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Cynthia B Astle's avatar

First, this Dog Mom thinks Duke is adorable!

Secondly, all of us are overwhelmed with life today and not being able to focus is not a personal failing or a health issue. Think of all that has happened to us collectively since the Orange Menace came into office in 2016. We have been physically assaulted by the COVID plague and by violence in our streets and halls of power. We have been emotionally assaulted by wanton murder by "law enforcement," by violent images of war and natural disasters.

What matters now is tending to our humanness, our human relationships. I, too, have been a past "mover and shaker," full of details about my little church-world and its sordid politics and scandals. Today I am more detached spiritually and emotionally, not from compassion fatigue, but from a deeper sense of the ephemeral nature of life, the universe and everything. Suffering still exists and must be care for, but the pain lessens when shared.

Now I can sit on our covered patio with my husband and enjoy beautiful weather, big, fascinating Texas skies and the frolic of life all around us. Our two little dogs chase rabbits and squirrels and birds and butterflies on the lawn, a glorious mixture of buffalo grass and innumerable weeds. The Shumard red oak we planted in 1997 in gratitude for my cancer survival is now 30 feet tall, wonderfully shaped and full of green leaves.

The deep questions seeking answers are still there, and are still unanswerable, but are woven into the fabric of our living. If COVID taught us anything, it taught us that we were addicted to life in the fast lane, and that there is more to life than increasing its speed and its accumulations.

So take a deep breath and relax into the eternal now. You are loved, first by God and then by many others. You are precious, and the very fact of your existence is a unique miracle in a wondrous universe. Let all else fall away like drops after a rain, and go forth in joy.

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Ian Sutton's avatar

Can I go off-topic and ask your community to comment on the role of ChatGPT in communicating the church’s message?

In the post ‘An Artificial Sermon’ at https://faithclimate.substack.com/p/an-artificial-sermon I asked ChatGPT to respond to the following request to do with next Sunday’s gospel reading,

Write a sermon based on the gospel from John 3:1-17. Include a heart-warming personal anecdote.

Its response was good. So, what are the ethics to do with a preacher having ChatGPT write his sermon?

We all have our favorite Bible verses. I think that the most important for many of us is going to be Pilate’s response to Jesus, “What is truth?”

BTW: How do you know that this comment wasn’t written by ChatGPT?

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