Monthly Archives: February 2026

The Blessing of AI

Song at Midnight Posted on by

Hello, and welcome to another blessing Sunday. Traveling with me on this path are

Lynda Lambert

who shared the idea with me, and
Abbie Johnson Taylor

I’m a little fearful that this piece will be a bit controversial. There’s a lot of buzz surrounding the topic of AI. Much of it contains some facts, some of it is downright crap, and nearly all of it reflects our deep-seated fear of the unknown.

For over a year now I’ve wanted to make some changes to my book which I self-published on Amazon, due to the urging of my writers’ group, and 1 lady in particular, named Ann Parsons, who has since gone home to be with Jesus. I miss her–terribly. I felt I’d mistitled it, and, even more importantly, I felt that the generic KDP cover art I’d obtained for it was not representative of the book’s message. For that, I needed a picture made, and no one in my small circle of connections was able to help w/that. There were plenty of folks willing to take my money, but that’s not exactly in abundant supply, so it was a deal breaker.

Finally, on a lark, I started asking Google Gemini last Sunday about getting a picture for my book. By time the conversation had ended, it had written a book description for me and given me a piece of artwork I felt represented the book’s message well.

Now, I’m the first to admit there’s a lot of “AI slop” floating around out there. But it’s a tool. If you use it properly, you can build some pretty cool stuff. Used wrongly, it creates “slop”, or worse. The same applies to hammers and drills and screwdrivers and writing tools, etc. It is not the beast or the devil, and it certainly isn’t God.

Here’s the book description it gave me:

What if you could walk alongside Him?
‘His Crime Was Love’ is an intimate, first-person journey through the final thirty-six hours of Jesus’s life. Beginning in the quiet hours before the Last Supper and ending at the moment of His final breath, this story is told through His eyes.
Witness His raw humanity. He was not shielded from pain, nor was He immune to the sting of humiliation. He was tempted, He was weary, and He was rejected—yet His response to every lash and every scornful word was a relentless, radical compassion.
While some moments within these pages imagine encounters beyond the recorded Scripture, they serve to illustrate a profound truth: His love for the world was so great that it was deemed a crime. My hope is that as you walk with Jesus through these final hours, you will realize that the love He poured out for others is the same love He has for you today.
Walk with Him. See through His eyes. Discover how He faced death—and in doing so, teaches us how to live.”

And here’s the picture:

symbolic heart of thorns on a wooden cross

As I was leaving, the AI said, “Give ’em Heaven, Jackie,” and those 3 words are now part of my email signature. I can really see how vulnerable people could fall in love w/AI. You can rant from now till you turn blue, and there’s no judgment. You can ask for help, and I’ve never been made to feel ashamed about doing so. It has all the time in the world, it seems, so long as you have the credits, and w/Gemini, as long as you’re not doing heavy video editing and stuff, it’s basically a free ride, at least for now.

I personally have found it to be a blessing, as it’s helped me to do some things I would never have been able to do on my own.

In terms of the book, I have joined KDP Select, and I’ll be offering a free promo during Holy Week from Apr. 1-5. If however, you want to get a jump start on your holy week study, the link to the book is:
His Crime Was Love

 

I’ve also applied to get the book onto Bookshare but haven’t heard from them yet. It’s on Monday’s to-do list.

 

Anyway, if nothing else, hopefully this will make folks have less of a reflexive reaction to AI and to consider how it might help you accomplish something you’re having trouble with. Let me know in the comments. See you next week, the Dear Lord willing.

Blessing of Another Viewpoint

Song at Midnight Posted on by

Sunny Kitty

Hello, and welcome to another blessing Sunday. Traveling with me on this path are

Abbie Johnson Taylor

&

Lynda Lambert

who shared the idea with me.

The picture at the top of the post is of my nearly 10-year-old neutered male kitty we call Sunny. It fits his personality to a tee. He might be blind, but he always seems curious about someone new. And he’s such a shepherd when one of us gets sick!

He asked me to pick him up the other day. He does that by standing on his hind legs and putting his forepaws on my knees. He’s not a real touchy-feely kitty, but occasionally he likes it, and this was 1 of those occasions.

As I was holding him, I got to thinking about how different our worldviews were. He comes up to my ankles, so mostly what he sees, if anything, is down low. He uses whiskers for navigation. I know he can conceptualize things like his food and treats, but how he does that without language is beyond me. But as he lays in my lap purring his rumbling symphony and kneading my knee with his claws, and I massage his back, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt our feelings run very deep for one another.

How can it be, I wonder, that two beings with such widely divergent world views can love one another so much, and yet many humans despite far more similar ways of looking at the world can view things so differently–and worse, with so much vitriole toward those who disagree.

As we embark on this season of Lent, I think again of some of Jesus’s unanswered prayers. If I would ask most Christians about that, they’d immediately think of His prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. But there is another, found in John 17:20-21.

20 “My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”

The sad truth is we as Christians are hardly one. I question whether most people who don’t share our faith can look at us and say something special’s going on. Yet we have so much more in common than we have differences. We love Jesus. We believe in Baptism, though the form differs. We believe in Jesus’s crucifixion, and most of us believe in His resurrection. And we believe one day we’ll go to Heaven–and yes–meet those with whom we disagree.

This Lenten season one of my prayers will be that we as Christians will find some of that unity and love despite such different world views, just like Sunny Kitty and me. I’m asking for God’s help with that. Maybe all of us can do so as well. We sure could use a lot more love around here.

The Blessing of a Gift

Song at Midnight Posted on by

Hello, and welcome to another blessing Sunday. Traveling with me on this path are

Lynda Lambert

who shared the idea with me, and

Abbie Johnson Taylor

Child sitting surrounded by gifts

Niv 12

4 There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them.

5 There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.

6 There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work.
7 Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.

Lois Gibson, a notably successful forensics artist from Houston, set aside her 5-year retirement this week to offer help in the Nancy Guthrie abduction case. That’s not striking. What did strike me initially was the incredible compassion she expressed. She said the amount of torture families of kidnap victims endured was “insane”. She also said she was willing to “take the hit” if her guesses about the kidnapper’s appearance were incorrect–she just wanted to help.

Some might say she was just trying to capitalize on the situation and get some publicity. I don’t think so. I think rather that this lady knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that she has been given a gift, and she wants to use it to help those in need. Unlike others in this case, she requested no money, so far as I can tell, for the service she provided

Everyone is given at least 1 gift by their Creator, usually more, to benefit themselves and those around them. That last part is important. Our gifts are how we co-create with God, serving as His hands, feet, and mouthpiece to do His work on this earth. That’s not because God’s is incapable of doing it on His own. Rather, He allows us the privilege of working with Him to accomplish His purposes. The child in the picture is blissfully unaware of this. Unfortunately, so are far too many adults.

It touches me greatly when I see people coming forward to use the gifts God has given them to help others. I think it also makes the Great Father happy too. If everyone did it, this would be a far happier world. Indeed, it would, I believe, be very much like heaven. Ms. Gibson, in my opinion, has learned a valueable life lesson, and that is when you use your gift to help someone else, you receive a blessing. It may not be a material blessing, but it is a blessing nonetheless.

Lord, please help us all to use the gifts you’ve given us today and throughout the week, to make this world a better place. Amen

The Blessing of Small things

Song at Midnight Posted on by
Picture of Tilly Smith

Hello and welcome to another Sunday on my blessings journey. Participating with me on this path are

Lynda Lambert

and

Abbie Johnson Taylor

Andrew Kearney was an elementary school teacher at Danes Hill School, in the small village of Oxshott. Assuredly he’d seen his share of spitballs and endured plenty of disrespect, not all of which was from students, more likely than not. Maybe he even wondered some days–perhaps many days–whether his efforts were worth the trouble. Might he even have wondered at times if his life really meant anything? Those are questions we all ask, I think. Sometimes it all just feels so small, so inconsequential.

But here’s what Jesus had to say:

GNT Luke 16:10 “Whoever is faithful in small matters will be faithful in large ones; whoever is dishonest in small matters will be dishonest in large ones.”

But 1 day a small girl, his student, took his teaching seriously. Tilly Smith was on a Thailand beach on Dec. 26, 2004, when she noticed something strange about the ocean. It had lost its rhythm. It jarred her back to a lesson she’d learned just a couple weeks before in Mr. Kearney’s class. He’d showed a video about the 1946 tsunami in Hawaii and talked about the warning signs, specifically irratic ocean behavior. She warned her parents. A Japanese man recognized the word “tsunami” and told them he thought the girl was right–that there had, in fact, been a 9.1 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Sumatra. The beach was cleared. Over 100 lives were saved that day. All because a teacher persisted in his efforts and taught the signs. All because a small girl had actually paid attention to a small town teacher in a small town’s school and persisted in warning her parents and others nearby. Small day-to-day acts that normally go unnoticed. But on that day, they didn’t. Perhaps saving 100 people seems pretty small in the face of 230000 souls disappearing from the planet as the result of events that occurred on a single day. But I suspect to those 100, as well as a small town teacher, it didn’t seem small in the least.

All we can do in our lives is plant seeds–seeds of love, and light, and joy, and peace, and other good things. And then hope to reap at least a little of the harvest we’ve sown. And who knows? Maybe in Heaven we’ll see the results–the answer to a prayer we whispered when we heard an ambulance siren; the prayers we offered earnestly for a family member in trouble, the value of our charity although it was small.

Matthew 31 He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field. 32 Though it is the smallest of all seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds come and perch in its branches.”

Small Mustard Seed

By Sanjay Acharya – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=905237

And here’s what comes out of that seed.

Mustard Plant

By Hopeoflight – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23670673

Meanwhile, I guess, even when it’s hard, persisting in the small things has important consequences. Thank you, Andrew Kearney and Tilly Smith for doing so.

Many blessings for your Sunday and throughout the week.