Every generation gets to panic about something. Ours just got AI. When the printing press showed up, people lost their minds. Monks who had spent their entire lives copying scripture by hand were suddenly irrelevant, and the establishment was convinced that mass-produced books would corrupt society. Spoiler: it did not. Factories terrified people who worked with their hands. Nuclear power was going to end civilization. Drum machines were going to murder music. Photoshop was going to make every photograph a lie. And then there was that famous, breathless declaration that video killed the radio star. Except radio did not die. It pivoted. It did audio AND visual, and some of those radio stars became television icons. The pattern is always the same: new tool arrives, panic spreads, society adapts, and the people who adapted earliest usually came out ahead. Here we are again. I am a writer. I have built a universe with specific rules, specific characters, specific histories that span books. It is not a simple place. If I handed that universe to ChatGPT and walked away, it would lose the plot, literally and figuratively, within three pages. The characters would start acting wrong, the internal logic would collapse, and it would produce something that looks like my work the way a funhouse mirror looks like your face. So I did not walk away. I kept pouring myself into the work, because that is the job. What I did use AI for was the grunt work that was eating my creative hours. Backgrounds for visuals, rendered through Leonardo.ai. Songs that exist inside my story's world, the ones characters would actually hear, built through Suno at three in the morning when the melody was already playing in my head and I just needed it to exist outside of it. The story remained mine. The vision remained mine. The tools just meant I did not have to choose between writing and sleeping. Now. The slop argument. Yes, AI-generated slop exists. Yes, it is everywhere. But here is a question worth sitting with: do you think your readers are dumb? Because if you do not like slop, neither do they. Readers who love books can tell when something was written with care and when something was assembled like a cheap piece of furniture missing half its screws. The existence of slop is not an argument against the tool. It is an argument against using any tool badly and expecting people not to notice. Which brings me to the piece that sharpens everything else. The tools have never been the problem. It is the people who abuse them. Your boss is letting AI replace your position, and it will not do a very good job at it. That is not AI making a decision. That is your boss making a decision and using AI as the excuse. Your friend is using AI to simulate a relationship because something in their life is genuinely lonely and broken. That is not the chatbot's fault. Your student is submitting AI-generated work to pass your class, and yes, that is frustrating. But maybe the more useful question is: what are they finding so difficult that they reached for that exit? If the tool is being abused to avoid learning, the tool is not the root of that problem. Guns do not kill people. Spoons do not make people fat. AI does not take jobs. People do. Every one of those outcomes requires a human being to make a choice. The technology just sits there, waiting to be used or misused, same as every technology before it. The printing press did not start the Reformation on its own. Someone had to decide what to print. Someone had to decide who got to read it. Someone had to decide what to do with that information once they had it. We are the deciding factor. We always have been.

I write characters who make terrible decisions. I know what they're going to do before they do it, sometimes, because I built them from the ground up. I know their fears, their blind spots, the particular flavor of pride that makes them reach for the wrong thing at exactly the wrong moment. And I let them do it anyway. Not because I don't care. Because the story only means something if the choice is real. That is the closest I have come, in my own small creative life, to understanding how God's sovereignty and human free will actually fit together. People treat these two ideas like they're arm wrestling. Like if God is truly sovereign, then my choices don't matter. Or if my choices genuinely matter, then God can't really be in control. But I think that framing misses the point entirely. An author doesn't lose control of the story when a character makes a bad call. The author continues to write. The consequences are real. The choices are real. And the Author is still holding the pen. Now let's talk about the Law for a second, because I think we've been misreading it. The Law isn't God hovering over your shoulder with a clipboard, waiting to catch you messing up. Think of it more like guide rails in a minefield. The minefield is real. The mines are real. The guide rails aren't there to restrict you for the sake of restriction. They're there because someone who loves you knows exactly where the buried things are. Ignoring them isn't freedom. It's just a different kind of trap. The Fall is where the compound interest started. Adam and Eve made a choice, and that choice didn't just affect them. It rippled. And every generation since has added their own decisions into that pile, each one building on the last. When people ask why there is so much suffering in the world, I think part of the honest answer is this: suffering is largely the accumulated weight of human choices compounding through thousands of years of history. God didn't design the suffering. He warned against the choices that produced it. The Flood fits into this too, and I think we sometimes read it with the wrong emotional register. Genesis 6 says God looked at what humanity had become and was grieved. That is not the language of a tyrant throwing a tantrum. That is the language of someone watching something beautiful become unrecognizable, and making an agonizing call to preserve what could still be preserved. The shortened lifespans after the Flood, the increase in natural instability, these aren't punishments handed down in anger. They look more like aftershocks. The world had been broken, and the breaking left marks. Then there's the argument I hear fairly often: what about the unreached tribes? What about the people who never heard? How can a good God hold them accountable? I'll be honest, I used to let that one sit heavier than it needed to. But then I read the Great Commission again. Jesus didn't say, I'll make sure everyone hears. He said, you go and tell them. The responsibility was transferred. God provided the message and the mandate. The question of unreached people isn't an indictment of God's reach. It's an indictment of ours. The better question isn't why hasn't He gotten to them. The better question is why haven't we. Sovereignty and free will aren't at war. They're a collaboration, one written by someone who knows the ending and still lets the characters live the middle. He knows what you'll do. He writes you anyway. That, to me, is not a terrifying thought. That is one of the most comforting things I know.