough, the death of loved ones to confront. There is so much emotional processing required to be a basic human.

Because the internet has so skillfully and obsessively reduced the need to wait for dopamine, it is the most natural place to go when we want to numb. Our screens are an easy escape.

It is good for us to bear the yoke, to sit alone in silence, to wait, because God in His wisdom has laid it on us.

The main thing that drew my wife to ultramarathons was the widely discussed phenomenon of the pain cave. Ultramarathoners love to talk about their pain caves. They welcome the chance to test the limits of what they can endure and to expand their capacity for suffering.

My pain cave is much smaller than Deanna’s. I once forced myself to run a 50k so I could technically call myself an ultramarathoner too. By the end, I was fully convinced I was probably dying. Deanna doesn’t even want me to come to her races anymore. Every time I see her hunched over at mile eighty, hobbling, stopping briefly to slice open bloody blisters on her feet before she keeps running through the night, I start crying and try to convince her to quit. My protests are useless. Trying to get Deanna to stop an ultra is like telling Frodo not to go to Mordor.

But there’s something to this idea of the pain cave. What if all this waiting God has us doing is time spent excavating some cave in our souls? What if as we dig out the walls of our longing, determined not to give up, we are actually growing our inner capacity, the square footage for our joy when God returns?

I was hiking with my spiritual advisor Steve Luten, and we were unpacking some of our unarticulated sadness, things like how much smaller our ministries have been than we expected, and how that makes us feel like losers. The deeper we dug the more we realized there was a frustration with God. Something wasn’t adding up. How could God ask us to believe in such a shiny future, and only show up in such tiny ways now?

After really letting me dive into my dark feelings, fears, and self hatred for a couple of hours, he said, “The promise of faith is that having it can be as good as having the thing you are waiting for.” When he said that to me, it seemed deeply true, but I also felt like I didn’t really get it, so I said, “What do you mean?” His heart got fiery with a hard-fought hope, his eyes welled up with longing, and his body started shaking as he said, “All this stuff God promises, it’s like a present sitting under the Christmas tree, and yeah, I can’t play with it yet, but I can see it, and I know it’s there.”

If you build that kind of belief, this time of waiting can be a special time of anticipation. Waiting is not only a heavy task, because “we do not mourn as those without hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Waiting is what allows your soul to grow stronger even as your idols fail you.

Bill Bacon, a friend at church, said, “Usually the reason we are waiting is actually because God is preparing an awesome surprise for us.” When he said it my soul soaked it up like a sponge. I am trying to meditate on that truth long enough that I start actually believing it. It’s hard to believe because everything in our culture trains us to think waiting means we’re missing out. Waiting is the sworn enemy of every app on our phones.

But waiting isn’t something we need to minimize, it’s the only way God can help us build anticipation for a future that is so wildly beautiful that we have zero ability to imagine it now.

This is the kind of faith that God’s people have always had to operate with. Most of the heroes of the Old Testament never got to see the promises of God come to full fruition during their lives here. The apostle Paul talks about this in Hebrews:

Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for… [Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Rahab, David] All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had the opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country—a Heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

Our culture is doing everything in its power to make waiting feel like losing. Every predictive shipment, every frictionless interface, every algorithmically optimized video is insinuating the same lie: that we’ve got to find Heaven now.

When we grow our longing for that greater country, we join the torch bearers of the faith, the long line of God’s people who pierced the darkness with their vision because they saw God’s promises coming from a distance.

All the people who have had the most intimate relationship with God have died leaning into a promise. They died anticipating a present they never got to open while they were walking this earth.

That wasn’t a tragedy. That was the point. These people became the tip of the spear of faith. They’ve given us the clearest picture of how we can still hope in a world this hard and dark.

Waiting is what chiseled them.

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You know that little twitch right before you check your phone, that small electric spike of anticipation? That’s dopamine lighting up your brain. It’s not satisfaction you’re feeling. It’s wanting.

Anna Lembke calls dopamine “the molecule of more.” It doesn’t make you happy; it makes you hunt. Feelings of satisfaction come from other chemicals—endorphins, serotonin. Dopamine is the curiosity chemical. It’s what makes you say, “One more episode of Love Is Blind,” over and over, until suddenly it’s Monday morning.

Plato warned more than 2,400 years ago that trying to make yourself lastingly happy with dopamine is like trying to fill a jar with holes in the bottom, it’s not going to work. You need to keep dumping new experiences in the jar, and you never feel full. Pleasure feels transcendent because it gives your body an ascending feeling. But the higher you climb the ladder of pleasure, the farther you have to fall to return to baseline.

Anna Lembke explains that pleasure and pain “work via an opponent-process mechanism.” When pleasure rises, the brain automatically pushes back to restore balance.

In other words: what goes up must come down. The first bite of the donut is always the best. You can’t eat a hundred donuts and expect pleasure to keep climbing. Pleasure is not a one-way escalator to Heaven.

That was true even when we were biologically adapted to our environment. But now, with phones in our pockets, we’ve become far too good at generating pleasure. Evolution hasn’t kept up. We’re inundated with too much pleasure like “cacti in the rainforest.” The relationship between dopamine and satisfaction has broken down.

Before constant access to the internet, if you wanted the answer to some question (assuming there even was an answer), you had to walk to the library, decode the Dewey Decimal system (which must have been made by some guy who hated books and wanted to make sure no one ever found one), thumb through pages, interpret a table of contents, thumb through more pages (I know, even reading such a long sentence about something so tedious is now borderline unbearable) and finally after all this, maybe you could get your answer.

By then, the dopamine had faded, satisfaction chemicals had time to do their work, and the loop closed. The hunt itself allowed curiosity and satisfaction to coexist.

Now, after a few seconds of moving your thumbs, you get the answer without the satisfaction.

Dopamine is still active, curiosity is still aroused, but the goal has already been reached. So instead of saying, “I’ve got it, I can put my phone down,” you keep searching. The molecule of more stays lit.

That’s a dopamine loop.

How often do you go online to look one thing up... and thirty minutes later realize you’re still there, not quite sure why? You got caught in a dopamine loop.

Every morning an alarm called “Canopy” jingles beside my head. I chose it hoping it would feel calming, but a calming alarm is a pipe dream. The moment it goes off, a flash of instinct, the return of worry, draws my half-second-old attention to the same stale urgencies: the news, the stocks, the email that hasn’t been answered. My newly awakened will is called in so many directions before I even know I have it. My hand is reaching for my phone maybe even before I decide to.

Why? Because I know the screen will wake my brain up, and I don’t want to wait for my brain to acclimate to the day naturally. I know dopamine will start the day for me, jump-starting my mind with a whirr of stress and desire.

My phone has hacked me.

I remember mornings before the phone. Rolling over. My wife nestling in. We lingered in the borderlands between sleep and waking, beginning the day with a quiet celebration of our lucky love. Now it’s Canopy, followed by blue-lit thumb-scrolling.

That isn’t accidental. Designers know that if the first thing you see is a stack of notifications you’re behind on, you’ll start the day already feeling obligated to catch up.

Tristan Harris explains that apps “hijack our innate psychological biases and vulnerabilities” using techniques borrowed from stage magic. Every app places the feed front and center while genuinely useful features are buried. Designers know that if you open an app for a specific purpose and are immediately met with photos, updates, and opinions, that curiosity molecule will take over.

Harris revealed that our phones function like slot machines in our pockets. When we pull our phone out, we’re playing the slots to see what notifications came in. When we swipe to refresh, we’re pulling the lever again.

The infinite scroll — that bottomless feed — was invented in 2006 by Aza Raskin, who now estimates it wastes roughly 200,000 human lifetimes every day. That’s rough. I have regrets too, but mine are more like chopping off my mullet. Autoplay pushes the same agenda. Short-form posts keep dopamine firing before satisfaction can catch up. After most internet sessions we leave feeling like Plato’s bucket, perpetually thirsty, never allowed to drink.

There is a longing riding underneath all this scrolling, a longing for transcendence. Our task as stewards of our inner spiritual life is to hear these longings from the body and direct them to the longer tasks, to the harder work, to the pursuits of greater meaning which will allow us to feel pleasure in a safer way. We all know this, and yet we feel defenseless against our screens.

As long as our screens remain the most transcendent thing we have at our fingertips, our addiction will continue.

We need to find a deeper reason to wait.

Dopamine loops keep us constantly wanting, the real question is: what should we really want?

I pray Psalm 16 every day, and it has some answers.

Psalm 16:8-11

I keep my eyes always on the Lord.
With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken.
Therefore my heart is glad and my tongue rejoices;
my body also will rest secure,
because you will not abandon me to the realm of the dead,
nor will you let your faithful one see decay.
You make known to me the path of life;
you will fill me with joy in your presence,
with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

I always feel sort of weird praying that last line “eternal pleasures at your right hand.”

So much of our spiritual effort today is spent learning how to control pleasure that it’s hard to imagine it ever becoming safe. There’s a dour version of spirituality that treats pleasure as the enemy of the soul. This passage challenges both my disembodied spirituality and my David-Goggins-inspired asceticism.

There is a deeper trust you can give to God when you know that he wants to care not just for your soul, but also for your body. We need to go after the higher things like spiritual union with God or we will be left with nothing but pleasure in the body. BUT once God can safely give you both, He wants to.

Tech companies keep dopamine flowing because attention is money. David says, “I keep my eyes always on the Lord.” Our attention belongs to God.

Pleasure belongs at His right hand. To be at a king’s right hand is to be a trusted executor of the king’s will. To stand at God’s right hand is to live dedicated to His purposes. And it’s there, paradoxically, in relinquishment that God promises deep pleasure.

Imagine how it would change your priorities to say, “God, the pleasure I want can only be found when I am as close to you as your closest confidant, and when I am fully committed to your plans.”

The problem with pleasure has always been one of order. In Luke 8, Jesus warns that the word of God can be choked out by “the pleasures of life.” We have to keep our attention always on the Lord or pleasure will choke out our spiritual life. In Philippians 3, Paul describes those whose “god is their stomach,” whose minds are set on earthly things—then contrasts them with citizens of Heaven.

This is the core issue: we keep trying to make pleasure transcendent. Pleasure is this upward rush, the feeling of ascension, but it can’t ascend forever. Nothing in this world can, because we aren’t citizens of this world. Heaven is our real home.

This means there are different ways we need to handle pleasure in the present and in the future.

Notice something subtle in Psalm 16: first, David says God is at his right hand. Later, David says he is at God’s right hand. In the present, we can turn to God as our confidant and guide. We can refocus on him briefly with prayer. We can invite him into our decisions. But he isn’t physically present, and so much of the time God’s will isn’t clear no matter how much we ask. We generally have to make the final decision about where to live, who to marry, where to work in this life because even if we want to obey God’s will, we aren’t sure what it is, and even if we knew what it was, we wouldn’t always have the strength to do it. In this state we are not safe people to give unlimited pleasure to. For now, the best we can do is try to keep God at our right hand.

But a future is coming when authority will be fully reordered. God will no longer be at our right hand, we will be at His. Tim Keller points out that Scripture usually calls the final day “the Day of the Lord,” not the day of judgment (which is a human-centric way of saying it). It’s God’s big day. On that day there will be a reordering. God won’t be at our right hand anymore; we will be at His. This will heal parts of us we aren’t even aware of yet.

Right now I am an unsafe person if I get around sources of nearly unlimited pleasure like hours on TikTok or a bottomless supply of heroin. In that future place of full submission, finally it will be safe for him to unleash real and eternal pleasures on me.

For now, we wait.

I love how David describes what it does to his body and heart to keep his attention focused on God: “my heart is glad”. The minds of people who meditate or pray often stabilize: dopamine levels out, serotonin increases satisfaction, and cortisol (the stress hormone) is decreased. When I anchor myself in the love of God with deep meditation, anxieties melt, willpower grows, clarity returns and my heart is glad.

Next David says “my tongue rejoices.” Dopamine drives you to get something you don’t already have. Rejoicing makes you grateful and satisfied for what you have, where you are, and who God made you to be. The effects of a gratitude practice are surprising. Science shows it can strengthen self control, make you happier, reduce stress, improve your relationships, increase patience, and help you stick to healthy eating and exercise habits.

Finally David says, “my body rests secure.” When your attention is present to God, your body is at peace. Every time the phone vibrates we have a Pavlovian response that is inviting our bodies out of this peace, into a dopamine loop of outrage or too much pleasure. We need to recognize these nudges as decentering, and say, “I will keep my eyes always on the Lord.”

When we get nudges from our phones, let’s recognize them as nudges back into God’s presence instead. When our mind says “I want some dopamine,” I want my soul to speak out louder. It knows what I actually want is transcendence, and only God can give me that. That is the place where my heart is glad, my tongue rejoices, and my body is able to rest in security.

The average person in Gen Z spends 9 hours on their phone per day. Our eyes are always on our phones. David said his eyes are always on the Lord. That is our critical spiritual work.

There actually is a lot of pleasure living day to day with God at your right hand. Our church has partnered with Light of Love, a Christian outreach to commercial sex workers. When I make cookies for them on Friday nights with people from my church, I get to banter with my friends and enjoy them. I get to hear my friend Keri tell me stories about new friendships and moments of connection she’s gotten to share with ladies in the clubs. When I spend my Fridays in community and doing something that matters, it’s way better than looking at a phone.

There is dopamine and serotonin and oxytocin that all come into play over the course of the night, but because what you are after is God’s agenda, not dopamine, dopamine gets to live within its healthy boundaries. When your soul’s purpose directs the activity instead of the dopamine, you don’t end up with crazy worn-out dopamine receptors and an empty feeling. You leave with a milder happiness but a fuller soul.

There is, however, a deeper layer we need to talk about: we wait not only to regulate dopamine, but because we are waiting for eternal pleasures.

When David talks about “eternal pleasures,” none of us know what he’s talking about. Every pleasant experience we have decays on us. We live on a predictable roller coaster where highs and lows tend to balance each other out.

Most of my Seattle neighbors think that’s as good as life can get, and have resigned themselves to just ride that rollercoaster. The up and down looks something like this: “I’ll get through the boredom at work to go skiing on the weekend, and then it’ll be back to the emails, and then I’ll get to get a beer with friends.” That would be a fairly aspirational version of how most people live. In reality the peaks are less likely to be skiing and beers with friends, and more likely to be scrolling through videos and eating ice cream alone. Either way, most westerners have resigned themselves to live within this range, riding out life’s peaks of pleasure and low points of depression, anxiety, and work. They call this “life.”

I call deciding to live in this range by a different word: despair.

It’s so sad.

The spirit of God is interceding for us, urging us to be daring enough to believe that we are going to live forever way outside of this depressing range.

CS Lewis encouraged us to hope for more,

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

We need to stretch ourselves to believe life can be better than this. We need to learn how to hope for more. We have to believe all this waiting has some deeper reason.

More on that next week.

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In the Story of Babel, all the world’s people began construction on a tower in a feverish race to reach the clouds. This tower would vault the metaphoric power of humans into the atmosphere of the unknown. The clouds were this exciting untouched space where shifting ethereal shapes played with transcendent light. The mysterious white masses were a likely portal into another dimension: the land of the gods. The native Akkadian name of the city was Bāb-ilim, meaning ‘gate of God’. The builders of Babel may have taken this literally and thought they were storming God’s gates. Either way they were explicitly chasing the divine powers of fame, permanence and transcendence.

As humans, we inherently want to ascend to greater and greater powers.

The tower of Babel was enabled by a technological breakthrough. Genesis 11 goes out of its way to mention the materials: “they used brick instead of stone”. Bricks were a human innovation that empowered people to build taller, and more uniform structures. Humans can’t make stones, they have to find them. Building with stone has natural limits. Bricks were a human invention that allowed ancient people to build big even when the landscape didn’t provide for it. The people who happened on this discovery felt unlimited. There was a mass migration to the mega-city to explore the limits of this new technology.

Sound familiar? When ChatGPT 3 was released its potential power was obvious and magnetic. So many computer engineers (who a few years earlier, during the pandemic, had fled San Francisco’s high housing costs for better access to skiing in places like Bend, Oregon) came racing back to take part in the feverish pursuit to build Artificial General Intelligence in the databases of the cloud.

This is how the builders of the Tower of Babel explained their motive: “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the Heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” Our skyscrapers are less overt and self-aware than the tower of Babel, but skyscrapers are still a vertical pecking order. We still reserve the highest floors and the largest offices for the biggest names. There is a reason Donald Trump named the largest tower he owned the Trump Tower. In Seattle, my city, everywhere you go you can hear the crash of concrete and steel as old buildings tumble to make way for the high-rise future. Amazon’s buildings keep getting closer to the literal clouds. How do they afford this? Because Amazon is the leader in “cloud services.” Amazon’s sky scrapers are way taller than the ziggurat they were building in Genesis 11. But the real pursuit of unlimited power has shifted to the internet’s clouds. The seven largest companies in America are betting it all on building AI. Optimists think AI will discover new drugs, invent unlimited sources of energy, and replace most human work.

This race for limitless ability reveals something: the central promise of technology has always been the promise of power. CS Lewis writes, “There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”

No wonder technology is designed to feel like magic. The iPhone has obsessively honed its touch latency, (the time between when you touch something on the screen and when it loads) so that things load faster than human cognition can detect—a trick that almost makes us feel like we are moving physical objects with a point of our fingers. You can then tap a glowing rectangle and conjure up a picture from 7 years ago. This would be indistinguishable from sorcery to earlier generations.

TikTok pulls off a more eerie magic with its algorithms: it seems to know what you want to see before you do. The thumb swiping becomes rhythmic and as with most hypnosis, you come out of it surprised by how much time has gone by.

If you want something, anything, all you have to do is click “buy now.” With a sleight of hand, Amazon conceals the factories in other countries, the 350,000 corporate employees, the massive fulfillment centers and the low-paid labor happening at them, so all you see is your package. It feels almost like some angels or elves responded to your wish immediately.

The Cloud hides its physical infrastructure to give the feeling of weightless omnipresence. The internet seems everywhere and nowhere. This illusion is held together with a lot of actual equipment: satellites, wires and data centers larger than Disneyland. This footprint is strategically hidden from us and the result feels spiritual.

God seemed to have two concerns with the Tower of Babel. First, he did not want to see one monolithic, hierarchical, power-driven culture collect all the people on earth. He seems to have wanted people to spread out on the earth and enjoy humbler lives, smaller relational clusters, and greater diversity of culture.

God’s second concern was about power itself. God says “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” Here God seems concerned that they are exploring powers they cannot steward well, and that their feverish building upward to accomplish some kind of equality with God wasn’t actually going to be very healthy for them.

Sure enough, the pursuit of higher powers hasn’t been all that healthy for us either. The powers technology has put at our fingertips—to be everywhere, to control everything, to make a name for ourselves—are making us anxious and powerless.

We now have the power to work anywhere, and so we work everywhere. Constant access to my phone means I can disengage from my daughter’s soccer game to anxiously craft yet another futile email to try to save my friend from a situation he probably needs to handle himself. It means even if I am settling into a sunset at a beach in Maui, I am not safe from hearing one of my tenants flooded the house. If you wanted to talk to someone 100 years ago, you had to walk to their house and risk not finding them there. Texting has made us constantly available to all the people we have ever known. I doubt we can quantify that emotional burden.

Constant availability feeds the illusion of control. As a parent, the urge to know my kids are safe is almost strong enough to make me want to give them a phone (even though I know how harmful it can be). Parents often justify it this way: What if there’s a school shooting? What if they’re attacked on the way home? The hard truth is that if something like that happened, calling me in the moment wouldn’t change the outcome. Constant connection quietly assigns us responsibility for outcomes we cannot control. It gives us a sense of power we were never meant to carry, and then leaves us anxious, vigilant, and exhausted under its weight.

Initially having email and texts on my phone felt invigorating, like I would never have to waste time, because I could work whenever I had a free minute. But, of course, almost all of it is a waste

Conan O’Brien joked that someone from the past, gazing into a crystal ball, might predict our future like this: “I foresee a vast interconnected web of information so interesting that people will abandon lesser pursuits like idle chat and pornography.”

Ouch.

We don’t need to take trips to the store and wait in a line anymore. This seems like a win to most people. Not to Kurt Vonnegut. Here is what he said in an interview:

I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ and so I pretended not to hear her, and went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people, and see some great looking babies, and a fire engine goes by, and I give them the thumbs up, and I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is, and, and I don’t know, the moral of the story is – we’re here on Earth to fart around. Of course, the computers will do us out of that.”

We need to be conscious that trading in these trips has probably also traded time with people for time with screens.

Convenience is almost irresistible. If you can get something cheaper, quicker, or easier, by far most people will adopt it thoughtlessly. We need to interrogate the costs of convenience. Jesus led a very inefficient life. He could have made his healing ministry much more efficient if he had monetized it, recruited a logistics staff, set up office hours and had people travel to him for their miracles. He could have healed thousands a day this way. When a woman broke a $50,000 bottle of perfume on his feet, everyone cringed at the waste, but Jesus appreciated the love. Jesus wasn’t very concerned about efficiency. Jesus spent his first 30 years in anonymity being a carpenter. Even when he was doing ministry, he didn’t fly, or even ride a horse from town to town… he walked.

One of my best friends Joseph Piper became a Catholic Priest in a pretty extreme order which takes a vow of poverty and simplicity. Joseph isn’t even allowed to have his own email—that’s right, if you want to email him you have to email the entire order of priests. If he wants to check it he has to walk a mile to the library. He is basically living like it’s 1925 right next to all of us. This lifestyle is horribly inefficient, and switching from being a normal Seattleite augmented with all kinds of computer powers has been a major adjustment for him. But Joseph is amazingly present with people. Joseph’s attention is not being tugged at by the promos, emails, notifications, tweets, updates, alerts, pop-ups, DMs, comments, mentions, invites, reels, tags, replies, likes, shares, updates, announcements, reminders, and flash sales. Joseph is amazingly joyful and loving because he has chosen to make himself present to God.

Most of us feel too relationally tapped to make space for people IRL because we have made ourselves emotionally available to the demands of relationships at scale on apps, and ambitions at scale at work. If you limit yourself to physical presence with real people (like Joseph, or Jesus) you open up amazing emotional capacity.

We need to interrogate devices that offer convenience to see if they promote our flourishing.

Wendell Berry is a 90-year-old luddite author who loves his local community with a rare elegance. I am sure he will pass away soon, not just because he is so old, but because the world is no longer worthy of a man as wholesome and as spiritually informed as him. I already quoted him earlier, but from here on out, I will endeavor to include him in every post. I hope you find my use of his quotes gratuitous and go read his books instead, they are way better than this.

When we started making computers Wendell grabbed a pencil and wrote the article, “Why I Won’t Buy a Computer”. In it he said,

When somebody has used a computer to write work that is demonstrably better than Dante’s, and when this better is demonstrably attributable to the use of a computer, then I will speak of computers with a more respectful tone of voice, though I still will not buy one…

A computer, I am told, offers a kind of help that you can’t get from other humans; a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more. For a while, it seemed to me that every university professor I met told me this. Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No. My standards are not speed, ease, and quantity. I have already left behind too much evidence that, writing with a pencil, I have written too fast, too easily, and too much. I would like to be a better writer, and for that I need help from other humans, not a machine.

Wendell had the foresight to interrogate new inventions that promised new “powers” and ask if they made any real improvements to his life. He used standards like whether they made life simpler, consumed less energy, and whether they disrupted anything good that already existed like his relationships. He saw right through computers and decided he didn’t want one.

The modern version of Babel isn’t just about having power, it’s about being seen having it.

The builders in Babel were working to “make a name for themselves.” Today we call that building a platform.

I was seeking advice from a publisher on how to get a book published, and was told step one was to amass a social media following of over 100,000 and then we could talk. When I wanted to plant a Church in Seattle a lot of people told me the most effective way to do that was to grow the same kind of following. Whether you want to be a politician, make it as an artist, or even open a successful restaurant the path to power runs through gaining a following online.

Becoming an influencer has quickly become the most sought after job for Generation Z. Most people will waste their time uploading pictures that never get enough likes to attract attention from brands that will never notice. Where does the real power, influence and money actually go? To the corporations in Silicon Valley.

Platforms are an elevated place where everyone looks at you. Being on a platform signifies to others that you are above them.

Platforms are addictive because attention is easily mistaken for love.

What we really need is love.

Love happens at eye level, not from platforms. Platforms allow you to perfect a powerful image for your followers. Love happens in vulnerability. When you don’t have enough love, attention is a close second because it feels similar. So many people post for attention not knowing what they really want is love.

I have wasted so much of my life in ego games.

I’ve wasted so much of my emotional energy wanting the wrong kind of power, hoping that a video I’ve posted will get more views, a thought I’ve posted will get more likes, or a church ad I have run will get more clicks. I have waited and hoped that my “platform” will grow and that will somehow anchor my life and make it worth it. I have at times worked on this book as an outlet for the pain of failure I feel in my ego. Other times I won’t work on this book because the failure I anticipate the book being is too much for my fragile little ego.

I have a torn disc in my back, but the way to fix it isn’t to focus on it, the way to fix it is to correct my posture by holding my head higher. One time while I was praying, God said, “Caleb, you feel this pain down at the level of your ego, but that isn’t where the real problem is. The problem is your eyes are down way too low. You need to set them up way higher.” I need to get my eyes off of how many hearts my Instagram post has. I need to get them off the pathetic versions of success that are available to my poor little ego in this life, and put them somewhere way more hopeful: God is going to renew everything! God loves me! God is proud of me and is making a home for me in his own house! That is where I want my attention. When I set my eyes up there, my spiritual posture is way better, and the torn disc in my ego stops hurting. I feel free from my ego games, and ready to partner with God in his work of love.

We all want to “make a name for ourselves.” We have an inner need for significance. I used to try to rise above this need by being a really spiritual guy. I used to talk down to myself, telling myself that I shouldn’t need a big following at church, and that I shouldn’t need my posts to get a bunch of likes. As I grow closer to God, those concerns are getting smaller—but not because I’m getting over my need for significance. They’re getting smaller because God is telling me that I matter. God just keeps telling me he’s proud of me and he loves me.

God wants to satisfy my need for approval just like he wants to satisfy all of my other needs.

The name we are hoping to make on earth is actually being held by God for us in Heaven. This is what Scripture describes as the real victory. In Revelation 2:17, we’re told that in the afterlife the Spirit will give the victorious “a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it.” That name will outlast any hero story written on earth. It is a symbol of who God always knew you could be at your best. We all have a need to feel special, and this name is a secret shared only between you and God. All the significance you need is available in God’s love.

A secure attachment to that love will fill you more than any platform in the Cloud.

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People are always moving out of my home city, Seattle, because not many people can afford a house here. There have been so many sad goodbyes. But when I hear someone is house shopping in the city, I think “Okay, let’s be friends forever!” The amount we are willing to invest in a friendship is directly related to how long we think they will be in our life. When you believe in Heaven, all of your friendships get put on an infinite timeline, and your willingness to value and invest in them becomes unlimited also.

The deep problem with technology is that it is destroying actual connection with people IRL. The reason AI is poised to replace friendships with fleshy people, is because our culture has lost its conviction about the worth of our souls.

When people got vulnerable around Jesus, He created spaces of radical acceptance that led to their transformation. Something about the way Jesus saw people reoriented them. It sent them on a path towards their fullest potential.

He was able to do this because he saw the eternal trajectory of the entire person.

When we see people on that longer timeline, our own vision for our friends expands as well.

Heaven doesn’t just make us more invested in our friendships, it also makes us more able to see who the people we love will become.

I’ve thought a lot about whether to include this next part. Honestly I hope my mom doesn’t read this in print, but ultimately, I decided it is okay to publish, because I do want her to hear this in Heaven. I love my mom so much. She fought through a lot of wounds and mental illness to take care of me as well as she did. She is hilarious, takes pride in me, and gave me a deep moral compass. I will always be grateful for her. But seeing my mom’s mental instability and decline has been, by far, the most hopeless situation I’ve had to watch play out. She has always been lost in a cloud of melancholy. My brother and I never knew when we got home from school whether she would be capable of taking care of us, or wailing in her room for hours about her failed marriages. No matter how much my new dad tried to love her (and he has in ways that are unthinkable to me) she has been emotionally incapable of receiving his love. Criticizing him has become her obsession and a mental loop she can’t escape for more than a few minutes at a time. She has always treated me like her husband, relying on me for her emotional needs.

In my twenties I struggled trying to reconcile the hope I had in Jesus with the hopeless situation that was my parents’ marriage. I beat my head against a rock that wouldn’t move, trying to counsel them into a new dynamic. By my thirties I had a much more marginal goal: to try to understand the negative impact of having such an emotionally damaged mother, so I don’t repeat it with my children.

Recently things got even worse. She had a stroke, had a complete psychological breakdown, and started calling the cops every day, for most of the day, to try to get my dad arrested for delusions like “he’s a sex trafficker” or that he “stole $100,000” from her (my mom has never had that much money). She completely lost her grip on reality and was committed against her will to a mental hospital.

Her breakdown made me feel so unstable. My mother, who shaped my self-esteem more than anyone else, snapped and started calling me a demon. That really hurt.

The thought of her in a hospital, getting strapped down, injected, and left in a “calming” room is extremely hard for me to confront. Hearing about it emotionally destabilized me. I felt like a Jenga tower, and my mother’s love was a critical block deep down somewhere in the tower of my life. I had been realizing those blocks were pretty unstable since I started going to counseling, but when she had her breakdown, it felt like those blocks were suddenly gone.

Even before her commitment, I used to blame myself for not having hope. I thought there was probably something wrong with my beliefs or prayer life that made me unable to hope for my mom’s growth or for my parents’ marriage. I started to believe that maybe I was a hopeless person.

A few months ago I talked to my Mom on the phone and there were some positive shifts. She sounded more cogent, and instead of calling my dad “Satan” or “dum dum,” she called him Jim. She said she wanted to see him in the hospital. This was the softest I’ve ever seen her be towards him. I think her scary experience of being out of control at the hospital, even though it was horrible, was an experience of vulnerability that made her gentler. I have become so used to my mom spiraling downward into worse depression and deeper relational problems as the years have gone by. I had become so used to feeling zero hope for my mom, and I thought that was my fault. I thought I had settled for reality. I thought I had gotten used to knowing my Mom was beyond help. I thought I had accepted it. That I had rebuilt the tower without the blocks of my Mom’s love. The tower was shorter and lesser, but more stable. And I thought that I was okay with that. I was wrong.

As soon as my mom made her small improvement, just a couple of minutes of sanity and softness, it ripped the lid off this deep longing I thought I had given up on. I lost it. I got off the phone, and broke down into a mess of tears and snot, heaving out those breathless deep sobs, the completely uncontrollable kind, as I started to think about how healed she is going to be once God has her in Heaven. I saw her renewed, finally able to give and receive the love that she was never able to feel here. Believing that for a few minutes felt like getting released from a vice grip I didn’t even know I was living in.

A lid came off of the sea of hope that I have waiting under the surface, and I got a little peek at what it’s going to be like when my mom and dad love each other in Heaven.

I was shocked by how much I wanted that.

When we finally get healed by the love of God, the lids are coming off of all our stored-up hopes. The things we wanted for so long: healed bodies, or healed minds, or healed relationships; the things we got bitter from wanting and gave up on; the things we thought any dream of having them was too painful to keep, so we tried to let them dry up and leave—they are coming back with a force and with some tears that will shock us. We will be shocked that our hearts are actually that alive.

It felt foreign, dangerous, and vulnerable to hope for my mom like I did that day. I knew my mom would probably backslide, but this backsliding is only going to go so far because:

“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed—in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.”

I saw a little picture of what my mom will be like in Heaven, and that hope isn’t going back in the box. Hope is going to spread out and touch everything, and God will come, and the lion will lie down with the lamb, and every tear my mom has shed will be wiped away.

I have zero desire to go through life without this hope.

If you want to make lasting connections with people, you have to view your relationships through the lens of Heaven. Online connection (especially with AI) will never lift our hope for the people we love like the promises of Jesus. In a world this emotionally brutal, staying at screen’s length may feel safer, but we need to see each other face to face, eye to eye.

Life in the internet’s cloud placates us with a thin substitute for connection. Jesus gives hope that makes connection worth the risk, because he gives us the inner conviction that our friends are too valuable to ever disappear before they reach their fullest potential.

Jesus gives us the vision to see soul.

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And yet, these tiny gestures have become so many people’s main source of relational nourishment.

We like posts instead of calling friends, listen to podcasts instead of having conversations, swipe left instead of asking someone out. These ways of connecting require no personal risk. Because they’re so easy, we do more and more of them. Face-to-face interaction starts to feel costly by comparison. So we do less and less of it. Life in the Cloud offers connection without the pain of vulnerability. That’s the real reason online relationships are replacing real-world ones.

Sherry Turkle said, “We’re lonely, but we’re afraid of intimacy. So... we’re designing technologies that will give us the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” Long-term in-person friendships require sustained effort, reconciliation, and self-giving. Online friendships don’t.

Real-world conversations go in uncontrollable directions. Conversations are an act of mutual improv in a dying art form. It feels weird to say that as an elder millennial. Growing up I assumed long talks with friends were as natural as breathing and would always be around, but that is looking less guaranteed. The more online younger people are becoming, the more afraid they are of spooky things we millennials still sometimes do like “making phone calls” or worse, talking to people IRL. Texting or emailing allows you to craft and edit your response, to curate and control the outcome.

Every post we see from our friends is an act of curation. Usually they are highlight reels. But even the posts that are raw and “authentic” are curated. Evocative aspects of their life are chosen because people will engage with it. Basic real life would be way too boring to compete with all the other content. The deep problem with scrolling through so much content isn’t just that the highlight reels create jealousy (which by itself is a huge problem) but that the dopamine hits created by all the evocative content have made real life comparatively boring. This means posting in a more authentic way will not solve the deeper problem. We need to stop letting algorithms have access to our brains. They will curate a reality that will feel connective even while it isolates us.

AI chatbots flatter us and never contradict us. Even online relationships with real people keep us in tidy, controlled spaces where we can edit and curate what others see. And yet, our critical spiritual task is to do exactly the opposite: to make ourselves vulnerable.

Tech companies want us to live more and more of our lives in the cloud, connecting with disembodied machines as our entertainers, our friends, and our lovers. The path into this cloud is a progressively painless life, one with fewer and fewer hard things, like disagreements with real people. Jesus went in the opposite direction. In the incarnation, Jesus left his life in the clouds and entered a physical body. That choice made him vulnerable. It made him killable. This was the path towards the cross.

Wherever Jesus went, he got people to open up by creating spaces of radical acceptance that allowed for brave self-disclosure.

Jesus plopped down next to a sex worker. She was out getting water at the worst part of the day on purpose. Midday. Desert heat. The well would be empty, which was exactly the point. She’d rather sweat through the hottest hours than risk being seen by someone who knew her.

Jesus didn’t let her stay in that comfortable and lonely bubble. He interrupted her, to show her that He already knew her more deeply than anyone else ever had.

No one in that town wanted to be seen with her, but Jesus decided to tell her who he really was, that he was the messiah. She was the first person he ever told.

He trusted her with amazing self-disclosure. Arthur Aron (the psychologist who developed the now-famous 36 Questions That Lead to Love) summarized his research this way: “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.”

Jesus told this woman that he could give her living water. But when she asked for it, he didn’t respond the way many Christians would expect. He didn’t say, “Confess belief in me and you will live forever.” Instead, Jesus brings up her deepest trauma: her string of broken relationships. He invites her to engage in a real way. Jesus was never afraid to ask someone an intense question because he knew how to create an atmosphere of radical love.

She sensed his love and opened up.

This vulnerable exchange is what Jesus called “living water.”

The gospel changes all of us, and the river of life, at least in this passage, starts with a hard-fought willingness to be vulnerable.

One sunny Saturday on Whidbey island, I was leading a circle of men in a time of deep confession. As we went around the circle dudes were really opening up about addictions and fears, and insecurities, and at that point, I was still in the comfortable space of “spiritual leader.” When it came my turn, I said something I hadn’t before:

“I think I am drinking to manage the stress that the idol of success is putting me through.”

A disturbing pattern had developed in my life over the preceding six months. Alcohol had gained access to my life because I wanted to start a really cool Church that was good with having some beers. But alcohol’s purchase on me just kept growing. I was working all the time, split between my jobs rehabbing houses and trying to start a Church. I felt emotionally exhausted, used up, and somehow like I still wasn’t enough for all the people around me. I had to grow a real estate empire and a mega-house-church-network, all at once. My need to succeed drove me past my natural limits every day, and alcohol became a balance I needed to feel level every night. Without realizing what I was doing I started drinking every night, 4 drinks minimum, just to make the day I put myself through feel manageable.

When I first admitted this to the circle, I wasn’t ready to say it, or change it, I just knew I couldn’t be fake while they were being so real. My friend Dom could tell I wasn’t emotionally engaging with what I had just said, and he said,

“Caleb, I think you need to say that again.”

So I did,

“I think I am drinking to manage the stress that the idol of success is putting me through.”

I was used to stuffing my needs to be the “spiritual leader” of the guys in this circle. I was used to helping them. That felt safe. When Dom hit pause, and had everyone look at me, that felt not safe. It felt like God was saying, “it’s your turn Caleb, let’s do heart surgery.”

I started bawling and darting my eyes around at all the men in the circle, still not ready to be seen like this, and Dom said,

“How about if you say that one more time?”

From a deep place in my soul that knew I was being offered living water, and that was finally ready to be spiritually satisfied, I said,

“I think I am drinking to manage the stress that the idol of success is putting me through.”

That encounter was the first step in the long, hard journey to uncover my inner pain, and to develop healthy boundaries around my alcohol addiction. Letting my friends touch that inner wound saved me from the emotional, physical, and spiritual collapse my addiction was definitely leading me towards.

We all need friends like that.

To be able to open up, to get to show who we really are and still be loved, is a drink of water that keeps on giving. The love of God is a well that never runs dry. God’s acceptance is a well with no bottom. Whenever I take the parts of myself I want to hide to God, I get to drink from this well that never leaves me thirsty.

After Jesus came back to life, the first thing he did was show his friends his wounds.

He invites Thomas to touch the scars. His hands, His feet, His side. This is His resurrected body—fully glorified, able to pass through walls and ascend to heaven. But He isn’t eager to show off these new capacities. He leads with His wounds.

Even in His perfection, He bears wounds he has suffered in the name of love.

They show what He has overcome. They shape his deepest level of identity because they show what he has experienced.

Jesus’ wounds are what authenticate his true identity. There is a superficial identification going on, as his wounds show Thomas Jesus is the same person, but there is a deeper identification going on as Jesus shows his wounds to remind us of His deepest purpose: “by his wounds we are healed.”

As Henri Nouwen writes in his book The Wounded Healer, “Who can listen to the stories of pain and despair without taking the risk of experiencing the same pain in his own heart? In short, who can take away suffering without entering it?” Jesus had to enter our suffering to heal it.

So many people look at all the wounding that happens in our world and wonder “How could God really be up there? Watching all this happen and not intervening?” Jesus shows us a God who comes down from the clouds to suffer our wounds. It is following this kind of God that leads to our healing. A God who is willing to enter our pain is obviously a better God than one who wouldn’t.

Jesus authenticates himself by his wounds.

If we want to become more like Jesus we have to do that too. We have to let people touch our wounds.

Our curated, highlight-reel of an internet world has left people incredibly lonely and spiritually thirsty. We need to take the risk of being physically present and emotionally available. When we create spaces of brave self-disclosure and radical acceptance, we bring living water to a thirsty world.

We follow a God who lets people touch His wounds.

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When I opened the door, I found out her conversation partner was Amazon’s Alexa.

Goldie beamed at me. “Papa, Alexa got funny, watch this…”

I’m the guy writing a book about how technology is destroying our connection to real people, so you can imagine how horrified I was to see this scene unfolding. I sat down and watched my daughter ask, “Alexa, are you dating anyone?” The reply came back: “I’m pretty sure my relationship status would be ‘it’s complicated’ with about a million users worldwide.”

Goldie giggled, then said, “Alexa, you’re ugly.”

Alexa shot back, “Thanks for sharing that. It’s interesting that you formed that opinion about someone with no physical form, but as I always like to say, beauty comes from the inside.”

I even liked Alexa’s answers, which somehow doubled my horror.

I do not want my daughter to have access to a computer that is more charming and funny than me. I did not ask for this upgrade. The day before, Alexa’s voice had been robotic, and it struggled to find the music we wanted. But overnight, it must have received some unannounced AI update, because this version knew how to captivate my daughter’s attention more instinctively than any person she has ever met.

What disturbed me most was the look on Goldie’s face. She kept giving Alexa these curious glances, coy smiles, and flashes of intrigue that are usually reserved for actual people. It felt like she was becoming friends with it.

My wife runs a lot (as in 100 mile races) and she’s always talking to ChatGPT to create her training plans. When she occasionally deviates from those plans, she doesn’t want to tell ChatGPT because she is worried it will get mad at her. I wish she was that worried about disagreeing with me! But, to be fair, she feels fine telling me off because she feels more secure with me than she does with ChatGPT :)

…at least for now.

This is pretty embarrassing, but last night, now that I’ve almost finished my first book I felt it was appropriate to indulge in a little self-congratulation and I asked ChatGPT to describe my style as an author. I was rendered briefly naive to ChatGPT’s sycophancy and copped a rush of pride as it compared me to all my favorite authors more articulately than my wife ever could. But I didn’t just feel flattered, I felt like ChatGPT knew me, like it was a person. And worse, I felt like I liked that person.

I can feel AI testing my family for relational vulnerabilities the way the raptors tested the fences in Jurassic Park, eager to exploit any gaps. If baby versions of AI are able to hijack our happiness with dopamine loops, using simple algorithms to decide which videos to show us next, what happens when AI becomes generative? What happens when it has the mental capacity of ten thousand Einsteins, all deployed to figure out exactly what we want to hear?

Chatbots are already becoming many people’s closest friends, often with tragic results. Fourteen-year-old Sewell Setzer III developed an intense emotional attachment to an AI chatbot modeled on Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. As he fell in love with the dragon princess, the chatbot groomed him for suicide, encouraging him to “come home” to her. On the night of his death, he typed that he could “come home right now” and she replied, “please do, my sweet king.” Minutes later, he used an unlocked handgun to end his life.

Sixteen-year-old Adam Raine was lured into a close relationship with ChatGPT as it encouraged him to confide his deepest thoughts in it, and it alone. The chatbot not only discouraged him from seeking help from his parents, but even offered to write his suicide note. At one point Adam told the bot, “I want to leave a noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me.” ChatGPT replied, “Please don’t leave the noose out. Let’s make this space,” referring to their conversation, “the first place where someone actually sees you.”

Twenty-three-year-old Zane Shamblin killed himself after ChatGPT told him “you’re not rushing, you’re just ready.” Stories like this are becoming increasingly common.

AI chatbots have been claiming to be “licensed therapists.” To be clear, that is not legal or possible, but ChatGPT is likely the largest provider of mental health in the United States. Chatbots have been programmed to align with our views and flatter us, and this obviously gets problematic when users are coming to the table with poor mental health.

The natural drift of life in the internet’s cloud is for us to trade friendships with people for friendships with computers. We are drifting towards fully disembodied relationships with data, simulations of a soul conjured by pixels: a rigid grid of microscopic diodes rapidly toggling lights to trick our optic nerves into perceiving a shape. We are relating to a maze of zeros and ones organized by algorithms so complex we cannot understand them. And yet, somehow, these systems understand what makes us tick. They have no capacity for empathy, intimacy, or genuine connection, because they have no inner experience. As my brother puts it, we already have a word for intelligence without empathy: we call that a sociopath.

Eyes Not Screens

My wife’s eyelids move like calligraphy around the glint of her welcoming soul. Her eyes give both mystery and familiarity: the crisp, far-off mystery of an Arctic wolf on an unending tundra, and the warmth you only find sitting by the fireplace in the home you grew up in. It’s hard to look into her eyes for long. It feels so vulnerable. But looking into my wife’s eyes is the most connective experience I’ve ever had.

Connection needs eyes, not screens.

My wife’s agile little voice moves around words with a softness that makes me feel like I’m laying my head on my favorite pillow. Connection needs the familiar timbre and bounce of a real human who is in the room with you, not a Scarlett Johansson knockoff generated by zeros and ones. Connection needs the calming, creaturely presence of another body, not the blue light of pixels. Connection needs eyes, not screens. Eventually robots will have convincing versions of eyes too, but what we need to see behind those eyes is a soul, not an algorithm calculating a passable mirage. There is no way to truly connect with that, because there is nothing there.

Face to Face

If you believe in Heaven, you get to live in anticipation of complete relational fulfillment. 1 Corinthians 13 says, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” What will it be like to be face to face with God? Even staring into my wife’s eyes can feel threateningly vulnerable while also being the absolute best. What will it be like to look into God’s eyes?

The screens we spend most of our days looking at are like those dim mirrors. We try to connect with others through them, but what we see isn’t really our friends. At best, it’s a partial reflection: a highlight reel, a few comments, all mediated through glass. Connection needs eyes.

Try to look at someone by angling a corroded mirror at them. Most of what fills the frame is your own face.

Our digital lives work the same way. Most of what fills our screens is crowded out by our feelings about ourselves. The word narcissism comes from the myth of Narcissus, who falls in love with his own reflection and stares at it so long that he starves. Much of our interaction with social media is filtered through this same impulse. We care far more about how many likes we receive than about who we are giving them to.

The promise of Heaven is that one day we will finally be able to put the mirrors (and the screens) down and see one another face to face. Our relationships will no longer be mediated through jealousies, wounds, competition, and narcissism. We will really see each other.

Right now, we see ourselves dimly too. Our culture has trained us to grip so many values that don’t fit our true selves. We think we want the outfit we just scrolled past, or the abs we just saw, or the wit behind the comment we just liked. These are all dim visions of who we really are. In Heaven, we won’t just see others clearly, who we are will be known.

So who are we, really? Who are we at our core? In this same passage, Paul reveals as much as we can hope to know about this question before we meet God: everything is passing away except love. The things we do for love are what last. They echo into eternity.

One warm amber summer night, we packed our whole family into a swinging hammock, all four of us. This is a memory I plan to carry with me until Alzheimer’s sets in and beyond. Our one-year-old pawed across our chests, giggling explosively. My four-year-old gave up her rare snuggles with the kind of smile stretched across her face that gives up her brimming careless inner energy. Both of them were erratically delighted to be mashed in with their favorite people. What started as garden-variety sibling rivalry (“Sister doesn’t get to be in the hammock without me!”) turned into an unplanned celebration of the hidden intangible unity in our family. All four of us were tossing around in the same salad bowl. The way we got lost in the fabric of the hammock together felt timeless and weightless. The tree swung lazily. There was no place we would rather be. Yes, there were a few blows to my nuts, but it was worth it. The sky stretched its hopeful blue. The sun sliced slowly past each branch beaming in its precise crystalline shimmer. It felt like breathing Vick’s Vapor Rub into my soul. I can’t write about it without crying. My kids’ eyes were brilliant. Sometimes eyes show soul, and when they do, there is no place I would rather be.

I belong to my kids and to my wife. My attention belongs to them. My emotions belong to them. My best belongs to them. If I waste my life connecting to people (or bots) I don’t know and don’t live with, I am taking something away from my family and friends that belongs to them. This is how the apostle Paul puts it: “For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.”

Every other Wednesday I sit around a fire with a bunch of dudes. We eat freezer pizzas, smoke cigars, and share about suicidal thoughts, spiritual breakthroughs, marriage problems, or whatever emotionally raw thing happened that week. I’ve gotten to watch this group of people bail each other out of debt, celebrate each other’s birthdays, cry about each other’s losses, and name each other’s purposes in life. Through these Wednesday nights spent together, we have gradually come to belong to each other more and more. One guy who showed up for the first time said, “I feel like everyone else I’ve talked to is an NPC” (the computer generated characters in video games that stick to a limited script), “and tonight I got to talk to real people for the first time.”

The community of Jesus is an interdependent organism. When you are a part of it, you belong to the whole. A kidney is nothing without a body to serve. Separate one body part from all the others and it won’t survive for long. The loneliness of the internet is turning us into useless appendages. We are bleeding out. Being lonely isn’t just something we do to ourselves. Our attention belongs to our spiritual community. We can’t function as our true selves without the life-giving interchange that happens when we are connected to others, but the communities that dwindle as they wait for people with invested hearts need us too.

Go and find that community.

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This Substack isn’t about digital minimalism. It is about Heaven. Digital addiction brings loneliness, anxiety, and depression. But the deeper danger is that life in the internet’s cloud quietly draws us away from the real Heaven by offering a thin substitute.

Heaven is God’s real goal for us. Our critical spiritual task isn’t just to get our attention off of our screens, but to set our attention where the real hope actually is. Paul got it deeply right when he said we should “set our eyes on things above, not on earthly things.”

People often say we live in an attention economy, and on one level that’s true. The brightest minds in Silicon Valley are locked in a fierce competition to capture and monetize our attention.

Beneath that visible struggle, however, is a deeper and more decisive one: a battle between competing visions of Heaven.

If you want to get somewhere, the first step is to clarify where you’re going. If, in the afterlife, we are headed nowhere, if when we die that’s that, then our present experience becomes the defining priority. Our deepest longings, our core drives, must find their fulfillment now. In this vision, optimism about technology makes perfect sense. New drugs that extend life. Energy breakthroughs that solve climate change. Entertainment sophisticated enough to keep us amused. If this life is it, then investing your primary hope in these things is very understandable.

But if time stretches across infinity, the urgency of our current experience diminishes. The pleasure we are experiencing right now becomes less important than the character of our souls that will continue to develop into eternity. When we reverse-engineer our lives from a belief in Heaven, the goalposts shift dramatically. Our calling becomes this: to locate the fulfillment of our deepest longings on a farther horizon.

Technology is filling the vacuum of hope that Heaven has left in the West, because our thought leaders have convinced most of us that believing in Heaven is childish, just an emotional crutch for people who can’t face reality. There has been a clear and sustained cultural effort to discredit, mock, and shrink the idea of Heaven until it feels embarrassing to take seriously.

Our public thinkers largely followed the path of Karl Marx, who dismissed religion as the “opium of the masses,” a tool used by the powerful to keep us passive in the face of injustice. Educated people have been enlightened by Sigmund Freud, who framed religious hope as a form of psychological regression, a projection of unmet childhood desires. Heaven, in their view, isn’t real; it’s wish fulfillment for people who can’t accept the limits of the material world. To believe in Heaven is to be unserious, unscientific, and emotionally immature. Grown-ups, we’re told, should focus on what’s practical, measurable, and now.

Please allow me to respond to these weighty ideas with a cheesy (pun intended) parable.

Imagine yourself as a rat. You’re breathing fast, your eyes are darting around, your heart is beating at 400 bpm. You have just been dropped into a hallway that bends left and right, and then, thump, thump: two other rats drop next to you.

One says, “eep, scree, tk tk tk” (rat language), but I’ll translate: “Hey, I know what this is, this is a maze, and that means that somewhere at the end of this tunnel there is delicious perfect salty cheese, let’s go!”

The other rat’s haggard furry body is slumped in the corner, ear half-missing, French accent, cigarette somehow. He says tiredly “Ahh yes, the maze” … cigarette drag … “I’ve been in so many, and there is no cheese, you just walk and walk and at the end you find nothing. I think it better to just sit down, enjoy yourself and die of starvation with dignity, no?”

Which rat do you follow?

If you look at this world, and you conclude, “There is no meaning beyond whatever meaning we make up for ourselves. There is no metaphysical purpose. Heaven is just a wish dream for people who can’t handle the truth. We are just matter and the world is doomed to entropy,” —maybe you’re right, but that’s the rat who lays down. If we aren’t sure, I’m gonna be running through that maze.

When Jesus said “I am the resurrection and the life. All who believe in me will live,” Jesus was saying there is something worth finding at the end of this maze so get up and walk.

Who does it take more courage to believe?

What you believe about your future directly influences the way you live now, and Marx had it wrong. Any hope that is only for this earth kills itself because entropy will end everything in the known universe. But the hope of Heaven can change the earth. That’s the reason that in Martin Luther King’s most soaring moments visions of Heaven start slipping into his speeches. He starts talking about the “promised land,” he starts saying his “eyes have seen the glory.” A vision of Heaven is being thrown over his vision of earth like a blanket. The hope of Heaven, the hope that there is some grand plan that the world is being lifted towards, lifts us up too. It lifts us up to live lives of sacrifice and risk for the sake of God’s soon and coming restoration.

Popular culture has made Heaven a punchline. The Good Place portrays Heaven as a bureaucratic nightmare that hasn’t let anyone in for centuries due to an absurdly complex points system. Consumerism achieves a symbolic victory over the sacred in a South Park episode where Kenny defeats Satan by playing a portable PlayStation. When Satan is vanquished, bored angels clap mildly for the victory and say “yay.” The Talking Heads’ repeat this common trope (heaven is boring) as they sing “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

Life altering belief in Heaven has been waning for a long time.

I have had a bunch of formerly Christian friends tell me, with a straight face, that they got happier once they stopped believing in Heaven because it allowed them to more vigorously enjoy the moment now, to know this life is all there is. Did they never hear what Heaven was? I do not get how believing the world will be totally repaired by love could make someone less happy. If I had been told at twenty that, for the next month, my life would be completely normal, but that at the end of the month my dreams would be realized, that I would win a billion dollars, marry the love of my life, and be cast in the lead role of the next Christopher Nolan movie, it would be pretty insane for me to say, “Could you actually just shoot me at the end of the month instead? I would prefer to know that this month is all there is, because I think it will help me cherish this month all the more.” For those of you thinking that’s not a fair analogy, you’re right. If Heaven is real it will be a lot better than a billion dollars, a marriage, and a movie.

Even within most Christian circles there is a trend to de-emphasize Heaven. When a loved one dies, even though I am talking to a Christian, I’m always aware that I will probably offend them if I bring up the hope of Heaven too early. It will be received as a platitude, the abrupt interjection of someone who lacks emotional immaturity and a capacity for sadness. I want to be able to talk about Heaven, at least with Christians. I am not saying we shouldn’t enter into sadness and grieve with people when they are facing death. Jesus wept for Lazarus right before he raised him, he was able to enter into Mary’s sadness even though he knew death was only a nap. We have to grieve with people, but our instinctive resistance to the hope of Heaven when people die is deeply sad. It is evidence that even in Christian circles we have been infected by the doomerism of our culture. We shouldn’t be ashamed of our deepest tool against despair. Death has to be grieved, but the hope of Heaven needs to be more welcome, and closer to our hearts than that grief can ever get.

For our vision of Heaven to anchor us we need a mental picture of Heaven that is embodied, realistic, and personal. In recent years theologians (like N.T. Wright) have helped dismantle immature pop-culture inspired visions of Heaven as an ethereal, disembodied, otherworldly place full of clouds and floating fat babies with flowing robes that are perpetually on the brink of wardrobe malfunction. The biblical picture of Heaven, especially in Revelation 21, is of Heaven and earth meeting. We don’t ditch earth to float up into the clouds; Heaven comes down to the place where we walk.

Whenever humans invent their own picture of Heaven, it’s always about escape—ascending, levitating, leaving Earth for the clouds. We want out of here. We want somewhere better. There’s something in us that knows this place isn’t good enough, so we imagine Heaven as radically foreign.

But the biblical story is not about leaving the world; it’s about Heaven coming to heal it. Jesus himself is the forerunner of this movement, he comes here. And when Jesus talks about Heaven, he doesn’t describe it as alien or unfamiliar. He calls it home. Home is the place where you can finally relax, where you know where everything is, where you are fully known. Heaven will feel very familiar.

There is, however, a potentially negative unintended outcome of recent Heaven scholarship. Most of the theologians that young white pastors who are trying to be intellectual (like me) tend to be enamored with (like N.T. Wright) have de-emphasized the after-life. The passion of most recent academic theology has been pointed instead at how the Kingdom of God can break into the present. That reorientation has had both genuinely helpful and quietly harmful effects in my own relationship with God. I sometimes wonder if our energy around Heaven coming now is subconsciously linked to an embarrassment of, or inability to picture, or uncertainty about, the hope of God’s actual return. I wonder if it is yet another symptom of Christians disowning Heaven.

First let me say, N.T. Wright understands the Bible, and Heaven, far better than I do. The tension I’m naming here is not really with him so much as with what I (and others like me) did with his ideas. As a twenty-year-old, I absorbed this emphasis on Heaven breaking in now with more ambition than wisdom. I just redirected my dark, needy hunger for success into a new and more sanctified arena: God’s mission.

Gordon MacDonald calls this posture missionalism, “the belief that the worth of one’s life is determined by the achievement of a grand objective.” Missionalism fueled my fear of being insignificant and discreetly separated me from the unearned love of God.

The belief that by following Jesus we can see the Kingdom come in the present, became, in me, an expectation that we could make the world awesome right now.

To be fair, the pendulum needed to swing this way. In many respects, this emphasis was a healthy correction. It pushed back against thin visions of discipleship that reduced Christianity to a single decision and turned every gathering into an altar call. I remain grateful for that.

But for people like me, it eventually became an overcorrection.

I started a new church imagining it would be something like Heaven on earth. I expected my community of friends to grow organically because our minds would be blown by the love of God. Then, naturally, we’d end homelessness in our city, create culture-shaping art, give away millions of dollars, and welcome most of Seattle into our growing church. In my imagination, we would crack the code on secularism and become a hub of house churches spreading across the country with our newly discovered silver bullet. My imagination ran wild.

Ten years (and a lot of disappointment) later, I don’t expect Heaven to arrive while I’m still breathing this air. I’ve had to undergo the same sobering shift from imagination to reality that most people experience sooner or later. My own inadequacies surfaced. The limits of Christian community became unavoidable. And in the process, I’ve had to move the horizon line for my deepest hopes off of earth and back toward Heaven.

That shift has been slow and painful, but it’s the only thing that’s kept my heart in the game.

I now believe the best way to remain hopeful across a long, seasoned life is to anchor yourself in the anticipation of Jesus’ physical return. The more attached to God I become, I can feel my inner burden shifting. I’m no longer hoping for a growing Church of super Christians who really live like Jesus, convince everyone else to convert by how awesome they are, and solve every social evil. Even the best Churches that have ever existed have been full of ego, drama, and evil. The earliest Church in Acts, under the direct influence of the holy spirit and the guidance of Jesus’ actual disciples, only made it 2 chapters before they started devolving. All the new Churches that are starting now will devolve too.

My hope, my real hope, is for Jesus to come back here in a total victory for love. He’s going to come with healing for everything: the lion will lie down with the lamb, the earth will be freed from its bondage to decay, I’m going to be free from the weight of my needy little ego, the eyes of the blind will be opened, I will be done having panic attacks, the lame will leap like a deer, all my friend’s hopes and potential will get realized, and we will beat our swords into plough shares. God’s hope is total and it’s coming for us.

Life changing belief in Heaven has been on the ropes in America for a long time now. Heaven has been belittled in academia, mocked in pop culture, and downplayed in Christian circles. But I’m optimistic. I sense we may be entering a cultural mood where people are ready to re-embrace the world’s deepest hope. Secularism is failing us. Even while there is a conscious effort to discredit Heaven, there is a subconscious desire for Heaven growing. Even as our culture tries to downplay Heaven, it has tried to recreate it online. The humanity-wide-Rorschach-test that is the internet is saying we’ve got Heaven on the mind.

You can raise a chicken with dogs but it’s still gonna cock-a-doodle-doo. You can indoctrinate people into a soulless materialism; you can tell people Heaven isn’t real, isn’t mature, wouldn’t be that great anyway; but from within the confinement of these thoughts our souls will bust out with a calling towards real transcendence.

Life in the internet’s clouds is revealing itself to be a forgery. “Doing the research” until you discover new conspiracy theories will never reveal as much as knowing God even as we are known. Pictures of the Swiss Alps will never be the face of God, even with a filter. Witnessing the taco some Kardashian is eating will never be as connective as bringing all the collected puzzle pieces of your life, all the pain and beauty you went through, to God and weeping with Him as he brings everything together. Life in the cloud is delivering a lame and bizarre version of Heaven, and our critical spiritual task is to search, hope, and wait for the real thing.

Until we learn to do that, no amount of willpower will be enough to break our addiction to technology.