When a theme keeps popping up in my head, I know it’s the Holy Spirit saying, “Hey, wake up, pay attention –this is important.” Usually it takes the Holy Spirit fifteen plus times to get me to figure it out. It is part of why I write at all. It allows me to wander my own brain until I come across what it is the Holy Spirit wants me to recognize.
For the past three years, I’ve waged war with AI, because I recognize what it does not do. It does not teach us how to think, reflect, or create. It merely helps us summarize what is, and perhaps generate something structurally sound –but only if we know what structurally sound is before it is created.
Like all tools, it has a purpose, and can be applied across disciplines –but we have to know what we are doing before we do it. Apprenticeship in life involves failure. AI precludes learning from our own mistakes. It often means, we don’t learn at all, because the product becomes the outcome desired, not the process.
In teaching English, we need to help students discover the purpose of writing and reading -which is not to ace the quiz or get the A paper. Though good grades may be the result, writing helps us to understand more deeply how to communicate our thoughts to others. Reading develops empathy, as we are able to walk through the mind of another and thus come away with a deeper understanding of our own convictions.
We need to help students discover and relish the struggle. In life, we get that struggle is part of the process –scraped knees, paper cuts, rejection letters, failed baked cakes, messy rooms, fights, all the ordinary things that come with getting up and going through time. However, the virtual reality, coupled with artificial intelligence, allows people to think they are saving time, by opting for a struggle free existence. If I don’t have to spend time reading the book or writing the paper, I can spend more time scrolling for something to entertain me.
Never has a generation been so bored, as one that cannot endure anything but being entertained. It’s rather like if God acted as a genie, granting all our prayers so that everyone had everything. If we have any understanding of perpetually fed appetite from our experience of the excessively wealthy, famous and infamous, we know someone who is always full feels empty. The need to feel something, when turned only inward, leads to the suffering of others, and eventual crippling of the soul.
The process of learning how, of jogging, of painting, of playing the piano, of writing, of any skill that only develops through the doing, is itself a means of growing that AI shortcuts or discourages. The result is a drain of creative resources because they are never exercised. Life is incarnational in nature. We lose something important when we try to arrange our existence such that nothing ever troubles us, challenges us, or pushes us out of our comfort zones. Hermetically sealing our brains against struggle, renders them smooth and our hearts, hard.
Runners run. Writers write, disciples pray and serve. The process is innately part of how the purpose becomes revealed. We must practice in order to be perfected –and it is an infinite process. I don’t know how I am going to teach this in the classroom, except to say the old joke, “How do you get to play in Carniegie Hall?” and establish that anything other than authentic effort, is stealing from yourself, a better version of yourself.
So this year’s theme, spiritually speaking, is embracing the struggle, the process, and all that it entails. I plan to learn to play go, bake bread, and attempt to edit two books and if I really get going, finally learn past page 4 of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
Hoping 2026 is a year we all choose the better portion and embrace the cross that leads to a better reality.
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