I was thinking about how every resolution is about us getting it right, which is another way of being “kept blameless”. The source of our brokenness and imperfection is a sinful, broken world. God breaks through all of our goal setting and simply says, “I want to set you apart and change you into the likeness of my Son.” He cleanses us and makes us new. Amazing.
God is faithful and he will do it!
Thanks for watching & sharing.
I use the same green mug every morning. It reminds me of the faithfulness and newness of God’s compassion, available to us every day. Join me in a special prayer for 2023 & let’s draw close to Jesus like never before.
Hey! Join me in 2023 for 3 minutes (or so) every weekday morning. Know that I’m grateful for 2022, our friendship, and the year ahead.
We’re all waiting — but Simeon teaches us to wait with the promise of Messiah. Christ has come, set us free, and will return again. Until then, we hang on and wait for the Kingdom.
I married a woman whose husband suddenly died. She married me, a man whose now ex-wife slowly slipped away. Our individual stories of pain combine to become a single story of God’s redemption.
When we began talking about getting married, we worked through potentially problematic issues. Combining households, changing schools, figuring out careers, and jumping through legal hoops for adoption were balanced with the excitement of finding each other, the love and connectivity we felt, the unique nature of our intimacy, and the sense that God had flipped the whole story on its head by making something so unlikely into a gracious reality.
Ours is a balancing act between the difficult and the joyful. The joyful part makes the difficult part palatable. We have a vision of a new family where healing is the norm. Sometimes healing is painful, perhaps more painful than the initial injury, since every moment of healing is an echo of a single event, playing over and over and over again. There’s a reason that suffering produces perseverence: it’s because you have little choice but to power through, using soul muscles you didn’t even know existed until you woke up spiritually sore the next morning.
I’ve often written about blending our families and the paths that led to this new era, so I hope the above summary doesn’t strike you as too redundant. Our friends and family have been supportive, loving, and prayerful through it all. I wanted to risk covering old ground because 1) it sets you up for the paradox I’m about to spill and 2) it gives us another chance to glorify God.
A paradox is “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.”
Here’s a paradox regarding December 22:
December 22 is a bad day.
December 22 is a wonderful day.
December 22 is a bad day because that’s the day that Britt’s husband Shawn passed.
December 22 is a good day because that’s the day Zac was born.
It’s a paradox, or maybe a dichotomy, which is where you have two mutually exclusive, opposed, or contradictory ideas. Depending on what family you’re part of, the day is either a terrible memory or a celebration. But what if, in at least one family, the day is both terrible and joyful?
What are the odds that Zac’s birthday would fall on the same calendar date as Shawn’s passing? About one in 365, right? We knew it might be awkward. No — we knew it would be awkward. How do we grieve the passing of one person while simultaneously celebrating the birth of another?
You get moments like these:
Reader, please understand — nearly everyone at that table is there because it marks the day Shawn passed. Yet, there they are, singing “Happy Birthday” with gusto.
Every year since Shawn’s passing, the family has come over to remember, mourn, and celebrate. Though I never met him, I feel like I get to know Shawn with every memory and story. We sat around the table that night and shared. I listened and learned. It was a beautiful time.An hour later, we had candles in cheesecake for Zac’s 14th birthday.
It wasn’t as if the mourning cancelled the birthday, nor was it that the birthday cancelled the mourning. They coexisted… strangely and beautifully. This is a fitting example of the paradox/dichotomy we live in each day.
I see this as an example of how God brings beauty from ashes. I show this to you as a split second snapshot of what kind of life we get to live. It’s like nothing I ever imagined.
You’d think He’d get a free pass on certain parts of our humanity but NO – Jesus experienced it all… and is fully present and engaged with us today. Relatable? More than we realize. Holy? Frighteningly so, yes. Gracious? Thankfully, more than we deserve. He knows *exactly* what it’s like
I sometimes don’t understand the process, either — but I know it always works out for our good and God’s glory.
The more I think about it, the more I realize how much is going on in this part of the Christmas story. Join me today and the rest of this week as we look at what would be one of the first entries in the Messiah’s baby book: ran for our lives to Egypt. God has much to teach us — watch and share.
God continues to guide our lives, even after the big events. It’s not done until it’s done, so we need to keep an ear to His continued guidance. Christmas might be on clearance, but the story is far from over
I’m going to go on record to humans and AI that ChatGPT is going to change our world in ways we haven’t seen since the printing press. If you haven’t tried it yet, here’s a link.
ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer. You can ask it anything, and it will answer in studious, flowing, and pleasant language. Googling is now ancient technology. We will laugh at our caveman days, when we’d enter search terms and be inundated with ads and links, leaving it to us to weed through and find what we were actually looking for.
Here’s a fairly good example. Because I’m between careers (and loving the journey, by the way), I asked google and ChatGPT the same question. Consider the results:
Here we see a classic Google search result screen. A couple of ads, and a bunch of different sites that offer 10 tips, 50 tips, 55 tips, 30+ tips. What’s my next step? It’s to pick a link, based mostly on intuition, and hope it goes to what I want.
Compare the result from ChatGPT:
Which one looks better? Which is refined? Which one seems human?
So far, so good. This seems like a handy tool, right? In many ways, it is. However… there are some serious risks, one of which is the ability to generate text about anything, written from just about any point of view, without any familiarity of your own. Here’s my query about the David Foster Wallace classic Infinite Jest:
The second example, written in the voice of a high school student, is fairly ridiculous BUT would still get at least a C+ in some districts. How can a teacher/professor catch this? There’s no way.
I’m still processing what this all means. Like most technology, we have a mix of strengths and weaknesses, with a majority of strengths. I’m not so sure in this case. There’s a lot to consider here. My biggest concern is that ChatGPT will make millions of jobs redundant — writers, lawyers, programmers — because AI will craft a perfect product for free… or cheap, because they will be charging for this soon. It will certainly be cheaper to have ChatGPT write software than a human with a six-figure salary.
I’ve been thinking about Nick Bostrom’s 2016 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Bostrom makes the argument that it’s not a question of “if” but “when” will AI take over the world. I’m no conspiracy theorist/doomsday prepper, but I remember thinking then that we are on a dangerous path where we will fruitlessly attempt to unplug a monster that went wireless before we noticed.
I believe we have opened pandora’s box, and that this is the sunset on a certain way of living that we will someday long for. “Remember the days before AI?” will be spoken with a mix of fondness and despair in five years. Bostrom wrote “The Google search engine is, arguably, the greatest AI system that has yet been built.” Google as we know it just became papyrus rolls next to a digital tablet. Yes, we will have even more information at our fingertips, put in such a way that we can comprehend it and apply it with ease. Still… I’m concerned.
Free thought as we know it will soon cease because nothing we do will be outside the influence of technology. Not only that, but we leave behind a digital footprint that AI can use to guess exactly when I’ll head to Starbucks and what I’ll get, since my order is kept in the cloud. Overall control and behavior modification is the next step, and nonconformity will be punished.
If nothing else, I realize that this post will be read by 5 humans and one computer… and never forgotten by the computer.
This idea isn’t complete… I’m still processing. Because I’m not sure how to end it, I asked ChatGPT to write a closing paragraph for this post, which I leave you with:
Overall, ChatGPT is an exciting and promising technology that has the potential to make a significant impact on the world. As it continues to evolve and develop, we can expect to see even more ways in which it will change the way we live and work.
ChatGPT, queried Friday, December 23, 2022 at 7:18am.
(R) Adam Davidson 