Breathing Is Good: The We-Wu for July 14-18, 2025

Yes, this we-wu technically encompasses a longer time period. I know this. You know this. All God’s creatures are aware of my lack of organization and time management skills. I want to honor the fact that it has been a long time since I’ve written anything, and you’re all just standing in a desert of content, so I’m going to do my best to give you your money’s worth today.

This has been me for a long time now. Longer than I’d like to admit. Long enough that I think the good ship Sane has sailed. It’s probably trading war stories with the Edmund Fitzgerald.

There is a lot happening in the world today. Even if I ignore all 192(ish) other countries in the world and focus on the United States, there’s just too much happening. And a lot of it perturbs me. (More than perturbs, but this is a family-friendly blog.)

In the meantime, though, I’m also trying to just live my normal life and go to work and play with cute animals and love Jesus.

Honestly, I’m exhausted.

But we’ll get into that.

What have I been up to? Well… We are in between sessions of VCP. The first round of eight terms is close to being completed by several of our trainers in Africa. The second round will be starting for some languages this Fall or Winter. Three new languages will also be starting their first session.

In this intervening time, we’re working on text revisions. (I’ve probably explained all of this before. Sorry.) But we’re also working on taking things off of Brian’s plate and putting them on mine. This will be a permanent thing since I’m taking on most of the production leadership duties for both T&M and VCP. As in, I have a new job description and everything. (It looks a lot like the old one except with more supervision duties.) And I have three direct reports now.

This doesn’t cause any anxiety at all.

Guys, I have so many tasks right now, it’s not even funny. My post-it notes are staging a coup on my desk, and I have lost count of the number of tabs I have open in Chrome AND Safari.

In between the VCP tasks, I have been working on templates, and I revised an article for Mike, and Sarah and I went to the county fair, and I had a traumatizing experience at Pizza Hut, and I have to re-tag an entire document, and I’m randomly creating an art library for T&M images because I needed something that was easy to do when my brain is smoking.

(If you’re thinking about the ‘this is fine’ dog right now, we can be friends.)

Honestly, it really is fine. Well, not fine, but manageable. It’s a process, and when you’re in the middle of a process, life seems a bit insane. But just think of what we’ll accomplish when the process is over!

More work! Yay!

I’m gonna Gloria Gaynor the crap out of this.

Anyway, what else is happening? I know what’s happening in the world. I know a little too much about that. I should probably spend less time on the Internet.

Hey, here’s a debate you can weigh in on. How does everyone feel about AI? And by AI, I mean things like ChatGPT and other learning models. Those very handy programs that can do your everyday tasks much faster and maybe better. I know the good teachers aren’t fans when it comes to their students using these programs. I read a study that AI actually reduces the elasticity of our brains. People don’t learn anything when they just copy and paste both the question and the answer. We’re losing the ability to create new pathways for information. And because AI learns from us, it’s actually getting dumber along with us.

Anyway, we keep talking about looking into all the ways AI can help us, and I just don’t know enough about it to give a lot of input. There are ethical concerns as well because most of the learning that AI has done has been on things they’ve stolen from all of us - any art or photos we’ve uploaded, any posts we’ve written - literally anything we put online is available to someone to purchase or scrape for information. And then there are the people earning peasant wages to provide human input on what the AI can’t figure out.

But I don’t even know how useful it will be. I am so biased in favor of human connection. I want to keep people in cockpits, I want people to keep driving, and I want people to keep talking to other people because that’s how we find meaning. I have seen too many videos of people claiming that a chatbot is their best friend. I just did an article for my other job about a man who proposed to his AI girlfriend while living with his human girlfriend and child. It’s scary.

I think technology is great. But every new thing that solves a problem also creates problems of its own. And entropy is literally coded into the universe. Decay is inevitable. This world is trying to fill the void with all the shiny bits and bobs. But the Church should have the simplest message there is. If the Church starts looking like the world, and the world isn’t satisfying people, why would people seek us out for the answers?

I suppose I’m preaching to the choir. But the choir needs the sermon just as much as the rest of us do.

I hope this has been a satisfactory installment of your favorite online content. Sarah went home for her sister’s wedding, so she’s not around to remind me of all the things I forgot were happening. I’ll do my best to write better notes for the next few weeks.

No promises.

In the meantime, take care of some small stuff. I know, it’s hot, and you don’t want to do anything except sit in front of the fan with some iced tea. But it’s gonna get cold soon, and you REALLY won’t want to do anything then. (Yes, I’m telling myself these things.)

Bye!